The only uncertainty now is peace. This essay, however, is about certainty. The certainty of memories. And the certainty that many of the men and women who figured in this past of mine are all gone. And with them as well is my youth, that unencumbered sense of idealism and bravado that once guided me through museums of peace and gardens of mothers swooning into the heavens as they cradled deaths and sufferings and monumental rendering of wars.
I was 20 years of age. Hatachi. A special age for the Japanese because to turn 20 is to be an adult. It was also in the deep winter when I found myself in Hiroshima.
A letter to the editor appearing in August of 1978 in the Japan Times was what brought me to Hiroshima. It was a letter from Dr. Tomin Harada, a Japanese surgeon who became famous for his works among the hibakusha, which referred to those afflicted with diseases due to exposure to radiation caused by the Atomic bomb dropped on two cities in Japan. Harada was a military doctor assigned to Taiwan when the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place. Out of this work, it is said he was able to help some 86,000 persons.
The hibakusha were noted for the keloids that formed on their bodies, marking them as different. Out of this disfigurement came the discrimination suffered by the said individuals. Many of them were seen as not capable of being married.
I responded to the letter by introducing myself as a young Filipino student spending a year in Japan under the program called International Christian Youth Exchange (ICYE). I did not anymore articulate one thing: my interest in Japan was formed out of the many stories about World War II.
“I have heard about the World Peace Center. Would they accept a volunteer?”
By December, I received a response from Dr. Harada. I showed the letter to Jintaro Ueda, our program director, who coordinated with the Center.
In February, I was traveling to Hiroshima via a shindaisha, a sleeper train, which was cheaper than the Shinkansen, known then as bullet train.
The World Peace Center was an old Japanese house. I lived there for months, free in exchange for helping clean the surroundings, including an ancient garden at the edge of the building. A significant bulk of my volunteer work included going to the A-Bomb hospital, presently the Red Cross hospital of the city, where I distributed books from a cart I pushed around the wards.
At Hiroshima, I had the chance to visit the famous Peace Memorial. The building, which has been kept as a ruin, had nothing to do with politics. It was a building meant for exposition and trade fairs. But its dome had served as almost a symbol of the folly of war. A museum running the length of the park contained the artifacts when time stood still that 6th day of August, 1945.
As if the first bomb was not enough and indeed because the war machine could never have satiety, the second bomb was dropped on August 9, 1945. In wartime history books, we are told the bombing brought the war to end.
There was peace for a while. Then in 1950, across the Sea of Japan, the Korean War erupted. Five years separated the two wars from each other.
In my case, histories separated me from the notion of peace in a city where peace was about memorials and monuments, and those evening meetings where I met for the first time women, their arms and faces bearing scars. Youth also was a divide as I looked at these persons without looking. I wanted to ask them: do you also think of the scars my grandparents and other relatives carry because of the war you brought to our cities, towns and villages?
I would leave Hiroshima that year with the promise that each year I would write about those two days in August. But I would forget each year.
A post-graduate scholarship would bring me back to Japan in 1990. Older and armed with theories, the talk of peace even became more complicated. The migration of the Filipinos continued unabated. The Japayuki (literally, those who go to Japan) phenomenon, a massive trafficking of Filipinas to supply the numerous bars and nightclubs made the Philippines a notorious supplier of labor.
Outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ceremonies in Nagasaki were beginning to look more exotic each year, as the war and its memories receded into the past. In Tokyo, in July or in August, government officials would observe O-bon, the time devoted to ancestor-worship, by paying tribute to wartime heroes enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine. The heroes, as some critics of this practice would attest, had become deities in this shrine.
It was in 1991 when Kurosawa Akira released his film Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku). The film tells a story about an old woman who is being convinced by her grandchildren to visit her brother in Hawaii. As she would not travel to see her only remaining sibling, a nephew, Clark, comes over to visit his aunt in Nagasaki. Played by Richard Gere, the character of the American became major.
In one of the dramatic scenes in the film, Clark and his grandmother were shown seated on a bench, while a pale moon shone over them. As the camera came closer, we heard them talking. Clark was apologizing for the bombing and the grandmother responded in English: “Thank you very much.”
The screening room at the arthouse cinema, Iwanami Hall, was full of viewers but when that scene flashed on screen, many stood up and walked out of the theater. Peace could never be about apologies; war was never about bombs. And August can be a month of ghosts and forgetting.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com