"Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses
By M.G. Sheftall
Dutton, 560 pages, $36
When the Nobel Peace Prize went to the Japanese grassroots organization Nihon Hidankyo three weeks ago, it arrived, in a sense, in the nick of time. Many of the group's members are hibakusha, survivors of the August 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they're getting on in years.
M.G. Sheftall uses the witness of men and women who were teenagers in 1945 as the foundation for a sweeping and vivid account of the bombing and its aftermath in "Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses," the first of two volumes.
Drawing on memoirs, works of history (including John Hersey's 1946 opus) and personal conversations with elderly hibakusha, Mr. Sheftall describes events in fascinating, often grisly detail.
The author is an ideal Virgil for such a nightmarish journey: He's an American academic who has made his home in Japan since 1987 and is well-equipped to explain Japanese cultural norms and protocols that may be strange to the English-language reader.
This multidimensional treatment begins with the well-documented flight of the Enola Gay, the American B-29 bomber tasked with dropping its atomic payload over Hiroshima and banking sharply to get out of range before the bomb known as "Little Boy" exploded. The survivors whom Mr. Sheftall interviewed were schoolchildren at the time -- though mostly not in school, because since 1944 the Japanese government had commandeered all boys and girls age 12 and older for the war effort.
Early in the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, hundreds of young people and their teachers were out working on firebreaks, clearing debris from wide channels so that, in the case of an incendiary attack, the whole city would not be lost. As the author reminds us, people in Hiroshima were uneasily aware that American B-29s had been burning other Japanese cities yet had left Hiroshima untouched. Many harbored fears that the enemy had something special in mind for them.
That day, a few young people had not taken up their posts on the firebreaks. Thirteen-year-old Chieko Tominaga had stayed home with an upset stomach. Kohei Oiwa, also 13, was home for the same reason, lolling on a futon that would flip over in the tumult and save his life. Both children thus avoided being caught in what became known as the "zone of total destruction" when the A-bomb detonated.
At 8:15 a.m. came an astounding flash of purplish-white light, followed nine or 10 seconds later by a shock wave that blew people and buildings apart.
Fire exploded across the ruined city. Those who survived the blast -- if only briefly -- staggered or crawled about with carbonized faces and skin hanging off their arms in sheets, so that they appeared to be clad in rags. People's hair "stood straight out from their scalps like that of electricity-shocked cartoon characters, and it was hardened into fright wigs by a shellac of dust and blood," Mr. Sheftall writes. Strewn sufferers unable to muster full screams emitted weak, desperate sounds that came to be known as mushi no iki, or "the breathing of bugs." In the aftermath of the immediate horror came killing radiation, suppurating corpses, and a pharaonic-level plague of maggots and blowflies.
Here and there, the author identifies striking ironies. It so happened that, the previous day, a Japanese physicist had lectured local army officers on the topic of "the theoretical and practical possibilities of developing an atomic bomb," we read. The visiting expert even hypothesized that one such weapon could easily destroy Hiroshima, though he thought such technology would not be available before the end of the war. In another oddity, the man who won a design contest in 1942 to commemorate the founding of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the name imperial Japan gave its conquered territories, is the same man who ended up in 1949 designing Hiroshima's celebrated postwar Peace Memorial Park.
In a different twist, schoolgirls who rebelliously wore white blouses stood a better chance of surviving the catastrophe than girls who had obediently switched to darker colors, which, though less conspicuous to passing aircraft, did not shield their wearer by reflecting thermal rays.
Teenagers in 1945 had scarcely known life without Japan being at war and from their earliest days were indoctrinated into a chauvinistic ideology of dedication to emperor and state. Japanese media pushed the official narrative. Children were told that the frequent presence of American B-29s overhead, far from showing the archipelago's vulnerability, was instead "a strategic masterstroke on the part of Japanese war planners to draw the enemy closer to the Home Islands," the author writes, "where they would be vanquished in a final decisive battle in which every Japanese who could hold a gun or a bamboo spear would take part."
Culturally, it was a mark of maturity to refrain from expressing emotion and do one's duty. One must not react to biting insects or minor injuries. One must try not to react even if one's daughter is found eyeless and scorched: An army officer confronted by just such a terrible sight after the bombing remained impassive lest he betray any distress to his subordinates. Mr. Sheftall writes of a grievously wounded teacher who clambered to her feet after the explosion to tell her students: "Class dismissed." A teenager, president of her class, apologized as she was dying for leaving the firebreak without taking roll call.
Toggling between the present and the past, "Hiroshima" is a highly readable, even-tempered work of history that suffers from an unfortunate lack of decent maps. The publisher has included only two, each dotted with unexplained numbers and useless as a tool of understanding. Let us hope that the planned second volume will be a bit better . . . mapped out.
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Mrs. Gurdon, a Journal contributor, is the author of "The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction."" [1]
1. Present at the Destruction. Meghan Cox Gurdon. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Oct 2024: A.15.
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