Today is Nagasaki Day. Earlier this week was Hiroshima Day.
I mean the anniversaries of the days we dropped atomic bombs on Japan.
I never paid much attention to these days, except once when
I was in fourth grade my class did a big thing on it and we all learned how to
make paper cranes. There was a girl we learned about who had been a baby in
Japan when the bomb fell and several years later she got leukemia, from the
radiation. She started folding paper cranes because someone told her that if
she folded a thousand she would be granted a wish. Her wish was to not have
leukemia anymore, to not die. She became famous for folding hundreds and
hundreds of cranes, but she didn’t make it. She died before she reached a
thousand. Her friends kept folding, after she died, and she was buried with a
thousand paper cranes.
I don’t know why they told us this story. To me, it seems
just pointlessly sad.
I asked Greg about this—I happened to be in front of him in
the line for the bathroom the other day. I hardly ever know what to say to him,
he seems so severe, but I knew he was going to give a talk on the bombings. So
I told him about that day in the fourth grade, just to have something to say,
for once. I guess I wanted to show I’m not completely ignorant, also. He smiled
at me, a little, but he looked sad, too. There is something very human, very
gentle, about Greg, when he expresses any emotion, though he usually doesn’t.
Usually he’s as austere as a rocky crag.
“People will do all sorts of things to gain a sense that
they have some kind of control,” he said. We both stepped forward a place in
line. After a moment he spoke again in a different, lighter tone; “it is true
that after all those cranes were folded she didn’t have cancer anymore.” I
looked at him in something like shock and he grinned at me for a moment. I
couldn’t decide if his comment counted as a sick kind of humor or something
very compassionate and profound. We both stepped forward again, and his expression
faded to its normal neutrality, his teaching face. “There is something very
alchemical about that crane folding. Japan is a Buddhist country, you know,
alongside Shinto, and there are a lot of Buddhist stories about people
meditating for long periods or performing various extreme ascetic exercises and
being granted boons, magical powers. It’s possible that’s where her idea of
folding so many cranes came from. But magic is a funny thing; magic, real
magic, always transforms something, but it is impossible to be sure what will
be transformed. Consider that when I mention the Hiroshima bombing, your first
thought was of a little girl with cancer who did not want to die. That’s not
the message I got, when I was a boy.”
And then it was my turn for the bathroom so our conversation
was over.
Greg’s talk was after dinner, during the third class block,
when most talks are scheduled, except that we met outside on the pasture by the
dining hall, so as many people could come as wanted to. So we sat and listened
to him as the sun started to set and the shadows grew long and we slapped at
mosquitoes. When a mosquito bit Greg, and I could see
this from the front row, he did not slap at it or wave it away. He just
experienced it.
He told the story of the bombings the same way he had told
the story of the Revolutionary War, back on Independence Day. He talked about
human beings going about their lives. He talked about historical controversy,
and the different interpretations of how and why nuclear weapons were used as
they were, but while he added some background information for and against
certain interpretations—just like back in history class he seemed interested in
how we know things, how we decide
which versions of history are reliable—but he didn’t seem particularly attached
to any one story. But then he did something he could not have done for his talk
on the Revolutionary War. He talked about himself.
“In 1945, I was eighteen years old. I had dropped out of
school and had a job as a carpenter, so I could support my mother, but I wanted
to go to war. As an American, I loved my country. I hated the Japanese. I had
friends” –and here his voice cracked and he swallowed, convulsively—“I had
friends, older boys, who didn’t come home from the war. I wanted to fight, I wanted to
prove myself. When the bomb was dropped, I was happy. We all were. According to
one poll, almost thirty percent of Americans were sorry when Japan surrendered,
because they wanted to drop more atomic bombs. They wanted to kill more Japs.”
His use of the derogatory startled me and I looked up at
him. That’s when I saw him bit by the mosquito. He ignored it. He paused a
moment before speaking again.
“The problem was, I was a Jap.”
News to me; I had always assumed Greg was white. Or, rather,
I had never thought about Greg’s racial identity one way or the other. I don’t
usually think about race, unless somebody brings it up. His last name isn’t
Japanese, and he looks mostly white. I guess there’s something about his eyes,
but he usually wears glasses.
“My mother was an immigrant, but she was very young when she came over,” Greg continued.
“She largely assimilated, and of course my father was white. We didn't live near other Japanese people. So, other than my being raised Buddhist, there was
nothing about my childhood that was culturally different from that of my white
counterparts. There was no reason for me to take any special notice, to
identify with, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or with those of Tokyo, which was
fire-bombed with conventional weapons to similar effect”—
“No more reason than for me to identify with Dresden,” put
in Allen, who was sitting off to the side. His ancestry is partly Germanic, though he’s
also much too young to have been alive during World War II. Greg acknowledged
him with a nod and then went on.
“But anyone who saw me, or especially is they saw me with my mother, to them I
was alien. All throughout the war. We did not have to go to the camps, because
we lived in the Midwest, but we knew people who did. We watched the news. We
knew what was happening. We become, to some extent, what other people perceive
us to be.” He paused again, and took off his glasses. The light of the setting
sun shone on his face for a moment and he squinted, then stepped a foot or two
to the side into the protection of a lengthening shadow. He continued.
 |
| Greg |
I expected him to say something else, to wrap up his story
with some kind of definitive conclusion, even a moral, but he did not. He just
stepped off the small, portable stage and into the crowd. After a few long
seconds, we realized he was done and the talk was over. The sun went down and
we all went to bed.
[Next Post: Monday, August 12th: Watching Stars]
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