CHAPTER FIVE: THE AFTERMATH

Summary

(Continued)

By the early 1960s, however, it was apparent to his family that his happy-go-lucky spirit had turned to melancholy. His relationship with his wife was strained, over a new American-style house he insisted on building, among other things. Over New Years eve, Dr. Fujii slept alone for the first time in his new house, and the next morning his family discovered him unconscious, poisoned by a gas leak from a stove. He seemed to recover in the first month in the hospital, but at the end of January he suddenly worsened and remained in a vegetative state for the rest of his life. When he died ten years later, his widow forbade an autopsy, but one of his sons snuck his body out to have one done. It showed a large, cancerous tumor in the liver, an enlarged large intestine, and an atrophied brain. His family fought over his property, and his widow sued one of her sons over the dispute.

One year after the bomb, Rev. Tanimoto preached the Christian message to people who would gather at the nightly black market. But since he had no congregation to bring them into, he refocused his efforts into restoring his old church building. He sought old military materials and worked with other parishioners on the carpentry work. He still lacked sufficient funds, however, so embarked on a speaking tour in the United States to raise support.

On this trip, Rev. Tanimoto devised the idea of making Hiroshima a center for studying peace, and began submitting his proposal to magazines and influential people in the U.S. - all without the knowledge or consent of anyone else in Hiroshima. Meanwhile, Rev. Tanimoto was unaware that in Hiroshima, the government had designated the city as a Peace Memorial City and unveiled a park to commemorate it. His chief U.S. promoter was Norman Cousins, an editor who enthusiastically backed Rev. Tanimoto's idea at first, but then pushed it aside in favor of his own peace idea of a one-world government. Yet Cousins continued to arrange Rev. Tanimoto's fundraising tours, now for a whole host of causes. The climax of Rev. Tanimoto's U.S. travels was when he was invited to give the opening prayer for a session of the U.S. Senate. When Rev. Tanimoto finally discussed his ideas with Hiroshima's mayor and the prefectural governor, they rejected them. The community also resented the old green Cadillac he drove, donated by an American friend.

Back in Japan, one of Rev. Tanimoto's major projects was teaching Bible studies and finding vocational opportunities for the city's young women with horrible keloid scars on their faces. He lobbied for plastic surgery for them, and finally was able to arrange for a few to be done in Tokyo. Later, he accompanied twenty-five girls to the U.S. for surgery by doctors who were donating their services.

Once in the U.S., Rev. Tanimoto was featured on the television show, This is Your Life, thinking it was a standard interview. The totally unprepared Rev. Tanimoto was confronted by various people from his past, and most shocking, Captain Robert Lewis, copilot of the Enola Gay which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department grew suspicious of Rev. Tanimoto's attention-grabbing activities.

After several years of working for peace, Rev. Tanimoto found himself out of the main stream of Hiroshima peace activities, overly controlled by Norman Cousins, and rejected by many of the people he had tried to help. Yet he maintained a compassionate heart, adopting an abandoned baby with his wife. His daughter Koko, meanwhile, suffered exploitation by atomic bomb researchers and was rejected by her fiancée's family because she was a hibakusha. In Tokyo she chose to hide her hibakusha status and eventually married a man in which she was able to confide her experience. As Rev. Tanimoto reached the age of seventy, he slowed down in his activities and fell into a mundane lifestyle, even as he aged and his memory became imperfect.

Notes

Forty years later, Hersey returns to Hiroshima to interview again the book's six main characters. He uses this material to fill in the gaps of their lives from 1946, where he completed his original volume, to 1984. This final chapter tells the rest of the story of Hiroshima, chronicling the six characters' lives from one year after the bomb to four decades later. The reader gets a broad perspective of both the bomb's societal impact as well as its powerful effect on individual lives over an entire lifetime. The bombing was not simply a disaster that faded away when the rubble was removed and buildings rebuilt. It changed the course of people's lives, shortening some, as in the case of Father Kleinsorge, or led them in a new direction, as in the case of Miss Sasaki's religious conversion.

Hersey carefully weaves together and selects pertinent details from each characters' forty years' experience. In telling Mrs. Nakamura's story, he makes the point that although her quality of life gradually improves over the years, she can never really escape her atom bomb experience. She struggles less and less financially and even the terrible memories recede in her mind as her life regains a sense of calm normalcy. However, her body remains weak, and when she faints while dancing at the flower festival in 1985, she is unpleasantly forced to remember her limitations during an otherwise happy event.

The theme for Dr. Sasaki's life is that he tries so hard to forget, yet cannot fully. He is still haunted by his failure to properly label all the dead at the Red Cross Hospital, so that they could be properly honored. Other than this one memory, however, he is fairly successful in distancing himself from his A-bomb trauma. He achieves enormous financial success as a doctor and entrepreneur. Yet after avoiding work with hibakusha for decades, in his 40s he is forced to reckon with his own physical vulnerabilities as a hibakusha.

Father Kleinsorge's is a story of a devoted pastor and missionary whose A-bomb symptoms greatly slowed his work but who never put his own frailties before the needs of others. If his body would allow it at all, he was absorbed in serving other people. The priest's adoption of Japanese citizenship is a telling demonstration of his dedication to the Japanese people. Yet he says that he found a truer identity as a hibakusha, being able to relate to other hibakusha in an instant, with so much shared experience and understanding. Father Kleinsorge's close relationship to Yoshiki-san is a touching picture of his love for Japan being requited. She loyally serves him in his disabled state, and stays with him until his death. The reader is moved by this woman's dedication, but also feels that her care is a fitting tribute to Father Kleinsorge's lifetime of work for the Japanese people.

Hersey's account of Miss Sasaki's life is perhaps the most inspirational of all the main characters. Her choices after surviving the A-bomb demonstrate that the disaster strengthens her instead of making her bitter. In her initial, deep despair, she finds hope in the Catholic faith and her life takes a very different turn as a nun. Her admirable work with orphans, the elderly and the dying uses her talents to the fullest; she most likely would not have had these opportunities to blossom had she been spared the bomb, married her original fiancée, and settled down as a typical Japanese housewife. In this way, she allows the horrors of the atomic bomb to fortify her as a human being, and in turn uses this strength to heal others.

In contrast, Dr. Fujii's post-bomb years are perhaps the most self-serving and tragic for the reader. It is significant that Dr. Fujii is the only one of the major characters to avoid any physical illnesses from his radiation exposure. Yet, ironically, by the end of his life he is a vegetable because of a freak gas leak accident that was perhaps due to his eagerness to move into his new and grandiose home. Hersey supposes that Dr. Fujii's pleasure-seeking lifestyle may have served as a way to forget his psychological trauma from the bombing. Yet it seems to the reader only an exaggeration of his pre-bomb tendency toward leisure and good whiskey. Sadly, his marital relationship sours over the years as he focuses on material possessions and earns a playboy reputation. His legacy, moreover, is marred when his widow fights her own son over the possessions he left behind. Dr. Fujii's life story contrasts greatly with the other characters', markedly Miss Sasaki's. While the atomic tragedy strengthens her and spurs her on to help others, Dr. Fujii sinks further into a self-absorbed life that keeps him distant even from his own family.

Rev. Tanimoto's story is marked with well-intentioned efforts for Hiroshima and world peace, but also with a stark disconnection from the feelings of the people of Hiroshima and the actual developments in peace efforts in the city. He has good ideas, but moves them forward independently and often inappropriately. By the twilight of his life, it is obvious that his efforts have strayed Hiroshima's mainstream and have not amounted to much. In this sense, Rev. Tanimoto's life is one of good intentions but few results. Yet his benevolent heart shines through even as his failures mount. His decision to adopt an abandoned baby, for example, reminds the reader of his compassion.

Hersey chooses Rev. Tanimoto as the last character in the book to talk about. Hersey makes a specific point as he closes both the book and the narration of Rev. Tanimoto's life: Forty years after the atomic bomb was dropped, the world's memory of the horrors of Hiroshima is fading. Hersey ends the book somewhat mundanely, discussing the retired and aging Rev. Tanimoto's daily habits. Yet it is this transformation of the active and passionate Rev. Tanimoto into a common old man that powerfully illustrates the slide of the world consciousness from moral outrage at the use of the bomb to indifference and even proliferation of nuclear weapons. The last sentence of the book, His memory, like the world's, was getting spotty, is a simple yet poignant concluding statement to this thought-provoking book. Hersey keeps his message subtle, true to his non-opinionated journalistic style, but delivers it nonetheless. This demonstrates Hersey's desire as an author to record the horrors of Hiroshima in order to continue to provoke the world's conscience for decades after the bomb was dropped.