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Yamato sank and her giant body lies shattered 200 miles northwest of Tokunoshima. 430 meters down.
Three thousand corpses, still entombed today.
What were their thoughts as they died?

In April 1945, Yoshida Mitsuru was a junior officer stationed on the bridge of the Yamato during her ill-concieved and hopeless 特攻 Special Attack mission that was meant to draw off American aircraft from the attack on Okinawa to allow a better hope of success for the 神風 Kamikaze aircraft attacking the American fleet. But as the Japanese themselves demonstrated in their 1941 attack on the HMS Prince of Wales, a battleship without aircover was no match for a concerted attack by over 400 aircraft. The Aircraft carrier group was the new supreme force on the high seas.

Richard H. Minear’s translation of Mitsuru’s account is a very easy and interesting read. The style is very clipped and terse. The original was written entirely in katakana in a now seldom used style called bungotai 文語体. First written in 1946, It fell foul of the military censor on several occasions during the American occupation. Only in 1952 was a version published, and the original didn’t appear until 1981.

It is patriotic and unashamedly militaristic in terms of sacrifice and duty, yet it is oddly matter of fact and I wouldn’t say it glorifies war. If it were an American writing about America’s military history no-one would find it strange at all. The British envisioned a similar forlorn hope and would have committed it’s fleet to engage a German invasion at all costs. Had that happened the sacrifice would have been deemed heroic.

Regardless of nationalistic sentiments, this speaks of the waste of war, the expenditure of young lives dutifully following orders of old men who wouldn’t bear the consequences. The sailors knew what they were doing. They also knew they couldn’t protest, that should have happened in the thirties with the rise of militarism not in 1945 when it was all falling down around them.

I heartily recommend this book for an insight into the thoughts of the Japanese who pointlessly sacrificed themselves in huge numbers in the closing year of the Pacific War. Not for it’s war story but for the glimpses of universal human life, in the bride left behind, the old sailor who posted all his possessions home before the attack, the captain knowing details about a junior officer, the crew getting slightly drunk together the night before the attack, it could have been almost any navy at any time.

Related posts:

1. Hiroshima – melted people
2. Hiroshima Day
3. Falling Blossom

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Yesterday I had my closest encounter with the bombing of Hiroshima.
Closer than having been in Hiroshima and seen the remains and memorials.
Closer than seeing documentaries, and reading contemporary accounts.
Closer than touching a stunted tree that survived the blast.

A friend of mine on mixi wrote about how her grandfather died in Hiroshima that day.

Her grandfather was going to work near the epicentre of the explosion. Hopefully he died instantly. Three weeks later her relatives managed to enter Hiroshima looking for his remains. All they could find was his teeth. (How they could tell I don’t know). But that is all that was able to be put in his tomb where today she lit some incense for him.

The remains are important in Japan, more so that the West. From my experience of my farther-in-law’s funeral the remains become part of daily life for the family enshrined in a Butsudan and part may also be buried in a tomb or a temple as well. I don’t know what happens if there are no remains or no family to observe the rites.

For me my friends grandfather illustrates the big tragedy of Hiroshima and countless other places. It is about the people just trying to live their lives that have no power over what their governments do. The people that are steamrollered by the indiscriminate military machine. For most there is no grand sweep of history, just death or survival in turbulent times.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be remembered and studied.
I don’t believe the reason that it had to be done to save lives. Kill 100,000 to somehow save a different 500,000. Japan was already defeated by the fire bomb raids and the blockades. Nor can Japan’s wartime atrocities justify it. (ie. two wrongs don’t make a right) The bomb was revenge. It was also a field test of a very expensive weapons system on unbombed cities to find out what would happen. And it was a warning to the Russians in Europe.
By today’s standards it would be a war crime. By the standards of the day, long abandoned by 1945, that civilians shouldn’t be targeted, it would have been too except there was no-one to indict.
It was done by the “good-guys”

There is an interesting news report on JapanProbe about a 90 year old survivor Toshie Une
Doug has an entry on his blog Japan: Life and Religion today.
And I’ve written about Hiroshima before with links to other articles and films.

Pray for peace if that is part of what you do.
Hope for a world free from nuclear weapons; not just held by the “good” regimes.
Practice empathy.

For the people in Hiroshima 6 August 1945
ご冥福をおいのりします。。。

–update 07Aug09–
An interesting blog that has quotes and links to papers expanding the motives for bombing Hiroshima and an interesting comments section.

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For several months I’ve been following Okinawa Soba’s fascinating photostream at Flickr. He has an enormous collection of Meiji period photographs mainly by a photographer called T. Enami which he is generously sharing via his flickr account. His comments make for interesting reading as well. He is what might be called cantankerous and I’m sure would be an interesting companion over a drink or two in a izakaya.

(original photo from Okinawa Soba used under creative commons licence)

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This illustrates why I like Japan. And also features kanji and gaffertape.

If you’ve ever been to Japan you will have seen guards with illuminated batons who direct people away from construction sites. On one hand it looks an even worse job than the bored security guards in the UK but as is often the case in Japan the guards take their job seriously and seem to have pride in it.

Shuetsu Sato went one step further. On his own initiative he started to make signs out of gaffertape while the station he was working at was under renovation. I believe it was Shinjuku which is confusing at the best of times. He does it out of public-spiritedness, to help people find their way. His bosses allow or encourage it. He takes great care over his work. I’d say he takes great pride in it. Apparently in his own freetime he has made signs in other locations.

You can see him at work here

He came to the attention of some artists who made a documentary about him and has now even appeared in a pop promo making one of his signs.

The typography is amazing, especially considering the materials he works with. It’s a lesson in information design.
For me it demonstrates Japan’s wealth in talented amateurs doing amazing things for the joy of it. It also demonstrates Japans genuine public-spiritedness and attention to detail. I think “only in Japan”.

Unfortunately I’ve never seen any of these signs myself. The photo above is by antjeverena on Flickr and is used (and cropped) under his Creative Commons license.

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I found a very interesting book in a second hand bookshop at the weekend. (I buy almost any book about Japan! even the ones written in Japanese I can’t read that appear in this shop from time to time)
It reminded me of the old curse “may you live in interesting times”.

It is about the love affair between an British Army Officer (Arthur Hart-Synott) from Ireland and a Japanese woman (Suzuki Masa-san) in the early days of the 20th century. It is based on his letters that were found in Japan when Masa-san’s daughter-in-law was clearing the house. A unique record I think. Unfortunately Masa-san’s side of the correspondence is lost but it is a very interesting, albeit sad, story indeed.

Hart was posted to Tokyo in 1906 to learn Japanese and fell in love with Masa-san. But due to the nature of class and racial prejudices of the day and family pressures and global turmoils they were somewhat doomed to a tragic ending.

The backdrop is the decline of the British Empire and the rise of Japan. The Boer War, The Japanese-Russian War, The War of Independence and Anglo-Irish War in Ireland and 2 World Wars. Interesting times indeed and I wouldn’t want to experience them.

Not so long ago either. It’s my Grandparents time. I have an autograph album of my great aunt’s that has drawings by army officers from 1914. I remember family photographs of relatives in uniform from that time. And some Japonisme ornaments we had. Even some of the places in the book are familiar. One street mentioned is adjacent to where I live in London.

Hart is not entirely sympathetic from his letters. I found his lack of concern for his children very selfish, but maybe it was a very different time. In the end I don’t think he treated Masa-san very well. It could be his limited Japanese didn’t allow much nuance (and I’m reading translated extracts) but he often sounds like a petulant teen.

It think it is a pity we only hear Masa-san in the reflection of Harts letters. I’t be very interesting to know what her concerns and day to day life were. And in the end I perhaps think it might be the opposite of the sub title; it seems more a Japanese Woman’s enduring love for a British Officer.

—
The books title is never explained but I wonder if it isn’t to do with the following phrases I found to do with falling blossom 落花 [らっか]
落花流水 [らっかりゅうすい] (n) mutual love,
落花枝に帰らず破鏡再び照らさず (exp) fallen blossom doesn’t return to the branch, what’s done is done.

It is available from Amazon.

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I’ve been wondering lately if I should allow comments here. This is actually the second time I’ve posted this piece. I pulled it the last time.

At first I used WordPress more as a content management tool. しあわせ started as a static website. I can’t remember why I decided to shift to WordPress actually.

This is just hobby stuff really. I spend rather than make any money on it. I’m not even sure why I’m shouting into the void of the web about these various topics. Something to do I guess. The 21st century equivalent of writing manifestos on a wall.

But I saw a video of a presentation by Liz Strauss at WordCamp Dallas and I think her call of “C’mon Let’s Talk!” inspired me a bit.

I’ve sporadically commented on other blogs. Mostly I prefer bulletin boards for discussions such as JapanesePod101 or BigHeadedMan Club. I always try to comment on friends posts on mixi and always reply there.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been commenting on HaikuGirl’s blog and I read a post on commenting at WeblogTools that I’m pondering opening comments.

My concerns might be
1. Is commenting suitable for the post. I don’t think a lot of what I write needs commenting on. How do you comment on a post about what films are upcoming for instance.
But sometimes in comments there can be extra useful information and discussion.

2. Spam Hopefully Askimet will catch it, but it’s boring to deal with spam. When I look at places like MySpace and YouTube the comments are … spammy. I might need to keep comments for people who can be bothered to register. I need to think of an incentive to register for that matter.

3. Quality of comment. At the risk of offending, I’d want some quality beyond hi there. (and pingbacks what the hell are they about?) I’d be tempted to have draconian comment vetting. Which might mean people don’t comment. But while I’m all for free speech, this is my kingdom, you can start your own blog should you feel the need to rant.

4. No one comes to play This is a very minor blog. I consider 100 visitors in a day really good, but don’t drop below 30 most days. When I got linked the other day from 2ch I got a big spike, I was once stumbled on and got an enormous spike (for me).
But if comments are open and then there are none, it’ll feel like tumbleweeds blowing through! My teacher Chika-san had this feeling maybe on her class site. There must be around 100 students but few comments or participation.

So this post is open to comments.
And when I have the time I’ll open up my other posts.

The policy is Play nice, Help each other, Don’t make a mess. Just like kindergarten really.

話しましょう〜♪

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Hiroshima by: John Hershey pub: Penguin

In January I visited Hiroshima. I’m not sure I wanted to. I was going there on a recommendation of a friend to see bugaku at Miyajima shrine near Hiroshima. I was afraid Hiroshima would be too depressing; maybe upsetting; maybe just too macabre to be a tourist at the worlds first nuclear destruction.

In the event, what I found was a vibrant modern city not overly dominated by it’s past. Yes there are memorials, and a museum, but oddly I didn’t find it depressing as I expected. It’s strange knowing what happened, seeing what survived. There’s the famous A-Bomb dome. The bank, and in the grounds of Hiroshima castle, trees.

And people survived.

Hiroshima is a contemporary account written by an American journalist of six of these peoples stories. I’m not sure what Japanese contemporary accounts exist. I do know the SCAP censored all mention of the bomb by the Japanese. Even in a memorial to schoolchildren killed by the bomb, the coded reference E=MC2 had to be used instead. Also Hershey’s article was the first to put a human face to what happened. Previously articles about the bomb concentrated on its abstract destructive power and America’s triumph.

Originally written as a groundbreaking single article for the New Yorker in 1946, it was updated in 1986 to see what had become of the people in the book. A German Jesuit priest. A Japanese Reverend. A Japanese office lady. Two Japanese doctors. A Japanese Housewife.

The things that struck me about the accounts in the book were

• the sense of resignation. しかたがない。
• the apparent silence of those dying in the ruins of Hiroshima.
• the sense of adventure felt by the children.
• the crassness of “re-uniting” a victim with the co-pilot of the Enola Gay on This Is Your Life.
• the abandonment of the survivors to their fates
• the endurance of the human spirit

It’s a thin volume and well worth a read.

I know when I was at school history studies were very Euro-centric. The Pacific theatre in World War 2 was summed up as Pearl Harbour ’41, British POWs and Hiroshima ’45. Nothing about Manchuria, China, Midway, Firebombings, Okinawa, Occupation.
In the eighties, the accounts of nuclear war tended to be fictional what-ifs. What if a bomb dropped on America, the UK? But strangely the true bombing and it’s effects were ignored. I can’t remember much about it in mainstream media until the 60th anniversary.

Indeed at the start of the HBO documentary White Light Black Rain, Japanese teenagers are vox-popped in Shinjuku about what happened on August 6, 1945. And although I suspect a film-maker’s manipulation at work, none of them knew, nor even guessed, it might have had anything to do with the war.

In that film I saw the melted people of my title. A man whose flesh was quite literally melted onto his bones. You could see holes on his chest between his ribs. Apparently his heart is visible through these. A woman whose fingers cannot be straightened, whose face is a reconstruction. Yet whose spirit is miraculously intact. People whose friends and families disappeared in an instant. A woman who survived with her sister, only to see that sister commit suicide by jumping in front of a train because she couldn’t go on. Ordinary people used as guinea pigs in studying the effects of nuclear weapons.

And I also saw the dehumanising effects on the people who make and drop bombs. An inability to empathise with the potential victims. Or maybe an unwillingness, if you did empathise could you do it.? In the end maybe everyone takes refuge in the mantra “only obeying orders”.

It’s important to known about these things. Then there might be some possibility of them not being repeated, again, and again, in smaller or larger conflicts.

Further Reading
Atomic Bomb Museum dot org
Hiroshima Peace Museum
Japan Focus
Hibakusha
Dissent

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The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery published by Vintage Originals

This is a very interesting debut novel by Ellis Avery. What struck me most about it is the author had obviously learnt Japanese and learnt it in some depth. Usually in novels about Japan there are a few tidbits thrown to the reader about Japanese but I often get the feeling that it is so superficial, that the author just did a little bit of research for added flavour. Ms. Avery shows some deeper insight or at least I can identify with her characters struggles in learning Japanese and learning to write.

By the time I was thirteen, in the second year of Meiji, I had a grasp of spoken Japanese that mirrored, I think, the way Yukako read and wrote: multiple strands of information spun towards us and we knotted together a meaning using what we knew and what we expected to hear. I understood what was said to me because it was said to me, and in due course I had heard many times over the few hundred things anyone—Yukako and little Zoji excepted—ever said to me. I could only understand what people said to each other if I listened very carefully; I could say much less than I could understand.

I recognise this in my own efforts. When being spoken to I can pick up the meanings, most other Japanese is background noise. I have to listen very carefully to follow it. Maybe I’m only prepared to listen to information I find important though and it’s very easy to let everything else wash over you.

Another passage slightly further along says something very apt about how kanji work. I always wonder if Japanese see the same blocks of meaning in kanji as I do or do they just see the word and it’s pronunciation?

Taking in pictures kana and kanji, Yukako came away with a story because she expected a story. She could read a sentence aloud and explain it in detail, but if I pointed to a kanji, she became flustered and irritable; she couldn’t tell me what it meant on it’s own, even though she had just used it in context to explain the sentence. She understood far more kanji than she could write….

…An ordinary speaker of English knows what a conversation is, a literate person can spell the word, an educated person will know it comes from Latin through French, and a specialist will know that con means with and verse means turn. A poet will hear conversation as a turning together. All the layers are there in English too.

I presume the author learnt Japanese because of her interest in Chado（茶道 tea ceremony) and her interest in Chado led her to write this novel.

It is set in the late 1800s after Japan was forced open by the Black Ships. The Meiji period must have been one of great turmoil as Japan went from a feudal agrarian society to a less feudal, industrial society. The character of Yukako in the book was based on a real person, and presumably the major events recounted are accurate too. Sen Yukako was responsible for the tea ceremony becoming part of the curriculum in the new girls schools. In doing so she changed what was once an all male art into one that might now be more identified with women. (Although from what little I know the master practitioners are men).

In essence the story is of a young French-American girl who is stranded in Japan after a fire and gets adopted into the household of a Tea Master. It is about her love for the daughter of the house, how she fits into Japanese society, and about the many social changes undergoing Japan in the Meiji period.

The narrator of the story is a young girl brought to Japan by missionaries when Japan is opened up. In some ways this is the most unconvincing part of the book. It requires a hefty suspension of disbelief. But it is necessary to have this western voice tell the story so you can appreciate what is happening in Japan. A Japanese voice wouldn’t have been as convincing or interesting I think.

Much is made, it seems, of the sexuality of the main character. Oddly I found it to be central to her character but peripheral to the story. (or is that the other way around?) I myself see the love as one of yearning for a mother or a sister and then that being transformed into something more sexual. I also don’t feel you really learn anything about sexuality in Japan of the Meiji period. Certainly Japan didn’t have Christian guilt about sex. That started to come in around this time to appease the colonial powers in order to show Japan as a modern nation and so re-negotiate the uneven treaties. But definitely you learn about the role of women within the society. Not so good, but if you think about it it wasn’t that good in Europe and America for women at the time either. Indeed there may have been more power and freedom for women in Japan.

The other interesting strand in the book is something that has always bothered me about depictions of Japanese samurai culture. In a feudal system the comfort of those at the top and their ability to indulge in (when you get down to it) rather pointless art is based on the toil and misery of the lower strata of society. And Japanese society was completely rigid for 200 years after the “reforms” at the beginning of the Edo period. The book doesn’t quite explore this theme, as you can see the author loves Chado, but there is a sense of unease there.

I also feel after reading the book that it’s almost like the middle book in a trilogy. The first chapters that aren’t set in Japan and the last chapters you feel could have been fleshed out into books in their own right. Indeed I’d really like to see the later chapters as a book on their own. I really want to know more about Inko, she is a character I’d feel great affection for.

I recommend this book. It’s well written. Although it is fiction the author comes across as knowing what she writes about. As well she should do having studied Chado for 5 years including spending time in Kyoto.

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