But as for the suicide boats, with their top speed of perhaps 30 knots, they were never going to work in the first place. They would not have got within 300 metres of a US battleship before being blown out of the water.
Still, the suicide boats were the one secret weapon that Japan had left, and we certainly did not want them destroyed before the invasion had started. So the Special Attack Forces were proving their devotion to the Emperor by digging holes to hide their pitiful craft.
How pathetic it all seemed, those patriots determined to throw away their lives in the face of an unstoppable Yankee tide. Thinking back though, there was very little in Japan that was not pathetic by the end of the War. We were like a punchdrunk prize-fighter: battered, bloody and tottering blindly on our feet, yet still out of misplaced pride determined to continue the fight.
As we watched those benighted soldiers digging the holes that might as well have been their graves, I had never felt so grateful to be alive. For the first time in four months, I was back at sea again. Hiroshima City was receding into the distance and, for a short while, the World War with it. We sat on a bench by the aft passenger rail, and I offered Sumie one of the rice-balls and some of the cucumber that she had packed for me earlier. The food in those days was frugal. You thought yourself lucky if you had a piece of fish to eat. As for meat, it was so long since I had eaten it that I had almost forgotten what it tasted like. Our diets largely consisted of unpolished rice and whatever vegetables were at hand.
Sumie took a bite of the rice-ball and delicately patted a crumb off her lips. “This is very stupid,” she said. “My sister would be very unhappy if she knew that I was visiting Miyajima with you.”
“She would be very unhappy whatever I was doing with you.”
“That is so.” She swept her mane of hair off her forehead and behind her ear, where it streamed like a scarf over the passenger rail. “Will the Goddess forgive me?”
“Probably not,” I replied. “I will try to make it worth your while.”
The story goes that the island’s shrine is inhabited by the sea goddess Ichikishima, who is fiercely jealous of any couple who comes to visit her. The shrine was built in 593 and legend has it that Ichikishima has been separating couples ever since – usually by arranging some cataclysmic event for the women. The island is so sacred that neither births nor burials are allowed there, and weddings are obviously out of the question.
“You know that this story of the jealous goddess was made up by the local sailors?” I said.
“Why would they do that?”
“It was a Red-Light district,” I said. “They first built a shrine here to protect the local seamen and the prostitutes followed soon after. The sailors made up this tale of the jealous goddess because it was the only way they could stop their wives from accompanying them.”
“Stop it!” she laughed and slapped me on the knee. “That is ridiculous.”
“It is true,” I said. “My father told me.”
“As if he would know! And doubtless you were planning to visit one of these brothels when you got there.”
“Well – now that you mention it ”
My actual reason for visiting Miyajima was rather less joyous. My father had died the year before and that Sunday, that Sunday 5th August 1945, would have been his 80th birthday. I was going to this old seaman’s shrine to give thanks for his life. After my mother had died when I was two, my father had brought me up almost single-handed. There was my grandmother, too, helping out during the day, but the bulk of what I have learned about life I have learned from him. He had wisdom such as I could only dream of. Long, long before Pearl Harbour, this gnarly old merchant seaman, who had seen so much of the world, was already querying the correctness, the direction, of this crazy unquestioning jingoism that had swept the nation.
I will return to my father later. But the reason why I was travelling to Miyajima on that bright blue morning was to give thanks for his life, and to honour everything that he had given to me.
At length, Miyajima’s century-old Torii gate came into view, while Hiroshima was just a grey speck 15 kilometres away on the horizon. The tide was high and, with its green backdrop, the floating shrine truly looked like something from another planet; certainly a world away from the war and the grinding poverty and endless air raid sirens that had us daily scurrying for our bunkers. They said that the Miyajima’s vermilion pagoda was so sacred that it could not be sited on normal soil – and for a moment, even a complete non-believer such as myself could scent a faint whiff of spirituality.
Sumie marvelled at the site of the shrine, clutching at my hand. Since she was brazening it out and visiting this Holy of Holies with her lover, then why should she not have held my hand? How much more could it have provoked that island’s jealous goddess?
“I have never seen it so beautiful,” she said.
“Nor I.” I wish I could have boxed up that time, as for a single moment everything about us seemed so simple and so refreshingly uncomplicated: the clear blue sky, not a cloud on the horizon; the verdant forest, as green as I had ever seen it; the almost turquoise blue of the cove; and then, in stunning contrast to all else, the red shrine, like a ruby gemstone set in the middle of the most gorgeous crown.
“Could I... would you mind if I stayed on board?” Sumie asked.
“It will be all right.” We stood among the swirl of passengers that was disgorging onto the shore.
“You know how superstitious I am,” she said, tugging at her baggy trousers.
“Do not worry,” I said, and, like a father leading a recalcitrant child, I took Sumie firmly by the hand and led her onto the gang-plank. And she, still filled with such terrible foreboding, followed.
Even before I had set foot on the land, even as I walked down the gang-plank, the omens were disastrous. I had walked but three steps when a shriek of intense pain rent the air. We all stopped and turned, and there by the anchor chain was the young cabin-girl, her mouth a perfect ‘O’ of horror as she stared at her mashed and bloody arm. Her hand had somehow got caught in the winch mechanism of the anchor chain, and she had lost two, three fingers, the blood already streaming onto the deck.
All she could do was stand there, stock still, and stare at the wreckage of her arm. She was whimpering, her brain numb with shock, little severed fingers lying at her feet.
And it says so much of Japan as a nation that not one of us, not one, moved to help her. We stood and watched, bowed down by the weight of national apathy. I, like the sheep I was, did not move a muscle towards her. Was not I the perfect wretch? Now, now I would do anything at all to have helped. But then, I was still so self-centred as to think that her pain had nothing to do with me. I could watch. I could observe. But I was not a part of it and it was not for me to help her.
I shudder to think of the utter callowness of that man that was myself. I may well have been doing what all of us had been conditioned to do. We did nothing out of the ordinary unless we had received a direct order. But it is not a humane way to behave; it denies every natural impulse to help your fellow man.
One person did finally go over to the girl. It was that captain, that monstrosity of a man. Yet rather than embrace her, or tend to her injuries, he merely launched into the most terrible harangue. “You!” he shrieked. “What do you think you are doing? Why did you not take more care? Go into the cabin and bind up your hand.”
The girl, still with her bleeding limb outstretched in front of her, cowered as if he was about to hit her.
“Get off my deck!” he said. “Get off my deck and get into the cabin! And stop crying! Stop crying! What are your injuries compared to those who have given their lives for their country? Stop crying, you hear me?”
But even then, even then, it was not too late. I could still have stepped in, could have comforted that shattered, bleeding girl – and, at the very least, defended her from the foulmouthed captain.
I should have and it still makes me wince that I did not. Perhaps it was just in our nature in those days. We had about us a natural reserve which meant you did not get involved; you let people sort out their own problems.
But my cold-hearted inaction was down to much more than mere conditioning. The truth was: I did not care. It was not my problem. The girl was in pain and had been maimed for life. But what could I do? What could anyone do?
The other passengers remained glued to the spot. Sumie at least was trembling at the horror of it all. Everything inside her was telling her to get back onto the ship and to go to the girl. But even Sumie could not find it in herself to go against a lifetime of conditioning. That was how it was in Japan: you knuckled under. You obeyed orders. You did not think for yourself. And you played the part of the good citizen by stifling the slightest impulse of emotion.
We stood for a moment longer, watching as the girl tottered to the cabin, the stump of her hand in her mouth. The captain showed his disgust by spitting over the side.
“What are you all looking at? Have you not got anything better to do?” With that, he kicked at the severed fingers, those pathetic little scraps of bone and flesh, knocking them into the sea. “Be off with you!” he said, not bothering to look up. “Go say your prayers.”
I have so many regrets in my life, but one of my greatest is my complete spinelessness in the face of that awful monster. What did I have to lose? I could, at the very least, have berated the man. Better yet I should have knocked him down and forced him to clean up the blood with his own tongue. But I did not and I despise myself for it. No, like all the other peasants on the ship, I registered that the show was over and I tramped onto the landing-stage. Not my problem. None of it was my problem. But how much horror does one have to witness before, eventually, it does become your problem?
Sumie was actually crying as she stepped off the gangplank, making no attempt to dry her tears. “That poor girl,” she said.
“Yes.” That was all I thought fit to reply.
We sat on one of the benches outside the shrine and in time Sumie’s tears dried. With one last decisive sniff, she gave herself a shake and squared her shoulders. “I think I am ready,” she said.
“Good.”
If only I had been more attuned to portents and signs, I would then and there have led Sumie back to the ferry. For sometimes I do believe the heavens give us due warning of what is to come. And if ever there had been a warning sign that Miyajima was not for us, that cabin-girl’s accident was it.
But we stayed, digging ourselves deeper into our hole until we were drenched from top to toe in misfortune. Now that I think of it, even Miyajima’s famous plum tree, planted by the great Saint Kobo Daishi, had been against us. That spring the tree had failed to produce any of its legendary double-petalled red flowers. That alone was a sign of extraordinary ill-omen.
Sumie followed me into the vermillion shrine, washing her hands and mouth before entering the portal. Myself, although I went through the motions, I have never much been one for religious ritual.
Like my father before me, my heart had been turned against religion – whether it were Buddhism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, or any faith you can think of. All of them, in their own fanatical ways, are as bad as each other. Why is it that all of the greatest outrages that have been inflicted on this world have always been in the name of ‘religion’? And the Buddhists, with their protestations of peace and goodwill, were no better than anyone else; who was it, after all, who launched the attack on Pearl Harbour? But I had not gone to the shrine for religious purposes. I was there purely as a mark of respect for my father.
I walked alone down colonnaded corridors that were hung with lanterns. The main shrine was gloomy after the bright sunlight, with that eternal musk of religious devotion. From below, I could hear the water slapping on the stilts, while all around were the muttered chants of the penitents next to me. I knelt and said a prayer of thanks for my father. In every way, he had been a much better man than myself.
Unlike the rest of the pilgrims, I was not going to waste my time on praying for my own good fortune; if it happened, it happened. I could not conceive how my future could be even remotely altered by a prayer on Miyajima.
I left after only a few minutes and was thankful to be back in the sunshine and away from that stifling atmosphere of religious zeal. As I had left the shrine, I had taken one of the fortune-telling paper slips, an Omikuji. I had been playing with it in my hand and had scrumpled it up into a little ball before forgetting about it.
A deer, one of Miyajima’s 600-odd tame deer, came over and nuzzled my hand. Deer, along with the monkeys that infest the island, are said to be messengers of the Gods. The doe thought I had some food and as I opened my fingers I saw the fortune-slip. I flattened out the paper to find out my destiny. But it had nothing at all about my future – and everything about my way of life. ‘Can you be kinder?’
I remember how aggrieved I felt. Could I be kinder? What did that mean? All of us could, perhaps, be kinder, but we have other things to do: family, lovers, work, commitments, obligations and traditions that must be kept. Did they not know there was a war on?
I fed the slip of paper to the deer, but still it rankled. Why me? Had I been especially unkind? Was I more unkind than anyone else? Not that I was superstitious, but still it vexed me – and that, of course, was because it had so precisely hit the mark.
I waited for Sumie and tried to distract myself by reading the Hiroshima paper, the
Chugoku Shimbun
. You would not believe the drivel they used to serve us. We had been at war for four years, we were being beaten out of sight, and yet still the
Chugoku Shimbun
and all the other festering newspapers in Japan were claiming that ultimate victory was just around the corner. Well, perhaps it might have been – if it had been us who had spent the last five years developing the atomic bomb. But Japan’s atomic weapons programme was nothing, nothing at all; just a dozen men wandering blind in the very foothills of atomic research. As it was, all we could fall back on were our bamboo spears, our suicide boats and our indomitable pluck.