I nodded and I was even smiling at the man, I was so confident. “Perhaps Dr Kinoshita has not explained. This is the only well that we have. There is very little water left and when this runs out, then there will be nothing left for our patients.”
I sauntered past the officer and stood by the side of the well.
“This is a time of national emergency,” the man replied. I could see the beads of sweat trickling down his cheek. “The army and the militia must come before the injured. We all have to make sacrifices.”
I laughed, genuinely laughed at that. “Why are you talking about the army? Have you not read any of these leaflets that the Yankees have dropped? The war is over! Our army is finished.”
“That talk is treasonous!” The officer snatched at my arm to drag me away from the well.
I had been enjoying myself up until then, but when he caught my injured arm, a flash of pain lanced through my body. He had tapped into a vast vat of rage that had been simmering since the start of the war.
“Get off me!” I backhanded him hard across the cheek with my other hand. “Get away from me and get out of here, you shits, you scum!”
The officer, trembling, tugged at the gun at his hip. “You have struck a police officer!” he said, fingers working at the leather. “You have struck a police officer who was carrying out his authorised duty! You will leave this room. You are under arrest.”
“Get out!” I replied. “I’m sick of the sight of you.”
The officer, working at the buckle with both hands, had finally drawn his gun and levelled it right between my eyes. The shaking muzzle was only a metre from my face.
“I am not moving,” I said. I was making my stand. I was going no further. It might have been over such a trifling matter as the hospital’s water, but, just as the quartermaster had urged, I was doing what I knew to be right.
“I am going to count to three,” he said, voice squeaking with nerves. “Then I will shoot.”
“Go to the devil – and take your committee authorisation with you.”
Dr Kinoshita had been watching aghast. “Let them have the water!” he said. “Give him the water! It does not matter!”
“Of course it does not matter!” I replied. “But for how much longer are we going to be pushed round by these uniformed dogs. They know nothing! All they have done is brought this country to its knees!”
The police officer, shaking all over, had brought up his other hand to steady the pistol. I doubt that he had ever pulled a trigger in anger. “I am counting,” he said. “One!”
And what was I thinking? Was I terrified at having that maniac point a gun at me? Did I only have a few more seconds to live before he fired a bullet through my brains?
I was certainly not frightened of dying. I had seen so much death, so much carnage, over the previous ten days, that I was past caring. At least it would be quick – which was more than could be said for most of the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Dr Kinoshita was pleading with me now. “I beg you,” he said. “Let them have the water.”
“Thank you, Doctor Kinoshita, for everything. You have given me so much.”
The police officer looked as if he was about to be sick. “Two!” he shrieked.
As I stood there waiting to meet my end, I was in a rather casual pose, one hand in my pocket, my injured arm hanging limp by my side. I was almost side on to the police officer, and gazing out of the doorway. I could just make out a funeral pyre burning briskly by the gates.
And a thought enters my head – perhaps the last thought of my life: in a few minutes, it will be my lifeless corpse being tossed onto the pyre.
“I mean it!” says the officer. “I really mean it!”
Did he mean it? Surely if he had really meant it, he would have already pulled the trigger? But to that question I will never know the answer – because at that very moment the girl flashes through the door.
“The Emperor!” she screams. “It is the Emperor!”
Yes, it was the Emperor, in person – come all the way from Tokyo to save my life.
The girl was carrying a radio, turned up loud. It took a moment to understand what we were listening to. The voice was high and rather weak; none of us had ever heard it before. It was high noon on 15th August and the first time in history that the Emperor had ever been heard by the nation.
The police officer’s face sagged, his mouth drooping open, as the full import of the Emperor’s words sank in. It was not at all clear what he was talking about. The actual words were so opaque as to be almost meaningless. But gradually we came to understand what he was saying. We were going to have to bear the unbearable. We had surrendered.
I listened to the Emperor’s words with a growing sense of elation. “Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the State, and the devoted service of our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage,” the Emperor said with sublime understatement, before continuing, “Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
The police inspector’s gun-arm dropped to his side, as if his very muscles had been sapped of their strength. The rest of them in that little outhouse were all in shock, not knowing what to do any more. It was like a decapitation. For the past four years, our nation’s sole focus had been on the war – and now that we had surrendered, no-one had any idea what to do next. Two of the civilians were so benumbed they had sunk to their knees.
There was a slight hiccup, almost a stutter, before the Emperor went on: “We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.”
The speech was at an end, and all that could be heard over the radio was the empty hiss of the airwaves.
“Is that it?” asked the girl. “Is the war over?”
I was about to take a step towards her, when in one fell movement the police officer brought the gun up to the side of his head and pointed the muzzle at his temple.
Tears were streaming down his face. “I give my life for the Motherland!” he said, eyes clenched tight shut, steeling himself to pull the trigger.
“Have you learned nothing?” I screamed, leaping forward to smack the gun out of his hands. The explosion was deafening as the bullet caromed into the side of the well.
The gun tumbled to the ground. I stooped to pick it up. The officer was lying on the floor, weeping into his hands as he was reduced to the schoolboy that he had always been.
I walked to the door. “The war is finished,” I said to the cowering men. “We have had enough. Japan has had enough.” And with that, I scooped the girl up into my arms and kissed her on both cheeks. I was so happy that I was crying, crying not because of the ignominy of surrender, but for the sheer delirious pleasure of being alive.
I put her down and we danced out into the sunshine and onto the grass, brimful with the most intoxicating euphoria.
“No more war,” the girl said, smiling up at me as she clung onto my good arm. “Perhaps you will have time to make me a kite?”
I enfolded her into my arms. “It would be a great pleasure.” The enormity of what had occurred was beginning to sink in as I let out a primal howl of delight. “It’s over!”
It was indeed; our war was over – and my education with it.
There were still two cities, of course, for whom the war had only just begun: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For many of the bomb victims, they had years of the most indescribable agony ahead of them.
Much of this was kept secret from the Japanese. The country as a whole knew that two atomic bombs had been dropped, but thanks to a news blackout on any talk of radiation sickness, few people had any idea what it entailed.
The Yankees, in particular, were keen to downplay the long-term effects of their new bombs, trying to pretend that Fat Man and Little Boy were really nothing more than a couple of giant-sized incendiary bombs. They spent years smothering news stories and fudging papers in their bid to prove that the A-bomb was just another wholesome, Honest-to-God Yankee killing machine.
There was one man, General Leslie Groves, whose comments about radiation sickness were so outrageous, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. It was Groves who had been the main driving force behind the Manhattan Project and without his constant belly-aching, the Yankees would probably have taken another year to develop the bomb. Groves not only created the bomb, but also helped pick the target cities – and, before the Emperor’s surrender, had been all for bombing Japan into oblivion.
Groves made many ludicrous comments after the war, but there were none quite so far-fetched as when he stated of the typical A-bomb victim: ‘He can have enough [radiation] so that he will be killed instantly. He can have a smaller amount which will cause him to die rather soon, as I understand it from the doctors, without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.’
The truth, for any of us on the ground, was that the radiation sickness turned out to be one of the most terrible tortures ever inflicted on mankind. It would be months before we learned how to treat those raw, maggot infested wounds; it was a sickness of which none of us had the slightest comprehension, and we only learned by trial and error how to cure it.
I know this well – because after Japan’s surrender, that hospital was my second home. In rather a loose fashion, I became a nurse. I did not have to take any exams, or jump any hurdles as such, but the good Dr Kinoshita kept me on as a general fixer at his hospital.
I am not by any means qualified. But then I like to style myself as something different from a nurse. I am a carer – and that is what I still do now, and that is what those two awful bombs have given to me: I care. I have cared, very deeply, about each and every one of the humans that entered our wards, and whether they were with us for a few days or a few years, I always strived to make their lives that little bit more bearable.
I loved them all, the girls, the men and the pitiful old ladies, but the two that I loved the most were my son Toshiaki and Shinzo’s widow, Sakae.
Even though it is now 60 years since I last saw my dear little boy, it still pains me to the think of him. After the end of the war, he clung to his life for another year. It would be nice to say that they were happy days, but I fear that he spent most of it in the most unspeakable torment.
I can truly say that I would have given up my life for his – and, when Toshiaki died, I focused my grief on my patients. I would work 18, 20 hour a day on the wards and when my withered arm throbbed and ached, I only ever considered it to be a reminder of my own good fortune.
By this strange alchemy of reasoning, Sakae’s fragile link with life came to have the most extraordinary hold over me. I had to save her. If I could save her, then I would be saving a little bit of Shinzo, of Toshiaki, of Sumie and Mako and all the others I had lost.
And, after over two years in that hospital, and with the skin on her back as brittle as parchment, I like to think that I did save her.
What I could never have guessed was that over those two years, as we chatted amicably and learned to make light of our pain, I would fall in love. And our love was based not on ephemeral beauty but on companionship, on mutual respect, and on a deep understanding of our pasts and our dreams.
Of all the many gifts that were bestowed on me by the bomb, I would not have dared to dream that I might also find my soulmate. We married three days after she left the hospital. It would have been very fine, perhaps, if we had been able to have children. But I can only count my blessings; I have no time for regret.
Sakae and I have, in a small way, become ambassadors for Fat Man and Little Boy. We have toured the world, telling people about the bombs in the hope that they may never be repeated. For a while, we even lived in America. How strange it was to be dwelling in the land of our one time enemies. Only a few years earlier, we had been trying to wipe each other off the face of the earth, and yet the matter of race is fast becoming an irrelevance. As I queued up to order a Big Mac and fries, my skin and my nationality were of as little consequence as the shoes on my feet.
As for Japan after the war, the Motherland was not crushed into the dust and nor were our womenfolk raped and tortured. It took some years, but I believe that once again we have become a great nation – though a kinder, less arrogant nation. It is difficult enough to change the mindset of a grown man, let alone that of a country; but the bombs changed me and they most certainly changed Japan. From being a nation of rampant warmongers, we became the most fervent pacifists, with every victim of the bomb becoming a symbol, in their own right, of the unparalleled horror of war.
And I am pleased to say that as part of my country’s rehabilitation into the world, our gentle Emperor also received his dues. At the start of the war, nations from around the world stripped him of every one of the medals and orders of gallantry that had been conferred upon him. Yet 30 years later, our Emperor was once again back in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and there amidst all the white-gowned choristers, he became one of the few men in history to be reinvested into that noble and ancient Order of the Garter.
And with that little bow to the Emperor, I believe that I am nearly done.
But is there anything yet left to tell? Is there anything that I have missed?
Well perhaps there is the one last matter I should attend to:
The Girl.
I feel that now it is time to make a clean breast of things. You will have noticed how, throughout my little book, I have never once referred to the girl by name. She is always ‘The Girl’.
The reason is because, at the start of this story, The Girl was nothing more than just ‘a girl’. To me, she was yet one more of Hiroshima’s numberless dispossessed. She had a name, but at that time I was not interested in people’s names – and nor was I much interested in people.