A Fire In the Sky

When Yoshitaka Kawamoto came to, the classroom was very dark, and he was lying under the debris of the crushed school building. In those days most Japanese buildings were made of wood; when the Bomb dropped, all but one or two of the structures that stood near the hypo-center of the explosion were flattened like paper hats. Kawamoto's school, the Hiroshima Prefectural First Middle School, stood only 800 meters, a mere half-mile, from the hypocenter. Two-thirds of his classmates were killed instantly where they sat at their desks. Some who survived were weeping and calling for their mothers. Others began singing the school song to bolster their courage and to let passersby know that the 13-year-olds were still alive.

"But then the singing and the cries grew weaker. My classmates were dying one by one. That made me very frightened. I struggled to free myself from the broken fragments, and looked around. I thought that gas tanks had exploded. Through a hole in the roof I could see clouds swirling in a cone; some were black, some pink. There were fires in the middle of the clouds. I checked my body. Three upper teeth were chipped off; perhaps a roof tile had hit me. My left arm was pierced by a piece of wood that stuck in my flesh like an arrow. Unable to pull it out, I tied a tourniquet around my upper arm to stanch the flow of blood. I had no other injuries, but I did not run away. We were taught that it was cowardly to desert one's classmates. So I crawled about the rubble, calling, 'Is there anyone alive?'

"Then I saw an arm shifting under planks of wood. Ota, my friend, was moving. But I could see that his back was broken, and I had to pull him up into the clear. Ota was looking at me with his left eye. His right eyeball was hanging from his face. I think he said something, but I could not make it out. Pieces of nails were stuck on his lips. He took a student handbook from his pocket. I asked, 'Do you want me to give this to your mother?' Ota nodded. A moment later he died. By now the school was engulfed in flames. I started to walk away, and then looked back. Ota was staring at me with his one good eye. I can still see that eye in the dark."

So began Kawamoto's morning, Aug. 6, 1945. Yoshitaka Kawamoto is 53 today, a small, solid man who dresses formally in blue or brown suits and carries himself with a quick-moving dignity. When he tells the story of what happened 40 years ago, however, he can become a 13-year-old on the spot--suddenly springing from a chair to strike a military pose, demonstrating a march step, or hunching down like a shortstop. In his office he sang the school song that was sung by his classmates the morning of the bombing. As he did, he rose automatically and snapped to attention, chin tucked, eyes forward:

The rain pours white against the Hiroshima evening. Colors fade on petals just past full bloom, Spring is passing. But we stand firm, our dreams of prosperity unfading.

Only in the past two years, since he was appointed director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, has Kawamoto begun to tell the story of his days of survival. Before then he did not want publicly to declare himself a hibakusha, a survivor of the bombing. He is aware of the unspoken stigma attached to being a hibakusha, that people often treat the survivors with a sort of sympathetic shunning. It is also unlike Kawamoto to do anything without a clearly defined reason. The museum directorship provided a reason. Kawamoto now recounts his experiences to museum visitors and groups of schoolchildren. He believes in his new role; people must know the facts, he says. At the same time, this retelling of the August days has caused Kawamoto deep uneasiness. He had given little thought to Ota before the past two years. Now Ota appears in his dreams. Kawamoto explains that much guilt is connected to surviving the bombing. In the days following Aug. 6, he lost Ota's student handbook.

Kawamoto spoke of that time, Aug. 6-11, over a recent five-day period, telling part of his story in his office across the hall from the Peace Museum, and the rest "on location," in various places where the story occurred. His office and the museum are in a long, silvery modern building that looks like a harmonica, situated at the broad end of the triangular Peace Memorial Park. At the point of the triangle sits the Aioi Bridge, a T-shaped structure spanning the Honkawa, the river that served as the aiming point for the Enola Gay. (The Bomb missed by only a block or two.) Between the point and the broad end of the triangular park lies a grassy area dotted with various memorials to peace or to specific victims of the bombing, the most sought-out of which is a rocket-shaped sculpture dedicated to a little girl who in 1955 died of leukemia attributed to radiation poisoning. According to one account, the girl made more than 900 paper cranes before she died, trusting that if she completed 1,000, her life would be spared. In Japan there is an old belief that a crane can live for 1,000 years, and that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, they will protect you from illness. Thousands of green, red and yellow paper cranes made by schoolchildren billow out from under the rocket like the undergarments of a skirt.

At the center of the Peace Park is a stone cenotaph that looks like a covered wagon from the American prairie. It contains the names of the Hiroshima dead who have been identified--113,000 names to date. In an oblong pool before the cenotaph burns an "eternal flame" in an odd metallic structure resembling a headless figure with its arms extended; the flame burns where the head would be. On either side of the pool are red-orange and pink roses of enormous size, and trees that look as if they were formed by stacking bulbous tire-shaped hedges on top of one another. On a typical afternoon couples stroll, mothers push babies, children hand out peace buttons, pigeons swoop in low arcs like confetti, then up again over the water, the monuments, the museum.

The area's most recognizable structure is what is now called the Atomic Bomb Dome, originally Hiroshima Prefecture's Industrial Promotion Hall, a sort of chamber of commerce building and exhibition hall in 1945. The remains stand just outside the point of the park, across the Aioi Bridge. This shell is Hiroshima's Eiffel Tower, its Statue of Liberty. Where the dome rose, only the supporting beams remain, a giant hairnet capping four floors of vacant gray walls, much of their outer skin peeled away, exposing patches of brick. The interior floors are also gone, making the entire structure an accidental atrium. A front doorway leads to nowhere. A metal spiral staircase ascends to nothing. A pillar lies on its side, wires springing like wild hairs.

Yet not the dome nor the Peace Park nor the monuments--and there are dozens of monuments to victims throughout the city--give any real feeling of the devastation of Aug. 6, 1945. Even the film that is shown visitors to the Peace Museum displays less sadness and horror than one would expect, in spite of the pictures of scorched children and hairless women lying listless in hospital beds. Far more affecting is a three-to-five-minute 16-mm movie in Kawamoto's possession that shows Hiroshima in 1936: men who still dressed in kimono; elegant women scooting rapidly through the streets of a shopping district; cherry blossoms; a fleeting glimpse of the Atomic Bomb Dome as it looked originally: fat, Victorian and official.

It is the ordinariness of the city that creates the sense of loss; what a normally pleasant city Hiroshima was before the bombing, what a normally pleasant city it is today. On any summer morning, the Hiroshima Carp take infield practice in the baseball stadium; fashionably dressed young men and women walk purposefully to work; traffic builds on the city's bridges. If you would picture the layout of the center of Hiroshima, which covers much of the ground of Kawamoto's story, place your right hand palm down on a flat surface with your fingers spread wide. Your fingers are rivers. On the land between your third and fourth fingers lies the Peace Park. Between your fourth and fifth fingers Kawamoto's school was situated. The heel of your hand is Hiroshima Bay, and beyond your fingertips lie mountains and countryside.

Between your second and third fingers is where the Enola Gay dropped the Bomb at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6. Once relieved of its nearly 9,000-lb. burden, the plane thrust upward, jerking the heads of the crew. The B-29 made a 60DEG dive and a 158DEG right turn. Forty-three seconds after the Bomb was released, it detonated. The crew members watched it explode in a red core below them. Then they headed back to base, the tiny island of Tinian in the Northern Marianas, 1,600 miles to the south.

That morning had begun routinely for Kawamoto. At the time, he was living with his mother and his younger brother in Ono, now a growing suburb of 30,000, then a fishing village of fewer than 10,000, about 30 kilometers outside Hiroshima, across Hiroshima Bay. Mrs. Kawamoto had taken her two boys to Ono one year before, after her husband, an engineer, had been killed in a freak accident in an electrical factory. Until then the Kawamotos had been living in the nearby village of Kuba, where Yoshitaka and his friends swam out long distances in the bay. "They called us 'children of the sea.' " Sailors from German U-boats would wave to the boys from the subs. Kuba was a wonderful town to grow up in, Kawamoto says, a place of frogs and dragonflies. Boys would test their courage in the graveyard at night. "In the daytime we wore uniforms, but at night we put on kimono. In the graveyard the hem of your kimono could get caught on a bush. It would feel like a hand tugging you down."

In Ono the morning routine was this: at 6, Kawamoto would rise, put on his school uniform, and walk down the hill to catch the train for Hiroshima. Monday, Aug. 6, was very hot, even that early in the day, and Kawamoto was tired. All the children his age had been conscripted by the military to clear firebreaks in Hiroshima, areas of escape or safety in case fires spread after bombing raids. Not that there had ever been major bombing raids on Hiroshima. While Tokyo and Osaka were being fire bombed by the Americans in March, Hiroshima was relatively untouched, save for two bombing incidents in March and April, the second of which tore a huge hole in a street near Kawamoto's school.

Aug. 6 had in fact begun with an air-raid alert for the city just after 7, but the B-29 soon passed over, and the all clear was sounded. This was the weather plane that advised the Enola Gay that the target was open. Schoolchildren looked forward to air-raid alerts, which allowed them to stop working. Kawamoto said goodbye to his mother, who told him to take care of himself. He plonked a shovel on his shoulder and strode soldier-like toward the railway station.

When the train arrived at the West Hiroshima station, Kawamoto and the other first-year boys gathered outside and, commanded by the senior boys, jogged in formation about two kilometers to the school. They jogged across the Shin Koi Bridge over the Ota River spillway, across a slim space of land to another bridge, which spanned the Tenma River, across another strip of land and the Nishi Heiwa Bridge over the Honkawa, finally crossing the Heiwa Bridge over the Motoyasu River. About 100 meters from the school gate, Kawamoto and his classmates were ordered to halt and march regimentally the rest of the way.

"We arrived at school at 7:45 a.m. Morning assembly would begin in the schoolyard promptly at 8. As was our custom, we began the day by bowing to the picture of the Emperor, and then proceeded to our classroom, where we recited the instructions for soldiers. These were rules of conduct, lessons that soldiers were always to obey. Fifteen minutes was never enough time to recite those lessons, but we could not be late for the 8 a.m. assembly. We went out into the yard and stood in rows. I saw B-29s flying overhead, and I thought, 'Maybe we won't have to work.' The head teacher spoke and gave us instructions for the day. Leaving assembly, we were divided into two groups: odd-and even-numbered classes. The odd-numbered classes were to take the first shift clearing firebreaks. The even-numbered classes went inside to begin regular school-work. I was in the even-numbered group.

"In the classroom we immediately went to our desks. The desks were attached to chairs; we told ourselves that they were the same kind of desks used in the United States. I had a special feeling for my desk. There was a space between the desk and the chair that we could dive under in an air raid. We also had 'bulletproof' helmets, which were not bulletproof and not really helmets, but rather pointed hats of thick cloth made by our mothers. The senior boys ordered us to close our eyes and meditate. I closed my eyes, but did not meditate; I was only wondering if the seniors were going to hit us. They were always clouting us for one thing or another. I practiced making the kind of face that did not look as if it ought to be hit." Kawamoto demonstrates the expression of a blank mask.

"Then the seniors went out of the classroom, leaving the younger boys to meditate on their own. I opened my eyes. A boy named Fujimoto--I think his father was a doctor--was seated by the window. He called out, 'Look! A B-29!' My class mates kept meditating, but I was very curious, so I started to go toward the window. That was when the flash hit. I heard no sound. It was a flash like lightning. The air was shimmering, the way a television screen shimmers when it is out of order."

Then unconsciousness. Then the school song. Then Ota.

Remember, I had only been in the middle school four months, like all first-year boys; not enough time to make many friends. Ota and I became friends because we were both short, and since students were allotted seats according to their height, Ota and I were placed beside each other in the first row. I admired Ota very much. I was just a country boy, but Ota was polished and handsome, the kind of fellow I had always thought of as the perfect city boy. White skin, clearly defined eyebrows, a Western-type nose, not a flattish one like mine. The whites of his eyes always sparkled. And he had a husky, manly voice. Everyone looked up to him because he was so articulate. He was fun too, a very special boy.

"I left him in the fire and went out into the playground. The playground was covered with a thick, dark layer of smoke. I could see the blue sky filter through from place to place. I did not know which way to run. Out of the flames and noise, I heard a voice cry, 'Run into the wind. Run into the wind.' I picked up a fistful of sand--to this day I do not know how I thought to do this--and tossed the sand in the air to see which way the wind was blowing. There was fire everywhere. Bodies lay dead or writhing all over the playground.

"Then I saw the head teacher. So severe were his burns, I could not recognize his face, only his voice. He wore nothing but a pair of undershorts, and he was dragging a cart with some of my classmates lying on it. I helped drag the cart, but the going was extremely slow and difficult. We had to lift the cart over the other bodies, and those who were still alive grabbed at our ankles and begged for help. We had to push bodies aside to clear a path. Finally, we reached a point safe from the fires. We found several tin cans of oil. I dipped a towel in the oil and dabbed my classmates' wounds. The road was heating up terribly, either because of the sunlight or because of the bomb. [The bomb emitted a land temperature in that area of at least 3000 DEGC, or 5400 DEGF, twice the heat required to melt iron.] The head teacher and I did not talk. I was too tired to talk. I only wanted water. Two students in the cart died before my eyes."

Kawamoto has been telling this part of his story standing in a school playground that was built where his old school playground used to be. It is only four or five blocks from his office. The new playground is much larger than the old one, Kawamoto says. There are tennis courts on one side; a soccer game is in progress; over in a corner a girl puts a shot while a friend measures the distances. Kawamoto observes that children today are less disciplined than in his generation. He speaks fondly of the strong sense of unity among his classmates, how they stuck together against both the seniors and the military officers assigned to the school to conduct military exercises.

"The officers also oversaw our lunches. Our lunches usually consisted of 'Japanese flags'--a bowl of rice with a red plum in the center, the design of the national flag. But if we had too much white rice, we were hit; white rice was a sign of luxury. If we had a mixture of rice and wheat, with more wheat than rice, that was O.K. Country boys had more white rice, of course, so we were hit quite often--either for that or for finishing our lunches too quickly. We were supposed to take a full hour with our rice, so we would gobble it up at first, and then slow down, trying to stretch out the hour. One of our military officers was especially strict, a real tyrant. He was in school the day of the bombing. I saw him months later working in the black market, pounding a counter in the street to attract customers."

Kawamoto did not like having the military around his school, but he appreciates the military values of discipline. He connects discipline with self-knowledge. Once, when he was a very small boy, his father took him in a boat out into the bay and threw him in, to teach the boy to swim. Kawamoto struggled and tried to grab the side of the boat, but his father pushed him off with a pole. Only when the boy sank did his father pull him back. "I asked him why he did not help me sooner. I thought my father was trying to drown me. Later I understood that he was really trying to save me, that I would only learn to swim if I came that close to death."

Of the modern generation Kawamoto says it does not possess "the kind of heart that knows how to stare into itself and discover its own strength. Onore o shiru: to know oneself. It is essential. People today live too much by their individual desires, and so are bound to repeat the mistakes of the past. One must vow not to repeat those mistakes. Unless you know your self, you cannot make a vow that counts."

In the Peace Museum now, Kawamoto uses a long wooden pointer to indicate, in a large circular panorama, the route of the rest of his escape. Above the center of the panorama a bright red ball representing the hypocenter hangs by a cord. Kawamoto touches the pointer to the area of the playground, then moves it out into the city, away from the hypocenter, toward the Kyobashi River and the Miyuki Bridge.

"We were trying to get away from the fires and head for the river. On the way, I lost sight of my teacher and proceeded alone. People burned too severely to survive grabbed at me as I went along. Those who could walk stumbled over the bodies; they wore tatters and were covered with ash. I saw a living baby clinging to the breasts of its dead mother. I saw another child of three or four beating her dead mother with her fists. Perhaps she did not know that her mother was dead and in desperation and confusion was trying to wake her up.

"Near the Miyuki Bridge I met my classmate Kimura. Kimura belonged to the odd-numbered group, so he had been working in the streets when the bomb went off. His face was charred. He lived in West Hiroshima, and he said he was going home, which meant that he was heading back toward the direction of the hypocenter. I told him that it was impossible to go back, that the area was all in flames. He was delirious and would not listen to me. He only repeated, 'I want to go home. I want to go home.' He walked away toward the flames. Later his family could not locate his ashes."

During the war people kept their own reservoirs in case of fires. The water in these reservoirs lay filthy and stagnant through the year, but Kawamoto was desperately thirsty. He started toward one of the reservoirs, but saw that people were lying dead, half in, half out of the water. Coming to the Miyuki Bridge at last, he leaped down the steep stone steps, stumbling over others plummeting down. There was a logjam of bodies at the base of the steps. "I was so scared." He tried to drink the muddy water, but spit it out. He clambered up the riverbank.

"I lay on my back in the heat. There was no shade to cool me. Thick clouds were billowing above my head. It was a thunderhead. Fires glowed in the clouds. The sky was dark. I thought, 'I will never see my mother again.' Then I passed out."

Much of what Kawamoto saw between the school playground and the Miyuki Bridge is exhibited in the museum he directs. It is after hours now, so he is free to move easily from display case to display case, using one exhibit or another to illustrate his story. During regular hours the museum is packed with schoolchildren in uniform, pressing their noses against the windows of the cases; chattering; some horseplay from the bigger boys. On display is all that became of Hiroshima once the bomb dropped, along with historical memorabilia such as the directive from Lieut. General Carl Spaatz, commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Air Force, ordering that the city be bombed; a large photo of the A-bomb known as "Little Boy," looking like a sea mammal in profile; messages of resolve or condolence from distinguished visitors; leaflets dropped by the Americans in early August 1945 that warned of some general disaster but not of the A-bomb specifically. "The Americans did warn Nagasaki about the Bomb, but not Hiroshima," says Kawamoto. "It made no difference anyway. Our military ordered the people not to read any of the leaflets, so none of our citizens knew what was coming."

Strange objects fill the display cases: testaments to the Bomb's effects on ordinary things. A twisted beam from a seven-story building; a charred tobacco pipe; a melted lump of coins; a mass of nails, of sake cups. A watch stopped at exactly 8:16 was found in the sands of the Motoyasu River. A horse is on display; its legs are missing. One case contains hair that had fallen in a clump on the ground. (Kawamoto's hair fell out after six weeks, but two months later it grew back again.) Another case contains black fingernails two or three inches in length that had grown on a hand where the skin was entirely burned off. The black nails had blood vessels in them; nothing like them was ever seen before.

And photographs of the suffering, their burned backs looking like topographical maps. And shadows of vaporized people that remained on streets after the people disappeared. And a wall streaked with "black rain," the large radioactive rain drops that fell shortly after the explosion.

The displays that touch Kawamoto most deeply are those of a middle-school uniform, much like his own, the jacket torn with one sleeve missing; and of wax models of victims walking as if stunned or asleep, their arms held out in front of them. Their skin hangs loose on their bones, like ill-fitting clothing. Their real clothes are rags. In the display case they stand blank-eyed against a backdrop of a wasteland of ashes and a fire-streaked sky. "It is the way people really looked," Kawamoto says. "They did not seem to walk voluntarily; they appeared to be pushed.

"When I regained consciousness, I found myself lying in a warehouse, which was turned into a hospital, near the Ujina port. The Ujina port is at a good distance from the Miyuki Bridge. Soldiers had carried me to the warehouse. There I waited. I remembered my fear at the sight of the bodies in the river. I saw not a single fish. That river was always full of fish. The whole area between my school and the Miyuki Bridge had looked so different. That was where Hiroshima University had stood. A railroad operated in that neighborhood. A Red Cross hospital had been there too. All gone. Children lay in the arms of dead parents, parents carried the bodies of dead children. The soldiers who brought me to the warehouse told of seeing a horse killed on the spot where it stood during the flash. There were no marks or wounds on the animal. It had died in its tracks of shock or of a scorching wind.

"It was about 7 in the evening when I came to. It had taken me 2 1/2 hours to get from the playground to the Miyuki Bridge, and this was eight or nine hours later, so I had lain unconscious for a very long time. The warehouse at Ujina ordinarily was used to store food for the soldiers. Now it stored people, who sat dazed with their backs to the walls. The first thing I saw on coming to was a soldier's face looking into mine. He gave me an affectionate pat on the head. Perhaps it was he who removed the piece of wood from my arm, for the wood was gone now, and my arm was in great pain. Another soldier who had medical training was working his way around the warehouse, going from victim to victim. When he came over to me I asked for water, but he refused. They were only giving water to the dying. By that I knew that I was expected to recover. The first soldier came by and placed a piece of ice in my mouth. I shall never forget his kindness.

"It was he who told me how I had happened to come to the warehouse. The people who originally found me by the riverbank thought I was dead, so they tossed me on top of a stack of bodies that they were about to set afire for cremation. Some how my body slid off the pile. When a soldier tried to heave me back on top, he grabbed me by the wrist and felt my pulse."

Throughout the day, Mrs. Kawamoto had been frantic for news of her son. She had made an attempt to get into Hiroshima by train, but was turned back at the West Hiroshima station. The morning of Aug. 7 she made a second attempt, but this time the railway station was roped off. The next day she went to the schools in the towns around Ono; she heard that bomb victims had been brought to these schools, which, like the warehouse in Ujina, had been turned into hospitals. On Aug. 9 she got word that her son was alive on one of the islands outside the city, but she did not know where. With a group of neighbors who were also searching for their children, she hired a fishing boat to search the islands around Hiroshima.

"The soldiers tried to place me on a boat headed for the island of Ninoshima, but the people on the boat rejected me; they were already overloaded with passengers. The soldiers put me on another boat headed for the peninsula of Taibi. On Taibi I was placed in a tent that was otherwise occupied only by women. I suppose they did this because I was a child. Some of the women were with babies. Some of the women were half naked. Some showed no external wounds, but they had gone crazy from the bombing or from being parted from their families. They clung to the legs of the soldiers, imploring them, 'Where are my children?' The younger women, distraught, began climbing the tent poles, crying, 'Mother! Mother!' I could not sleep that night, or the next day, or even the next. The women cried for two days, but on the third, they were too exhausted to cry.

"The second day on Taibi, we had an air-raid alert, a false alarm. Those who could, walked to a shelter. Most people were too weak to stand. They urinated and defecated where they were lying. Soldiers, their eyes red with fatigue, passed around canned oranges. But I could not eat; I could not bear the smell in the tent. My face was burning with fever, and my eyes and lips grew swollen. By now my arm was in terrible pain, and finally a soldier took me to a doctor. The doctor wanted to amputate, but the soldier said, 'This boy is only 13. He has lots of things to do for our country. Please don't cut off his arm.' "

To which the doctor agreed, but said that he could not guarantee Kawamoto's life. Then he disinfected the wound. "I was not afraid now. I was sure I was going to live."

Kawamoto got word to his mother from Taibi. He did so indirectly, by invoking the name of a relative, a principal of a military school who was a powerful man in the military. A soldier, impressed by the name, called the village hall in Ono, saying that Kawamoto was alive, though he did not mention Taibi. That was when Mrs. Kawamoto hired the boat and began her search of the islands. Meanwhile, Kawamoto returned to the tent and waited, not knowing whether his mother had received his message or not. He began to get some sleep on Aug. 9, sleeping heavily for several hours at a time in the dark tent, lit only by candles, half waking when the women screamed.

In the Buddhist graveyard at Kuba, Kawamoto walks among the block-shaped tombstones and looks down from the steep hill at Hiroshima Bay, where he swam as a child. This was the graveyard where he and the other boys used to test their courage: "In the daytime we would come up here and leave some personal belonging. In the night we would retrieve it, which would prove to the others that we were here."

"There were mysterious stories about all these hills," he says, stories of tanuki, strange raccoon-dogs invested with mischievous, magical powers. He tells of a boy who used to go up into the mountains for birds' eggs; the birds nested in the mountains' muddy surface. "One day he asked me to go with him, but I was busy. By evening he had not returned home. His parents were very concerned, and they organized a search party. When the search party came upon the boy, they found him walking in a huge circle, round and round. He kept repeating, 'I have grown taller. My legs are long.' Everyone assumed that a tanuki had put a spell on him.

"Foxes were also supposed to be magical and troublesome. My grandfather used to tell me of a day he was walking along the 'beast path' of a mountain, a path between villages that foxes were thought to frequent. My grandfather was carrying a bento, a box lunch; foxes were known to love bento. Walking along, he suddenly heard the sound of straw shoes trudging in the sand behind him--sarrah, sarrah, sarrah. My grandfather looked back and saw what appeared to be a peasant girl in a dress, a shawl and sandals. But foxes were known to wear such disguises. One way to be sure was to see how the creature crossed water. If it stepped across, it was a peasant girl; if it jumped, it was a fox. When my grandfather came to a stream, he crossed quickly, hid and watched his pursuer. Sure enough the 'peasant girl' jumped the stream. I loved to hear that kind of story from my grandparents."

Reading the names on the Buddhist tombstones, Kawamoto points out those of the families he knew. He keeps a plot of ground here for his own family. Living in Ono again, he is close to both the villages of his youth, though Kuba, like Ono, has grown considerably. The hill of the graveyard had to be cut away at the base to make way for a new high school. Growth is natural, Kawamoto says, but he regrets modern disconnections from the past. "Now the future is everything." Still, he believes that the world is in many ways better off than before the war. He is glad in retrospect that the Americans won the war--a feeling expressed by many Japanese his age. Under the military regime, Japan's spirit would have perished, he says. Japan needed democracy, and it took losing the war to achieve it.

He is opposed to the existence of nuclear weapons. Both as the director of the Peace Memorial Museum and as a hibakusha, he can speak with authority about nuclear force, but he makes his case briefly and without evident passion. "I am not a philosopher," he says. If pressed as to what he thinks the world will do with nuclear weapons, he admits that he is worried. At the same time he ascribes his own sense of practicality to the world: "Human beings are not fools. We are not likely to destroy everything. We must leave our traditions to the generations."

Mainly he believes in what he saw those August days in 1945. He believes in the piles of bodies in the river and in the melted skin and in the fires in the sky. He believes in Ota. In the present, he believes in his wife and in his home. He would believe in children too, if he had any. But he would not have children; he was afraid they would be affected by possible genetic damage caused by radiation. He believes quite strongly in his house, onto which he has just built an additional room. The house is lovely; it sits on a hill just below his mother's house in Ono. He says that one improves one's house as one improves one's life, and that when you die, you must leave both house and life in as good shape as possible. All this, he explains, is part of the Japanese way of thinking. That all things are transitory, and that their value derives from the fact that they shine brightly before they pass away. For this reason, says Kawamoto, one must keep track of one's experiences.

On Aug. 11, 1945, Yoshitaka Kawamoto sat in the tent in Taibi, half awake in the darkness. Suddenly his mother entered, and the two caught sight of each other. "It was the first time I cried."