New book on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Atomic Cover-Up

    DemocracyNow.org interviews Greg Mitchell, author of "Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and The Greatest Movie Never Made" at Atomic Cover-Up: The Hidden Story Behind the U.S. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mitchell also co-authored (with Robert Jay Lifton) "Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial."   

TODAY'S POST BELOW.

GUEST COLUMN for Hiroshima Day: Coming of Age with Hiroshima's Mourning

NEW ANTI-NUKE FILM: Knocking at the Devil's Door: Our Deadly Nuclear Legacy: screenings August 5-11 in New York (4:20 PM and 8:00 PM, The IFC theater, Ave. of the Americas / Waverly Place) and Los Angeles (3:00 PM and 7:30 PM, Laemmle Sunset 5 Theater, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood) 

Friday, Aug. 6, 2010

Coming of age with Hiroshima's mourning
By JANE BRAXTON LITTLE

Special to The Japan Times
GREENVILLE, Calif. — I arrived in Hiroshima looking for a party on Aug. 6. I was 23 and starved for American jokes, American English, American company. For the past year I had been living with a Japanese family and teaching English in Wakayama, where the only other American women I knew of were an older teacher and a pair of middle-aged nuns.

     Hiroshima seemed to be the elixir for my loneliness, a relief from the awkward mannerisms I had assumed in an effort to fit in with my Japanese hosts. I knew the city would be crawling with foreigners coming to observe the anniversary of the event that had made Hiroshima an international household word.
     I, too, wanted to pay my respects to the city we had blown to smithereens. I was too young to remember the bomb but had grown up with Quaker pacifists who could not forget it. Most of my parents' friends were conscientious objectors who chose prison and government work camps over fighting "the good war."
     As a high school student I had made my own small antiwar statement by refusing to evacuate my suburban Philadelphia classroom during air raid drills. At Wakayama University I flaunted my pacifism by singing a Peter Seeger antinuclear tune in Japanese.
     In Hiroshima I set out on my own, amazed by the glass and steel high-rises that grace the broad avenues of the rebuilt downtown. Unlike traditional Japanese streets raucous with boys on bicycles delivering udon noodles in porcelain bowls, Hiroshima was cosmopolitan. And it was filled with foreigners.
     I gravitated toward the English speakers, enjoying the escape from being the American professor and the anonymity of being one of many young blondes.
     Bu the time the memorial celebration got under way, I was freelancing my fluent Japanese to American and British TV crews covering the day as if it were an athletic event.
     I might not have noticed the woman with the cropped hair and ill-fitting gray silk dress if a cameraman hadn't zoomed in on her.
     She was stooped, seated in a cobblestone courtyard on folded legs before a black-and-white family photograph flanked by vases of golden chrysanthemums. In my eyes she looked old but she could have been middle-aged, a young mother on Aug. 6, 1945.
     Maybe the other foreigners and their cameras emboldened me. Forsaking the respectful distance I generally accorded my Japanese hosts, I moved within 35 mm range and clicked off a shot. She noticed me, hissing her disgust. Embarrassed, I apologized.
     Apparently stunned that I had understood her, she stared hard at me as if trying to reclaim her privacy. I expected her to slip into the vaporous deference I had become accustomed to for uttering even the clumsiest of phrases in Japanese. Instead, she took me on.
       In the shadow of the bombed-out hulk of the six-story Atomic Dome — one block from the Peace Museum entombing the outlines of children's bodies radiated into the sidewalks where they happened to be captured at 8:15 a.m. on their way to school — there in the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, I became this woman's token American aggressor.
      It was my government, my president who unleashed the horror of the atom bomb on Japan. It was my country, my people who turned her home into an inferno roiling with flames that seared the living and the unborn alike. We — I — had murdered her daughter, her only son, her aged father and over 100,000 members of her national family. Her voice swelled from tight-lipped anger into furious rage before it struck a high-pitched frenzy, keening from word to word like an atomic wind leveling everything in its path.
      A small crowd gathered. Other mourners joined in. Soon the words of the woman on folded knees were part of a chorus lamenting untold losses, grieving their fear of helplessly handing down contamination to their children and their grandchildren's children.
      I listened. This was a voice I had not heard from the generous families who had invited me into their homes. I had not heard it from my students, a cocky new generation bent on shucking the humilities of their elders and the oppression of a war that ended before they were born.
     The Hiroshima mourners vented a national anguish and a pointed blame I could not have imagined behind the traditional Japanese stoic silence.
     Finally spent of words, the woman in gray bowed deeply to her photograph and flowers, gathered them up and walked off with a curt nod in my direction. The crowd drifted into the sea of people milling around the Peace Park. The TV crews had long since left in search of action. I stayed seated until the bent legs beneath me revolted.
     August 6, 1945, forever changed the world. Hiroshima is witness to our capacity and our willingness to destroy. I left the city humbled, my pretentious pacifism eclipsed by survivors destined to see that blinding flash replayed over and over again in horrific silence, a ghastly tape without a soundtrack.

After teaching at Wakayama University, Jane Braxton Little earned a Harvard M.A. in Japanese cultural history. A freelance writer and photographer in northern California, Little has returned to Japan several times as a journalist. Many of her articles are posted on her website: www.janebraxtonlittle.com 

In related news:
Investigation-rewrites-nuclear-history, industry says

Memories of MUM - Message from Hiroshima Peace Park

    Today I will be one of those speaking at Hiroshima's Peace Park as we dedicate the memorial to my mother, Barbara Reynolds, for her humanitarian help to survivors of the first two nuclear bombs dropped on people.
     Here is the English translation of what I will be saying. (Japanese follows.)

     Honored guests, hibakusha (nuclear bomb survivors), members of the World Friendship Center, friends, and family:
     We consider it a privilege to meet with you today. My husband Jerry and I have come from California and my nephew Tony, one of Barbara's grandsons, has come from Texas. We also represent my brothers, Barbara's sons Tim and Ted Reynolds, her other eight grandchildren, (8 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandsons) who, although they were unfortunately unable to attend, send their greetings.
     We are here at the invitation of the Monument Committee to unveil a monument to my mother, who would have been 96 years old today. To me, it is amazing that the hibakusha of the nuclear bomb dropped by Americans would erect a monument to an American woman at their Ground Zero. I am so humbled by your forgiveness and desire to do this.
     Many people whose lives have been touched by my mother's life call her a saint, even a "national treasure."  But my mother would have been the first to say she was just an imperfect human being.     
     In September, 1964, my mother was 49 years old, reeling from the pain of divorce. My father had married another woman. My brother Ted had just gotten married. I had gone back to the United States. So she was alone. A friend of hers, a Buddhist priest, gave her permission to come to the temple on Mt. Rokko to spend time alone in meditation, fasting, and prayer. There, for a week, she lamented her failure to hold her marriage together and with loud cries to heaven questioned her purpose for living.
     My mother believed in the God who is above all other gods. This God is not the work of our hands; we are the work of His hands. He has created us in His own image. She knew Him as Creator and powerful controller of the universe.
     But until that week she did not know Him as a personal, living heavenly Father. At the end of that week, the heavenly Father spoke to her heart and told her that He loved her and forgave her. Her tears turned to tears of joy and peace. Then He revealed to my mother that His purpose for her was to take His love back to Hiroshima and show the hibakusha how much He loves them by serving them.
     Years before, my father had been part of a team sent by the American government to study the effects of radiation on Hiroshima hibakusha--to draw their blood and measure their height and weight and photograph them. But no one had asked them, "What was it like to experience an atomic bomb?" No one had listened to them or cried with them. Now, in obedience to her heavenly Father, my mother went back to Hiroshima, despite her sense of personal shame, to listen to them and serve them, to be God's hands and feet and voice. Out of her humility and obedience bloomed the World Friendship Center.
     She was not only a voice from the heavenly Father to the hibakusha. Hibakusha told her they considered her a voice for Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the world. She took that responsibility very seriously. And as she came to know them, they taught her the value of each life. She came to respect the brave, suffering, patient survivors of the first two nuclear bombs dropped on human beings. She began to identify with them and hurt for them. And so she said, "I, too, am a hibakusha." She wanted to accurately convey to the world their message, "No more Hiroshimas!" to urge everyone on the planet to choose peace and prevent the horror and catastrophe of Hiroshima from happening to anyone else, ever.
     Since 1945, starting in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the number of people exposed to the poison of radiation has grown through Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island and now Fukushima. Radiation does not distinguish between war and peace. Radiation from nuclear weapons keeps killing after the war is over, even affecting DNA and thus hurting later generations. Radiation from nuclear reactors causes increased numbers of lethal cancers in those who live near them, whether there are accidents in the reactors or not. We are here to assure all radiation-exposed people anywhere that we will not forget your distress. We will pass your message on from generation to generation: "No More Hiroshimas! No More Nagasakis! No more Fukushimas!"
     As you unveil this monument, my mother is just a symbol. She is a symbol of love, pointing to the source of love, the heavenly Father. She is a symbol of hope because anyone of us who humbles himself to listen to the "still, small voice" of our Heavenly Father can make a mighty difference.
     Thank you for honoring my mother in this way.

ごらいひんのみなさま、被爆者の皆様, ワールド・フレンドシップ・センターの皆様, お友達、またご家族の皆様、今日は、皆さんとご一緒に除幕式に参加できて、大変嬉しく思います。

主人のジェリーと私は、カリフォルニアから、また、バーバラの孫にあたる甥のトニーはテキサスから参りました。私の兄弟で、バーバラの息子にあたるティムとテッド、そしてバーバラの残り8名の孫たちは、残念ながら、今日伺うことが出来ませんでしたので、彼らに代わってご挨拶申し上げます。

本日は、生きていれば９６歳になる母の記念碑の除幕式に、記念碑委員会のお招きをうけて、参りました。アメリカ人が投下した原爆で被爆者となられた方々が、その爆心地にアメリカ人女性の記念碑を建てて下さるということは、驚くべきことです。皆様のお許しの気持ちと、このような記念碑を建てて下さろうというお志にひたすら頭が下がる思いです。

母の生涯に影響を受けた方々はよく、母を聖人であったと、さらには「国の宝であったと仰います。しかし、それに対しては、母自身が真っ先に、「私は只の、至らぬ人間ですよ」と申したことでしょう。

1964年の9月、当時49歳の母は、離婚の辛さの真っ只中におりました。私の父は既に別の女性と結婚しておりました。兄のテッドは結婚したばかりで、私はアメリカに戻っておりました。つまり、母は一人ぼっちでした。母の友人で、僧侶であった方が、六甲山のお寺に母を招いてくださり、そこで瞑想、断食そしてお祈りで時を過ごすようにと配慮して下さいました。そこで一週間、母は結婚の失敗を嘆き、自らの生きる目的とは何か、大声で泣きながら天に問ういかけたのでした。

                                                         

母はもともと他の神神々の上に立つ主なる神様を信じていました。この神様は、私たちの手によって創られた神ではありません。私たちがこの神様の手によって創られたのです。神様は、私たちを神自身の姿形に創られました。母は、この神を、創造主であり、宇宙を支配する強きものとして知っていました。でも、六甲山での一週間を過ごすまで、母は、その偉い神様が、私たちのずっと身近で生きている父なる神様であるということを知りませんでした。その一週間の終わりに、この天にまします父なる神様は、母の心の中に語りかけ、母を愛されていると、そして母を許すと言われました。母の涙は喜びと平安の涙に変わりました。そして、神様は、その時、母が受けた愛を広島へ届け、被爆者の皆さんにお仕えすることで、神の愛を皆さんに示すことが、母の生きる目的であると啓示されました。

それより何年も以前に、アメリカ政府は、広島の被爆者放射能被害の研究のため血液検査、身体測定、写真撮影を行うチームを送りましたが、私の父はそのひとりでした。でも、そのチームの誰一人として、被爆者の方々に「原爆とはどんな経験でしたか」と尋ねる者はありませんでした。誰一人、被爆者の話を聞いたり、一緒に泣いたりする者はありませんでした。一方、天にまします父なる神様に忠実であろうとした母は、広島に戻り、自らの恥をかなぐり捨て、被爆者のお話に耳を傾け、神様の手や足や声となってお仕えしました。そんな母の謙虚で従順な働きからワールド・フレンドシップ・センターが生まれました。

母の働きは単なる天の神様から被爆者へのメッセージに終わりませんでした。被爆者の方々は母の働きを広島・長崎からの世界へ向けてのメッセージだと言ってくださいました。母はその責任をとても真剣に受け止めました。そして母がお一人お一人と知り合っていくにつれ、被爆者の方々は、人の命の価値ということを母に教えてくださいました。母は、人類に対して投下された最初の二つの原子爆弾に被爆しながらも、勇敢に、苦しみながらも生き抜いている方々を尊敬するようになりました。被爆者の方々に共感し、痛みを分かち合うようになりました。そして、母は言いました。「私もヒバクシャです。」と。母は、「ノーモアヒロシマ」という被爆者のメッセージを世界中に確実に広げようとし、地球上の総べての人々が平和を選択し、広島の恐怖と惨事を二度と誰にも味あわせないようにと呼びかけようとしました。

1945年以降、広島と長崎に始まって、沢山の人々が、チェルノブイリ、スリーマイル島、そして、また福島で、放射能という毒物に曝されています。放射能は戦争と平和の違いを選びません。核兵器の放つ放射能は戦争が終わった後でも人々を殺戮し続けます。DNAを組み替え、従って後の世代まで傷つけます。原子炉からの放射能は、原子炉に事故があろうと無かろうと、近隣の住民の発ガン率を高めます。こうして放射能に曝された方々も原子力利用の被害者なのです。私たちはここに、世界中の総てのヒバクシャに向かって、私たちが彼らの苦しみを決して忘れないということを誓います。私たちは、あなた方のメッセージをこれからの世代に伝えます。「ノーモア広島！」「ノーモア原発！」ノーモア福島!

この記念碑の除幕にあたり、母は象徴そのものです。母は愛の象徴として、愛の根源である、天にまします神様を指し示しています。母は、謙虚に天の父なる神様の「静かな小さな声」に耳を傾ける者は、とても大きな仕事を成し遂げることができるという希望の象徴なのです。

本日は、母を讃えるこのような式典を開いて下さって、心から感謝申し上げます。ありがとうございました。

I've been edited

    I've been edited. My smugly memorized passage now reads, 

今日は、皆さんとご一緒に集まることが出来除幕式（じょまくしき）に参加（さんか）できて、大変うれしいです嬉（うれ）しく思（おも）います。

       Last night Michiko, my long-suffering contact person with the Monument Committee responded to the Japanese translation of my upcoming speech, "We think there is nothing wrong in [H's] translation, but we, the Committee,  took  the liberty of revising it and added some words to make it easier for the audience to understand or to suit the Japanese custom." 

     She attached an edited version of the speech which consisted of passages like this: 

                                                          

母はもともと万の他（ほか）の神神々（かみがみ）の上に立つ天主主（しゅ）なる神様（かみさま）を信じていました。この天主様神様（かみさま）は、私たちの手によって創られた神ではありません。私たちがこの天主様神様の手によって創られたのです。天主様神様（かみさま）は、私たちを神自身の姿形に創られました。 

     She added tactfully, "Just one point I am not sure. Near the end of your remark, you wrote: She is a symbol of hope because anyone of us who humbles himself to listen to the "still, small voice" of our Heavenly Father can make a mighty difference.  H's translation was  “…に耳を傾ける者は、とても大きな違いを生み出せる希望があるからです。=because there is hope that anyone can…” And  one of our committee members insisted that it should be changed into “ 違いを生み出せる仕事を成し遂げることができると信じておりました”  But this means that Barbara believed that anyone could make a mighty difference…This is not what you said.  Literally, you said “…に耳を傾ける者は、とても大きな仕事を成し遂げることができるという希望の象徴なのです。希望（きぼう）=hope　象徴（しょうちょう）=symbol　 I think word by word translation is better, but I don’t know.  It’s up to you, you can take whichever you like."

     I woke at five this morning (before a call from a free-lance writer in Japan would have wakened us anyway thirty minutes later) in mid-panic over my need to compare and choose between three translations of my sentence above (among other things). It's all straightened out now. I found a local Japanese woman who graciously let me read my romaji version (which took 13 minutes) as she followed along in the kanji/kana version. She caught and had me correct many minor errors. Then she read it aloud to me so I could hear the flow and emphasis. That was so helpful! She said it was very formal in style and impressive in content (both thanks to the Monument Committee). I owe her a box of See's chocolates!

     I'm still feeling confident about the speech--but a lot less cocky.

My secret fear

今日は、皆さんと一緒に集まることが出来て、大変うれしいです。

     I have been invited to speak at the dedication of my mother's memorial. Fifteen minutes, including translation, they said. (They also said they expected my talk to be the highlight of the hour-long ceremony. To pull this off, I have to forget I know that.)
     I wrote out what I would like to say. I had it translated and intend to read it in Japanese (which means I have the full 15 minutes). The sentence at the top of this post, which I am including in my opening, is a speech I had to memorize when we first moved to Japan. (I was seven.) I thought it was the longest, hardest thing I'd ever struggled to learn. I didn't understand the individual words then. Now I know it means,

"Today, everyone with together gathering thing possible, very happy."

     There are three alphabets used in Japanese. Two, called kana, are not formed of letters per se but sounds, consonents with one of five vowels--ah, ee, oo, eh, oh--attached. So you can have kah kee koo keh koh or sah shee soo seh soh. But they have no "k" or "s" by itself. That's why Japanese struggle to pronounce English correctly. They want to put a vowel after every consonent: Disneyland becomes Dee zu ni ra n do." ("N" is the only sound without a vowel attached.)
     My advice to Japanese learning English (or anyone learning any foreign language) is to let go of the words and sounds you are familiar with and mimic exactly what you hear. This means for English you have to stick out your tongue a little when you say "th." Japanese are always embarrassed to do that.
      Anyway, my name would be transliterated "Jeh-shee-ka" in hiragana, the first of these two alphabets. But since my name is a foreign word, it would actually be written in the second alphabet, katakana. Either way, my name would be pronounced the same but in order to be recognized as a foreign word, it would be spelled with alphabet #2.
     The third alphabet is kanji. Kanji are the pictographs from the Chinese. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of kanji. I think I can safely say nobody knows them all. Some are simple pictographs, like three vertical lines for "kawa" (river) or a two-line stick figure of a man (hito). Some are combinations of other pictographs. There is a symbol for animal, for instance, so when you see any kanji with that symbol along the left side, you know it stands for some kind of animal, even if you don't yet know what animal it is.  
     Way before history was written down in most cultures, when it was still being passed from father to son orally, the Chinese captured history in their pictographs. For instance why would the combination of "boat" plus the number "8" over the hollow square meaning "mouth"--eight mouths--form another kanji  for "boat" unless the combination of ideas tells the story of a particular boat which held eight people, that is, Noah's ark?
     Similarly, the Chinese language not only succinctly depicts historical events but divine teaching. "Righteousness" is "lamb cover me." What a powerful summary of the book of Romans! Or really, of the whole Bible.
     The numbers 1-7 (if you play Mah Jongg, they are on the kanji tiles) depict what happened on each of the days of creation. "One" is a single horizontal line; on the first day God created heaven and earth as one undifferentiated entity. "Two" is two horizontal lines; on the second day God separated them. . . "Six" looks like the little man you see on the "Walk" sign at intersections; on the sixth day man was created. And "seven" looks like a figure sitting; on the seventh day God rested.
      Kanji are usually the noun or verb in a sentence, with kana as endings, conjunctions, and all the peripherals. In the sentence above, there are ten kanji. In general, kanji stand out as the more complex characters.
     When I first asked to have my remarks translated, I had Hiroko Shibuya, the translator, write it all out normally, just as it would appear in a newspaper, that is, with kanji interspersed with the simpler kana--but also translating each kanji into the kana equivalent so I had the full manuscript in kana. I thought I could read the kanji I knew and cheat on the ones I didn't know by reading the kana in the parentheses which followed.
     So that's what she did--and it increased the length of my remarks from 1-1/2 pages to 3-1/2 pages! The above sentence now looked like this:

今日(きょう)は、皆（みな）さんと一緒（いっしょ）に集（あつ）まることが出来(でき）て、大変（たいへん）うれしいです。

     At one time I knew about 1,000 kanji, almost enough (1,200) to read a newspaper. Now I think I'm down to around fifty. In my talk I'm going to be using all kinds of words and phrases I don't know in Japanese, like "Monument Committee," "meditation," "controller of the universe," "nuclear energy" and "DNA." (Actually DNA, being a foreign word, is written in katakana, "Dee eh-nu eh-ee."). The text bristled with kanji and that intimidated me.
     So I thought, Since I have the whole thing in kana anyway, I'll eliminate the kanji and just read it in kana, like a first grader. So I cut out all the kanji. The sentence above now read,

きょうは、みなさんと いっしょ に あつまることが できて、たいへん うれしいです。

     This was much easier for me to read but when I tried it aloud I was afraid I'd panic and my mind would go blank. What if I got mixed up and read "neh" instead of "noo"? My mother taught me kana when I was seven or eight as we rode a train up through the middle of Japan to visit friends in Sendai. She used verbal pictures to help me remember each symbol. (I can't really call them letters.) "Neh" is for "nezumi" (mouse) and "neh" looks like a mouse with a curled tail. But I can't take the time, while I'm speaking publicly, to figure it out that way. It needs to flow. I needed a fallback position I couldn't get wrong, wouldn't even have to hesitate on.
     So after reducing it all to kana, I further reduced it to romaji, or anglicized letters, which feels more comfortable in a public setting. Now it reads,

"Kyou wa, minasan to issho ni atsumaru koto ga dekite taihen ureshii desu." 

     I think I can read that fluently and with expression.  Now I am confident, even if I don't understand what I am reading, my Japanese audience probably will.
  I have taken 30 units of Japanese language--reading, writing, and speaking--at  International Christian University, a top bilingual college in Tokyo. But that was half a century ago. All I have left is really good pronunciation--which gets me into trouble because it makes people think I have an extensive vocabulary and accurate grammar behind it.
     What I'm afraid is, I'll read it so well, I'll sabotage myself. Afterwards, the media will expect me to be able to answer all their questions in Japanese and I'll just have to stand there looking stupid.

Memories of MUM - Peace Pilgrimages and World Friendship Center

     This will be the last re-cycled post about my mom. I sense you're getting bored--or maybe it's me. I do have some fun and more personal ones I haven't posted before which I hope you will enjoy, leading up to the ceremony on June 12.
     This is extracted from a long and insightful chapter, "The Symbolic American: Barbara Reynolds," from City of Silence: Listening to Hiroshima by Rachelle Linner. (The entire chapter is posted on His Scribe, Nov. 23, 2010.) If you want to skip any overlap with what I've been posting, pick the saga up with "The Peace Pilgrimage" on p. 64. You can quit at "Ambiguous Symbols" on the last page.

Left-click on each page once or twice to enlarge.

Memories of MUM - Living in Hiroshima

(Continued from May 20) Sometimes when we went off base, we'd visit the local orphanage. At the time I didn't realize many of the children were orphans because of a bomb our country had dropped on their parents six years before.

Mum and Dad would invite girls my age, always two at a time for company,  to come to our house on weekends. Incredibly shy, they'd eat every bite of whatever we served (whether by personal choice or by order of the orphanage director), giggle at Cappy and watch amazed as I taught them how to bounce on the beds. (In the orphanage they slept on futon over hard wooden floors.) Mum and Dad even tried to adopt one of the little girls but we had to give up. There was too much red tape.

During the week Dad studied children like those orphans at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. When the first nuclear bomb ever dropped on people exploded, civilians died with the soldiers. In fact civilian deaths outnumbered military ones. Housewives, schoolchildren, babies, the unborn. The nuclear bomb didn't discriminate. (Three days later, it happened all over again in Nagasaki but scientists only studied survivors of Hiroshima. Being second didn't count.)

ABCC, established in 1946, began as a five-man commission whose first research program was a hematological study. By 1950, it had expanded to include studies on radiation cataracts, leukemia and other cancers, survivors' aging and mortality rates, sex ratios of survivors' offspring and genetics.

ABCC was where Daddy would be seeing Japanese children every day, measuring their height and weight, taking their blood and photographing each one naked, facing the camera. (On the film their eyes were blocked out, for modesty.)

He would study 4,800 children over the next three years. Those were, of course, just the children who had survived. Many more had been killed and some of those Dad examined would develop symptoms years later and die of the residual effects of their exposure to radiation.

Dad's three years of research indicated that children exposed to radiation don't grow as tall as their counterparts, experience more fatigue and are more susceptible to disease, particularly leukemia and other kinds of cancer. Strontium-90, a product of nuclear fission, is a "bone seeker," just as calcium is, and tends to deposit in bone and blood-forming tissue (bone marrow). Instead of building bone, however, the radiation deteriorates it and can cause bone cancer, cancer of nearby tissues, and leukemia. So the growing children Dad examined were showing abnormally high incidences of thyroid cancer.

Dad studied the physical effects of the atomic bomb on the bodies of survivors and became one of the world's leading experts on radiation. But it didn't occur to any of us--until years later, when Mum crept back to Hiroshima, bruised and shattered by divorce, to pour the love of God into their lives--to ask the real experts, "What was it like to live through an nuclear explosion?"

Mum and me fasting in front of the Children's Peace Monument

The statue to the left is dedicated to the memory of the children who died of fatal doses of radiation from the first nuclear bomb. It shows a girl with outstretched arms, a folded paper crane rising above her, representing Sadako Sasaki.

Sadako was a two-year old in her mother's arms in 1945 when she was exposed to the atomic bomb. She had no external wounds or burns. Ten years later, she developed leukemia and other symptoms of "A-bomb disease"and died within eight months.

A brief biography, Memories of Sadako: Three months with Sadako at the Doorway to Adolescence, was written by Kiyo Okura, who was exposed to the bomb herself at the age of four and was also hospitalized with radiation poisoning ten years later. Kiyo Okura was sick for six months, survived the disease and lived until 2008.

(Modified from His Scribe, May 17, 2010)

Memories of MUM - Moving to Japan

Slightly modified from His Scribe, May 15, 2010

Dad and Mum were away at a writers' retreat in the hills of some eastern state when the news came that a new type of bomb had obliterated Hiroshima. They felt relieved. Not because they had anything against the Japanese. But maybe--finally--this would end the war. Mum went back to polishing the novel she was writing, Alias for Death. Dad went back to working on his latest play. Bite the Dust, maybe. Or, I Weep for You.

We had no way of knowing that the Hiroshima bomb would gradually come to profoundly affect our own family. The day would come when Mum would tell survivors of that bomb, weeping, "I too, am a hibakusha (fire-exploded person)" and they would design a monument to her with those words on it in her handwriting, to be erected in the Peace Park.

But for the next six years we didn't think about the bomb. We lived a normal American life in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Dad, Dr. Earle L. Reynolds,--who was a physical anthropologist--worked at Fels Research Institute and taught at Antioch College. In 1951 that changed forever. The National Academy of Sciences assigned Dad to conduct a three-year study on the effects of the first atomic bomb on the growth and development of surviving children.

Each of us had to get passport photos taken, apply for visas and endure a series of ten injections, for everything from typhus to typhoid, yellow fever and smallpox. Then, complete with our "Woody" station wagon and our dog Cappy (short for Caprice), we packed up to move to Hiroshima.

We drove to San Francisco and steamed across the ocean on the President Wilson to Yokohama. We drove the Woody carefully down the length of Honshu, the main island, because the only road was often only one lane wide, and even where it was wider, one of the lanes was always under repair. Large chunks of the road had been blown away. Perspiring laborers were lugging the chunks back from the fields in baskets swinging from each end of a stick across their naked shoulders. Beyond them, ankle-deep in mud, their wives stooped to transplant spears of rice.

We passed through towns that were clogged with cars, bicycles, oxen-drawn carts and three-wheeled "bata batas." Once Daddy had to back up and he asked me to look and see if there was anything behind us.

"No, Daddy," I said. "Nothing but people."

People. Wherever we stopped, children, their eyes bright with curiosity, crowded around our car, greeting us with a chorus of "Harro, Harro!" They jostled each other aside and held out grubby hands, grinning and clamoring eagerly for "Chu-in-gu ga-a-mu!" That's all the English they knew. Chewing gum. The only foreigners they had ever seen were soldiers. We were a family. A father who was not wearing a uniform. A mother. Kids, like them. (Later, when our grandmother Diggie Dee came to visit, her soft white hair made a sensation throughout the country. Even grown women wanted to touch it.) And a dog! There were no dogs, cats or birds left in Japan after the war. Rumor had it they had all been eaten. 

Every child had a runny nose.

Japan was still occupied by Australian and American forces. The Australians were finishing up and would be gone in a year. Although Dad was coming to Hiroshima as a scientist we lived on the nearby Army base, a community of pastel-colored houses called NijiMura (see "Australian families") (Rainbow Village).

Families in NijiMura did what families were probably doing back in the States. The men went to work every day and the women got together for bridge and gossip. We kids went to school--all in one room--and attended Saturday matinees at the one theater on the base, even though there were only enough of us to fill the first few rows.

The base effectively insulated us from Japan and the Japanese people, except for those who cooked our meals and mowed our lawn.

It was fun living in NijiMura because we had a maid.  Mum didn't have to cook or do housework and I didn't have to wash the dishes or clean my room. Miss Dote (Dohtay) couldn't read English so the first night she worked for us, she opened all the cans to see what to serve for dinner.

Once she forgot to cover the pitcher of syrup and when I poured syrup on my pancakes, a two-inch-long shiny black cockroach washed out and lay in departed dignity atop them, thin little contracted legs in the air. Little brown roaches, of no consequence by comparison, never bothered me after that but it took a long time for me to like pancakes again.

My brother Ted, who was absent-minded long before he became a professor, wore the same shirt every day. At night Dote-san would wash it, iron it, and place it folded back in his drawer on top of the others, until Mum instructed her to put the clean shirt on the bottom. My mother was a genius at some things and avoiding confrontation was one of them.

We kids made fun of the maid but Mum tried to get to know and befriend her. Miss Dote was young and overwhelmed, trying to survive in a foreign world within her own devastated one. The Americans she had been taught to hate were now the employers she must learn to respect and serve. (Years later, Dote-san was murdered.)

Most people in NijiMura paid little attention to the world outside the gates. They didn't go outside if they didn't have to and on the anniversary of the bombing, everyone was warned not to leave the base. The Japanese might be hostile. 

If dependents had to leave the base, they watched curiously through the glass of car windows, noting shops lining narrow streets, their fronts open to display fruit, vegetables or cheap trinkets. Men urinating along city sidewalks. Mothers nursing babies in public. How primitive, how offensive! Americans would never think of using public Japanese restrooms. They were just holes over mountains of reeking excrement. Every Australian and American would return to the base in relief.

But Mum was an exception. Mum took us kids off base by choice.

Mum wanted to experience Japan. As a child, she had read a book called The Japanese Twins by Lucy F. Perkins (published in 1912) and she was fascinated with Japanese life. She had her mother tie a doll to her back and practiced using chopsticks. So she had never feared or hated the Japanese before or during the war and she was excited when Dad was assigned to Japan and we were invited to go with him.

Mum had me take lessons in flower-arranging, calligraphy and dance (a far cry from the ballet and tap I studied during three months we had spent in Tucson).

While Dad was at work (ABCC sent a car and driver to pick him up), Mum would take us into Hiro, the nearest town. We would get out of the car and walk down the narrow roads and look at, even buy, the fresh fruit and vegetables. Japanese women behind the stalls would rush to help us, bowing a lot, carefully selecting the cost of the items from the coins we held on open palm. Others, in kimonos and wooden clogs, perhaps a baby asleep on their back, would sling dippers full of water on the dirt roads to keep down the dust. We'd smile and they'd bow, their baby learning social skills by participating in them.

Mum and Dad also hired a strait-laced little professor named Mr. Yamada. Impeccably groomed and proper, carrying a briefcase, he would come to our stucco block house in Rainbow Village once a week and teach them to speak and read Japanese. They would ask him all kinds of questions about the culture and the "inscrutable Japanese" mind.

After they felt they knew him well enough, Dad asked him how to swear in Japanese.

Professor Yamada's impassive expression betrayed nothing. "We do not have words like that in Japanese," he answered politely.

"Sure, you do. Every language has words like that," Dad prodded. "What would a workman on a ladder say if the man above him spilled hot tar on his head?"

Mr. Yamada was unruffled. "He would say, 'Please don't spill hot tar on my head.'"

"Come on, Mr. Yamada," coaxed Dad. "What would he really say?"

Mr. Yamada relaxed just a little. "Well," he admitted confidentially, "he might leave off the 'please.'"

Mr. Yamada lived into his 90s and became one of our best friends and strongest supporters.






Mum had written children's books for Tim, (Pepper, about his raccoon) and for Ted (Hamlet and Brownswiggle about his hamsters).

Later she would write Emily San about a little American girl in Japan with her family, for me. It was translated into Japanese after her death and published as Rainbow Village.

HIROSHIMA: Monument to my mother

"I, too, am a hibakusha" (nuclear bomb survivor)--in spirit

     The date has been decided. On June 12, which would have been her 96th birthday, a monument to my mother will be unveiled in Hiroshima's Peace Park.
     For her years of humanitarian and moral support to the survivors of the first two nuclear bombs dropped on human beings in 1945 and for founding the World Friendship Center in Hiroshima in 1965, the hibakusha (literally "fire-bombed people") determined to build a monument to her.
     It has been years in the making, involving the forming of a Monument Committee, the drawing up of plans by a design company, many changes in wording and photo used in the design, and permits from the International Peace Promotion Department, City of Hiroshima for permission to erect the monument in the SE corner of their Ground Zero.
     Not the least of the obstacles the committee had to overcome were the strong objections by some members of our family to spending money on a monument to Mum at all, and to calling attention to her rather than giving the money and attention to the survivors themselves. They pointed out that Mum herself opposed the idea during her life.
     But the hibakusha persisted.
     Others of us kept correcting, fine-tuning the English wording on the monument or preferring a different photo (the original choice, which was black and white, looked "grim," as my brother Ted put it).
      Each request for a change required that the Monument Committee reconvene to consider it. (Finally, I see, they scrapped the over-critiqued text and kept only one quote and the fact that Mum founded the World Friendship Center.)

 
This is the proposed monument, one of only three monuments dedicated to foreigners at Hirohima's Ground Zero.:

Monument to Barbara Reynolds, SE corner of Peace Park, Hiroshima

Lord willing, this is where Jerry and I will be on June 12.

My niece in Afghanistan

     I didn't know I have a niece in Afghanistan until today! Lisa is married with four young daughters, a busy veterinarian somewhere in Michigan (I thought). I think I've only met her twice, at family reunions, and I don't remember her ever answering any of my letters to her.
     So when I wrote the whole Reynolds family, my family of origin, about the unveiling of Mum's memorial next month (see posts below), inviting them to consider "going yourself or helping others go to the ceremony." I only tossed Lisa's name into the mix as an afterthought.
     She responded almost right away:

Dear Jessica, I would love to be there with you in Hiroshima, but I am currently in Afghanistan and circumstances are such that I cannot attend. 

Lisa

You can imagine my astonishment and curiosity! I wrote back, 

Dear Lisa,

I had no idea you were in Afghanistan! That news brings all kinds of questions to my mind--under whose auspices? for what purpose? for how long? Does Ted know? And Naomi? Who is with the girls? What about your practice? If you are free to explain, I would be very interested.

Thanks for writing.

Love,

Jessica

Hey Jessica, I am here in Southern Afghanistan as an Army Veterinarian.  Mostly I am taking care of the Military Working dogs that are sniffing out the IEDs and unexploded ordinances, but I also am here to support the local Afghan veterinarians and farmers, as we are attempting to stabilize the region and provide the local nationals with the tools to provide for themselves.  There are many many sheep and goats here, plus a few camels running around.  And, I have no idea if dad knows, I think he might.  Mom and Naomi do because when the Tsunami happened, they tried to contact me and eventually figured out why I was not answering my cell phone.  The Reynolds side of the family is pretty anti military so I don't go around talking about what I do much. But, I am envious of you as I would love to go to Hiroshima and be part of the history. Lisa Lisa, I think what you're doing is amazing! I was just reading about Army dogs online, including a photo essay by Rebecca Frankel. We will be praying for your safety and the safety of those (human and otherwise) with whom you are working. Is it okay if I let Ted know? He was telling me he hadn't heard much from you and he sounded kind of deflated about that. I can't imagine he wouldn't be proud of you. Love, Jessica  Wow.  That just goes to show that one should never make assumptions.  I didn't think you would be supportive.  Thank you.  You are welcome to tell Dad.  The one time we did discuss my going to Afghanistan, he said that I was supporting an invading Army and the conversation kinda stalled out about then.  I do love him lots and I am sad he feels that way.  I feel he doesn't understand what we are doing here and doesn't want to hear my perspective.  Hell, I'm not sure I understand what we are doing here.  But the Army has learned that the only way to defeat terrorism is to stabilize those areas of the world that are unstable, so that people have choices and the oportunity to do the right thing.  It is the poverty and the hunger and the lack of education that permits Al Queda and other extremist organizations to florish.  Most of the insurgents that are being taken out here are just local farmers that get paid by the Taliban $10/mortor round they fire at us.  Killing them doesn't stop the number of hungry farmers that need $10 to feed their children.  Introducing poutry and aquaculture industries, replacing Poppy production with Safron fields, promoting improvements to the agriculture and food animal industries, these things may help those farmers not chose to take that $10 offer.  I think sometimes we do a better job than other times at accomplishing that goal, but the stability operations and nation building is a huge focus now and we hear about it every day.  Gosh, did I just get on a soap box or something?  Well, it is midnight here so I am going to crawl into bed.  Take care and have a WONDERFUL time in Hiroshima. Lisa

Since I had her permission I forwarded this correspondence to her father, my brother Ted. Under the subject heading, "Friends again?" Ted immediately wrote to her, with a copy to me,  

Dear Lisa,
I've gotten along with Jessica for decades by not arguing with her about religion.  Think you and I could work out a similar modus vivendi?  I love you and miss you, respect what you are doing, and think that's more important than any difference of opinion.
 

Please stay in touch.

Have you done much with camels yet?
ted

All of this happened today.

Mum was a woman who loved reconciliations and restorations of relationship. She would be thrilled to know that the invitation to the dedication of a monument in her honor would have reconciled her son with his daughter and her granddaughter with her aunt.   

HIROSHIMA: We accept the invitation

(For invitation, see previous post)

Dear Michiko, Riji-kai, and everyone who has helped with this monument,

     This is so wonderful it takes my breath away! It is the culmination of so much work and so many dreams! You have all been so patient with our family in our making so many demands for changes in the wording and picture on the monument. I deeply apologize for the continual inconvenience we--I--caused you. But I believe the end product is beautiful and will be a witness and inspiration to other foreigners who visit the Peace Park and see what God can do through any individual listening to Him. 

     We feel so privileged to be invited to the ceremony. I see this ceremony as closure, a perhaps final opportunity to honor the generation actually exposed to the atomic bomb for their dedicated, tireless, unfailing commitment to peace and the abolishment of nuclear weapons. Among these hibakusha we can now count all those irradiated by the disasters at the Fukushima power plants. Radiation, whether from bombs of war or power plants for peace, still kills. I want to be a part of declaring the use of nuclear energy--because of the short- and long-term risks--to be inhuman and "politically incorrect." 

     It is also closure for my mother's involvement with Hiroshima and the hibakusha, symbolically laying her spirit to rest in the city she came to love and feel a part of.

     Jerry and I accept with pleasure the invitation to the unveiling ceremony. It seems appropriate that it be held during the week of my mother's birthday, June 12.

Blessings,

Jessica

Invitation from Hiroshima

     We just received the following letter announcing the completion of the monument to my mother, Barbara Reynolds, for her 17 years' humanitarian assistance to the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs, including the founding of the World Friendship Center. The writer, Michiko Yamane, is on the board of WFC and is a point person for the Riji-kai (group of decision-making elders) who originated the idea of and desire for this monument.

     In less than five weeks, the long-awaited monument will be erected and unveiled in the Hiroshima Peace Park. (For back story, read anything on HIS SCRIBE marked MUM or PHOENIX or anything about "nuclear" or "Hiroshima." Ted is my brother and Naomi is his eldest daughter, captain of the Phoenix.) 

 

Dear Jessica, Ted and Naomi,

I hope this mail finds you well.

We have a good news about Barbara’s monument.

Finally this morning we received a permit to change the photo into the one with the serene , peaceful and faithful expression.

We are so happy to meet your request.

We will receive another permit soon to install a monument at the south-eastern corner of Peace Memorial Park during the period from June 1^st till June 10^th.

As soon as we complete placing the monument, we should have an unveiling ceremony.

Although we haven’t decided the exact date, weekend or weekday, could you come to Hiroshima to attend the ceremony during the third week of June, from 11 to 17?

We want to set up the date according to your schedule.

We are looking forward to your response.

Peace and many blessings.

Shalom,

Michiko Yamane (^-^)