Fukushima: "Worse than Chernobyl"

     I'm going to research the latest information on the continuing nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan and its effects here in the States. In the meantime, please watch this easy-to-understand but sobering update by medical expert Dr. Helen Caldicott. She declares Fukushima to be "by many orders of magnitude, worse than Chernobyl--" the effects of which, over the past 25 years, have taken a million lives.
     You can read her credentials at wikipedia/Helen_Caldicott

Blessed in unexpected ways: more Japanese nostalgia

     I recognized survivors of both atomic bombs who came to the service. 

Mr. Sekiguchi, Nagasaki survivor 

Mr. Sekiguchi with his guide and Larry Sims.

     MR. SEKIGUCHI came all the way up by train from the island of Kyushu for the ceremony. He must be in his eighties now and he is blind, but he didn't let that stop him. He represented the hibakusha of Nagasaki and is a dear friend.

     MIYOKO MATSUBARA, who lives in Hiroshima, and HIRO HANABUSA, who came all the way from the island of Shikoku (the one shaped like a dog biscuit), both attended. They were the two chosen by the city fathers to represent Hiroshima in two Peace Pilgrimages around the world in the sixties, appealing to the nuclear powers for peace. (See Peace Pilgrimages and/or His Scribe, November 14, 15 and 16) Mum accompanied them.

Hiro Hanabusa, DDS

     Hiro looked so sad during the ceremony. I'm sure he missed Mum. I should have included him in my introduction of her sons. She was the only mother he ever had. 
     

He looked better at the reception. Here are the two Peace Pilgrims.

Miyoko Matsubara

Miyoko's face was as beautiful as I have ever seen it. I wondered what she would have looked like if it hadn't been disfigured by the atomic blast, whether someone might have married her.

     Within the last two years, Miyoko has had a stroke which left her unable to speak, although she has completely recovered, and Hiro had a heart attack. I was so grateful to have another chance to see them. 


I missed long-time friends who weren't there:

"Babara Bara (Rose)"

Dr. and Mrs. Tomin Harada

DR. TOMIN HARADA , who created a rose in Mum's honor. He brought bushes of them to the States and planted them along the walk at Mum's (now Tim's) apartment building in Long Beach, California. But a few years ago there rose up a gardener who knew not Barbara. He tore them all out and planted something else.



REV. KIYOSHI TANIMOTO - beloved Christian pastor and spiritual support to the hibakusha. His grandson attended.
     
ICHIRO KAWAMOTO and his wife, who, as a young married couple, vowed never to have children because of their exposure to the atomic bomb. While we were sailing around the world, a little girl named Sadako Sasaki, who was two at the time of the bomb and showed no symptoms of radiation disease until she was twelve, developed leukemia and died. Sadako was a bright light in the A-Bomb Hospital, visiting other patients and cheerfully making paper cranes with them and for them in what turned out to be a futile effort to survive her illness. The Kawamotos founded the Paper Crane Club that kept Sadako's memory alive until she became a worldwide symbol of hope. The Children's Monument which now stands in the Peace Park was built in her memory.

Kunio and Ki Yanagida's wedding

KUNIO YANAGIDA and his wife KI, a graduate of Hiroshima Women's College, who was one of Dad's three secretaries during his tenure there. (Dad married one of the three, Akie.) 
     The Yanagidas aren't hibakusha and they're apparently still very much alive. In fact, Hiro informed me that Kunio (who used to work for NHK in Hiroshima and is now based in Tokyo) is famous and is on TV every night. But they weren't present and I missed them. Ironically, despite Kunio's fame we have been unable to figure out how to contact them.


I also missed Dad's secretary Emiko (EMMY) HIGUCHI. Before I left Japan for Bible College, Emmy married and moved to Australia. I don't have her last name or address but she was the friend I was closest to as a teenager. I suspect Dad hurt Emmy in the same way he hurt me. I want to tell her if that is the case, I am so sorry.

Blessed in unexpected ways: The 3 Ms (Part 3)

Niichi (Nick) Mikami's journals.

      Maybe the most bittersweet blessing of all was the discovery of our first mate Nick Mikami's journals. Just as I had, he kept a record of our four years aboard the Phoenix. He had taken pictures and had pictures taken of him and had recorded information meticulously (some in English) on the back of and below each one in multiple albums. He had included clippings written about himself and the other members of the crew. (More photos of these books at Reception after unveiling ceremony.)
     At the reception, when I was so busy greeting other people and answering questions Jerry had to bring me food or I would have had none, a man introduced himself as the grandson of someone Nick had known and spread all these albums out on a table. It took me awhile to realize their significance. Nick was an only child. He passed away soon after returning to Japan and his parents are long gone, too.

Toshinobu Omiya, who found the journals.

     Here were the works of Nick's hands, his memories, his thoughts, recorded to pass to posterity--and he had no posterity. I wanted to tell Mum--but she was gone. Skipper--gone. The man who had inherited them by default was a friend of the Mikami family who had discovered them only the day before!
     It brings tears to my eyes even now. This was a man's life. This man had used the clumsy canvas and thread and sewing machine with which he stitched sails together to make a carrying case for my own journal, for my birthday, knowing how much a part of me my journal was. (See PHOENIX: Childhood artifacts--Journal-carrying case). And here were his journals, spread out to be read, absorbed, enjoyed, pondered--with no time for anyone present to do more than leaf through a few pages and point at a picture here and there.

A man's life. . .

     The first Japanese man to sail around the world--in a wooden boat in the middle of the 20th century. They belong in a museum.

Blessed in unexpected ways: The 3 Ms (Part 2)

PHOTOS ADDED AT BOTTOM.

Moto's daughter Riri (Lily) Fushima Mishima

Poring over the route of the Phoenix.

     One of Moto's daughters, Riri Mishima, came into our lives by mail a year or so ago, sending us the few photos she had of her father on the Phoenix and asking us lots of questions, as well as she could in the English at her command. He had passed away just a few years before and she was hungry for information about him.
     Jerry had just digitalized about 3,000 slides of our trip around the world so I was able to go through them and send her the ones with her father in them. Riri wrote back that seeing them was "as if I meet my father again."
     We reached Hiroshima on Friday. On Saturday, an excited Riri came to see us at WFC, bearing photo albums she had put together. She had pictures of us at her parents' wedding, of us with her as a baby. (I'm ashamed to say I didn't remember being at either occasion.) She had photos of Moto by a palm tree or against a thatched house or a sunset and wanted to know if I could identify where they were taken. (While we were talking, someone handed us the day's Chugoku Newspaper, with an article about Riri and me, saying we would be meeting each other at the unveiling ceremony the next day "for the first time in fifty years.")
     Riri struggled to tell us that her father had not talked about his trip with us, had not even hinted at it until she was ten. Until the day of his death, he had hardly told them anything about it. 

     I was stunned. Moto hadn't even told his family about traveling around the world for three years on a yacht? I thought about the night watches he would have reveled in, phosphorescent  foam hissing under the Phoenix's forefoot, the landfalls of South Sea Islands, the parties with the "Hiroshima Prefecture Clubs" in cities we visited. Had the whole experience been that bad for him, perhaps soured by the way it ended?

     But Riri put her finger on it. "He was shy," she said. I think she meant he was humble. He didn't want people to think he was bragging or felt special--or even different. I told her what a kind, considerate man he was, how fun-loving, how much we liked him. She drank my words in like rain water on parched soil.  

Our family with Riri's father, Moto Fushima, c. 1957.

     I had thought a lot about what gift I could take Riri. I wanted something from the circumnavigation, something personal, something, if possible, which had belonged to her father. I remembered this picture of Moto with our family, probably taken in New York, and thought of the inflatable globe we had toted with us around the world, marking the latest leg of our route in red each time we completed it. I could take her our globe. It was grubby and had a slow leak but it was part of the Phoenix. 

     As Riri and I sat looking through her scrapbooks of pictures and ours of newspaper clippings--with no time to read them--she was entranced with our route, fingering it and pointing out specific ports whenever we came to a map. She hadn't noticed the globe Jerry had inflated and set nearby. He picked it up and handed it to her without comment. She was amazed. Something actually from the Phoenix! Then we told her it was hers to keep. She was overjoyed, couldn't believe it, expressed her gratitude over and over. I had wondered if it would be enough, wished I could give her more. But it was a hole in one. She even had me autograph it.

Riri's husband, to right, came and paid for all of us.

     Then a bunch of us decided to go around the corner for lunch, for Hiroshima's signature dish, okonomiyaki (a kind of vegetable omelet), and we invited Riri to join us. She was thrilled. She asked if her husband could come and we said sure. I anticipated her scheme but not soon enough. When her husband reached the restaurant, we were just finishing up our meals--and he paid for them all! Very sneaky, Riri! Arigatou gozaimashita!
     The next day, the day Riri and I were to meet for the first time in 50 years (!), she brought her elder son, Yuuto, to the ceremony to show us he looks just like his grandpa Moto. Riri said her wish had come true to talk about her father.

Riri and her mother, Ikuko Fushima

     An extra blessing: although Riri's mother, who had been hospitalized some time ago with a heart condition, could not attend the ceremony, Riri told her all about it. A hibakusha, as I mentioned, her mother said she was very moved by statements I made and told Riri they gave her a lot of encouragement. PTL.

January 10, 1960

     At my request, Riri mailed me photos of her parents' wedding and of her father late in life. I have added them below.

Blessed in unexpected ways: The 3 Ms (Part 1)

Posing for the media; Moto at the tiller in the background.

      Two bittersweet blessings that came from our trip back for Mum's ceremony require some back story: Nick Mikami, Moto Fushima, Mickey Suemitsu* were the three Japanese crewmen on the Phoenix. Dad (Skipper) called them "the 3 Ms." They were all members of the Hiroshima Yacht Club and had helped with the building of our boat. (*Niichi Mikami, Motosada Fushima, and Mitsugi Suemitsu.)
     Nick, our first mate, was a stolid man, reliable. He was in his thirties and knew English pretty well.
     The other two were in their twenties. Moto was gentle, quiet, and kept himself in the background. When the Honolulu Star-Bulletin wanted a picture of the Phoenix under sail off Diamond Head, the rest of us lined up along the rails for the photographer on a boat pacing us. Moto (I notice now) stayed in the cockpit steering. That was so typical of him.
     Mickey was different. He spent our whole shakedown cruise from Japan in his bunk seasick (well, it was a rough and scary trip and his bunk--and Moto's--were in the fo'c'sle, which has the roughest ride). When pressed, he finally had Nick tell us he thought it would help if he could have "a little rice gruel like my mother used to make." So Mum, who already made three meals a day--meals for all seven of us with Japanese rice and miso soup for the three Japanese men--set to work to make Mickey rice gruel the way his mother used to make it..
     Mickey didn't like to work (he prided himself on growing his little fingernails out about an inch like Japanese "gentlemen" so he couldn't do much work anyway) although he didn't mind taking credit for it, and he didn't like taking orders. Despite repeated instructions, he'd let other ships approach too close in the middle of the night before waking the skipper to inform him there was a ship in sight.
     Whatever real offenses he may have committed, Mickey became our scapegoat for everything. When our black cat Manuia turned up with a stripe of white paint down her back, I blamed Mickey. (I should have known it was more in the line of my father's type of humor.)

Moto, Mickey, Nick

     The men had arranged with their families to be away three years. The three years were up in 1957 when we were in the Caribbean, with the Panama Canal and the whole Pacific (Galapagos, Marquesas, Hawaii) to go before we'd be back in Japan. But Dad's patience with Mickey was up, too. There was an event off Jamaica, a defiance of authority that amounted to mutiny (Dad never demanded obedience for its own sake but for the safety of the ship and crew) and after a family consultation and a confrontation with Mickey in the presence of the other two, Dad told him we were shipping him home.
     Nick staunchly chose to stay with us. For some reason, Moto chose to be sent home with Mickey. We liked Moto. We liked his cheerful personality and his hard work. Setting sails or mending them, he'd quietly do what needed to be done whether assigned the job or not. We had no issues with Moto and were sad that he chose to leave. We weren't sure whether it was out of loyalty to Mickey, issues with Skipper's authoritarianism, or homesickness.
     Three years later when we reached Japan, Nick became a celebrity, the first Japanese to sail around the world. Toward the end of our trip Nick had taken to wearing a wide wool cummerbund. I wonder now whether he wore it to ease pain because soon after our return to Hiroshima he went in for surgery for stomach cancer and died on the operating table.
     Meanwhile, Moto had settled back into Japanese life and had met the woman he wanted to marry--a hibakusha (nuclear bomb survivor). Most Japanese discriminated against hibakusha and would not consider marrying someone (or arranging a marriage for their grown child with someone) carrying potential mutations that might affect future generations.
     We've never heard what happened to Mickey after he left the Phoenix.

(To be continued)

Blessed in unexpected ways: Old friends

Masako Fujisaki, 95, and grandson Ken.

     We reconnected with old friends, too, friends from my childhood (ages 7-10), friends from my teens, friends from our years of sailing (ages 10-14) and our years of peace activities (14-18)--people from very different eras of my life, intermingled.
      In Tokyo we had lunch with Masako Fujisaki, 95, who was a close friend of my mother's back in the fifties when we were living in "Rainbow Village," the American-Australian Army base near Hiroshima. 

     She had three young daughters and an even younger son back then. Her daughter Noriko and I were nine. (Noriko died when her own children were young.) My mother's book Emily San is based on the Fujisaki family and the fun we had learning each other's languages. 
     Mrs. Fujisaki's grandson Kenichi (Noriko's nephew) brought her to the Friends Center in an SUV from her home an hour's drive away and she spent our time together, as she always does, wiping away tears and saying in English, "Oh, if only Noriko were still alive!" "Oh, if only your mother were here!" and "You look just like her." She is the sweetest lady and I probably won't see her again until heaven. (She and her grandson are Christians, the only ones in their family.) 
     Her daughter Noriko, all dressed up, stood with us in family pictures at the launching of the Phoenix. She was much cuter than this depiction of her. I'm trying to find the pictures. (Photo goes here.)

Friends Center, where we stayed in Tokyo.

     


     Other friends I didn't remember so clearly.     Also at the Friends Center we connected with Mitsuo Otsu, whom I'd known as a teenager when I taught English. He has been a loyal friend over the years, not corresponding much but remembering everything about me and how we met, while I am hazy about much of it.

Mitsuo Otsu, next to "Friends Center"sign he painted.

     He has taught at the Friends School next door to the Friends Center for years and is now an administrator there. 
     I didn't know he is also an award-winning calligrapher. He brought us a scroll he had lettered, a Chinese poem about how, in our eagerness for spring to come, we break off plum branches that aren't budding yet. (Photo goes here.) When we got to Hiroshima, I showed it to Dr. Morishita, the calligrapher for Mum's monument and I could tell he recognized its value.

I think one of these may be Mitsuo Otsu (c. 1963)

     I re-connected with two other English students I didn't know I'd had as a teenager when we got to Hiroshima. The morning of the ceremony, we had been sitting around the table at WFC which I showed you yesterday and for the first time since I taught the class, I described teaching English conversation to the employees of the Toyo Pulp Company when I was 17. It was a cushy job, not a job at all, really. I just sat at the head of a long table in a big meeting room and chatted in English with Japanese "salary-men" and women. They loved American colloquialisms and had lots of questions. It was fun for all of us. At the end of each week I got a big check and turned it over to my dad, since I was living on the Phoenix and had virtually no expenses.
     That very day an elderly man approached me, among all the people who approached me, with a confident smile and "Remember me?" I wouldn't have if Michiko hadn't prepped me that Mr. Sera from Toyo Pulp would be there but I was able to smile, hold out a hand and say, "Mr. Sera!" Whew. Thanks, Michiko!
     That night the ceremony was covered on NHK TV. The next day Jerry, Tony, and I came home from shopping on the Hondori and a woman I didn't recognize was at WFC waiting for me with obvious anticipation. I didn't recognize her even after she handed me her business card reading "Tokuko Kikkawa." She said she had been one of my students at Toyo Pulp.
     We sat in the room with Mum on the god shelf while she told me in halting English that she had seen us on TV last night and had persevered until she found her way to the WFC where we were staying. She unwrapped her furoshiki, a square of cloth which forms, when the opposite corners are tied, a convenient container for bundles of any size and shape--I commented on it, not having seen one for years--and brought out, holding one at a time in both hands as if they were sacred, a letter I had written her 40 years ago after Ben was born and a card announcing Becky's birth three years later. I didn't even remember writing them.

Maybe this is the Toyo Pulp English conversation class.

     I was sorry I had forgotten her. She was so apologetic that she had not brought me a gift. I said it didn't matter, that she was the gift. I borrowed her pen to write down something she told me and she urged me to keep it. I told her a pen was a perfect gift for a writer!
     But an hour or two after she had left she returned with two gifts wrapped in paper from a famous department store. One of them was a furoshiki.
     I was just a kid enjoying being a big shot. I didn't deserve such faithful friends. On the other hand, I knew a lot of Japanese people and I was probably the only American many of them knew. I console myself with that thought. 

Blessed in unexpected ways: New friends

New friends: JoAnn and Larry Sims (blue scarf, purple shirt), Drew Tanabe

     




     Before we left for Japan, one friend wrote us, "We pray that your presence there will be wonderfully used by the Lord in ways more than you could ever imagine." 

     Another wrote, "May your trip there and your words be blessed in unexpected ways."

     It was and they were. For instance, we made new friends:  

JOANN AND LARRY SIMS -  The new directors of the World Friendship Center (for the next two years) are JoAnn and Larry Sims from the state of Washington. JoAnn's father was a trucker and Larry worked for a trucking company for awhile so Tony the Trucker (who has his own 18-wheeler) had a lot in common with them and they discussed things like--well, uh, axles?

ANDREW (DREW) TANABE is a student from the east coast doing an internship at WFC. (From January until the day we arrived he had been doing an internship at the Memorial Peace Museum under Steve Leeper.) Drew's great-grandfather was Japanese and came to the United States at the turn of the 19th century. The six of us had lots of fun over breakfasts at the center, swapping anecdotes about things like brushes with wild animals (including yellow-jackets).

KEIKO MIYAMOTO is the translator of Memories of Sadako, a little book I am offering to those who prayed for us while we were in Japan. I hadn't met her before but your prayers went before me and touched her heart.
     At the reception, Keiko took my hands and said earnestly, "Your talk gave me courage." She came to the WFC later to take my hands again, put her face close to mine, and tell me, "Your talk gave me hope" in a personal situation she was facing.
     She pulled out a tiny box, opened it carefully and showed me five of the world's tiniest paper cranes, calling them "my treasure." She let me choose one for myself (I chose the red one), giving me an even tinier box to keep it in, cautioning, "Don't sneeze!"

"Don't sneeze!"

     "Now it's my treasure, too." I told her.
     Later, up in our room, I handed the box to Jerry, who was sitting on the floor, his back against a wall--the only furniture in a Japanese bedroom is a thin mattress and quilt on the floor--told him what was in it and warned him to open it carefully.
     Jerry opened the box, peered in and said, "There's nothing in here." I leaped back across the room to him with an anguished: "NO-O-O!" We searched all the folds in his shirt until we found the little morsel and restored it to its container. Whew! I couldn't lose Keiko's "treasure" in the first half hour of being entrusted with it!

Kotaro and Junko Tanimoto and family

KOTARO AND JUNKO TANIMOTO - Kotaro    and his wife Junko live in Hiroshima. Kotaro got his degree in dentistry in San Francisco and we have mutual friends there who told us to look them up.

     I wrote the Tanimotos ahead of our coming to invite them to the ceremony "at 10 AM June 12 in the south-east corner of the Peace Park," and before we even arrived, Junko had dropped in at the World Friendship Center, met the Sims and signed up for an English conversation class!

     We had a chance to visit with them at the reception and this is what Junko emailed me afterward:

Dear Jessica

Hello.We had a English conversation class today at WFC and studied about your mother.

I told our children about Barbara-san and World War 2. I thought that we need to continue telling young people and children how cruel nuclear war is.

I worked for electric company before we moved to San Francisco. I was in nuclear fuel section of fuel management department for about 6 years. When I worked there, I thought nuclear power reactor were perfect system with no doubt. It's like a kind of feeling that we human could achieve everything.

But it was wrong.We are very weak when unexpected things suddenly happen.

I hope there are no nuclear weapons and things in the world on someday in the future.

By the way, my mother in law knows about Barbara-san.She said that she is almost the same age as you.

Ａnd many other people in Japan got to know about Barbara-san on newspaper and TV news.

I hope more people know about fears of nuclear.

I have many things that I want to tell you but my English is very weak. I'm sorry for that.

We hope to see you again.

God bless you.

Junko (Tanimoto), Hiroshima

CONNIE AND MASAAKI NAKAMURA - Connie has just moved with her Japanese husband Masaaki from Saipan to Nogata, Japan. We have been following each other's blogs. Hers is Japan--Living the (Not So) Simple Life and unfortunately her life was not simple enough for her to come to Hiroshima for the ceremony. We really wanted to meet!
     But she commented on my post afterward: "I'm just beginning to realize what an awesome woman your mother was. She seems to embody what I want for my own life and feel like I have failed to achieve....I want to stand for something, to make a difference, to have a strong purpose."
     Then she wrote a post on her own blog about "Someone I want you to meet. . .Jessica Renshaw" in which she said, "The more I read about her mother the more amazed I am. Her mother was AWESOME. She embodies everything I want to be. To stand for something with strength, unwavering commitment and purpose."

     A really neat discovery we made in the course of our correspondence since we got home: WE MAY BE COUSINS! Connie's maiden name is Schon (with an umlaut). My maiden name would have been Schon, too, if my father, who was born Earl Schon, hadn't been adopted by his stepfather Louis Reynolds! My great-grandfather was August Schon, her grandfather was Emil August Theodor Schon. So there may be a connection there. She confirmed what we had been told before, that "Schon" is a German Jewish name.
     Her ancestors come from Suhl, Germany, so my Danish nephew Allan, who has wanted to go look up our ancestors in Germany, may have a place to start digging (not literally!)

     Who would have expected two descendants of a family of German Jews to find each other while blogging about Japan?

DEBI YOSHIMURA - Just before we left for Japan, our daughter Julie put us in touch with her friend Debi Yoshimura in Tokyo. She lives very close to the university I attended as a teenager. We didn't meet Debi while we were there but we have connected on Facebook:

Debi Yoshimura Thank you, Julie! Jessica, I actually live a 5 minute bicycle ride from ICU. We'll it's 5 minutes from ICU going down the hill toward Nogawa Park, going up the hill it's probably more like 10... I've lived here for the past 10 years. This has truly been a very difficult few months in Japan! But we have seen the Lord open the hearts of the Japanese people to the gospel of Christ in ways that couldn't have been foreseen before March 11th. Tokyo Baptist Chruch, where I am a memeber, even baptized a man in Ishinomaki, Miyagi-ken, last month! He was given the choice of coming to Tokyo or being baptized there and he wanted to be baptized on the spot he was saved! So that's what was arranged with about 100 people watching:-) Please continue to pray for Japan, there is a very long road ahead. In Him, Debi (NOTE: At the moment, we have an embarrassment of riches--thousands of photos--which we're trying to edit down to post on Facebook.)