Hiroshima Maidens Read online

  The Hiroshima Maidens

  Rodney Barker

  Copyright © Rodney Barker 1986

  The right of Rodney Barker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1986 by Penguin Books.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To

  TADAKO EMORI • YOSHIE ENOKAWA

  TAKAKO HARADA • YOSHIE HARADA

  HIDEKO HIRATA • SUZUE HIYAMA

  MISAKO KANNABE • TERUE KAWAMURA

  KEIKO KAWASAKI • CHIEKO KIMURA

  SAYOKO KOMATSU • MITSUKO KURAMOTO

  TOYOKO MORITA • TOMOKO NAKABAYASHI

  SHIGEKO NIIMOTO • MICHIKO SAKO

  TAZUKO SHIBATA • HIDEKO SUMIMURA

  EMIKO TAKEMOTO • HIROKO TASAKA

  MASAKO WADA • ATSUKO YAMAMOTO

  MICHIKO YAMAOKA • MOTOKO YAMASHITA

  MICHIYO ZOMEN

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  Prelude – This Is Your Life

  Part One – Hiroshima

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two – America

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three – Home

  Chapter Eight

  Afterword

  Afterword 2015

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Foreword

  In 1955, ten years after World War II, a group of twenty-five young Japanese women crippled and disfigured in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima were brought to America for reconstructive surgery. The operations were performed at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and Quaker families in the surrounding area provided home care, which is how two of the “Hiroshima Maidens” as they were called by the press, came to stay with my family. I was nine years old at the time.

  Looking back now, almost thirty years later, it is difficult to pinpoint the significance of that experience or say how it affected me. I suppose I was too young for the feelings of awe or terror that one might expect. Our two visitors lived with us in an intimate everyday way; they seem more like a fact of my early life than a formative event. And there were competing first impressions: I had never come into contact with Orientals before; I was the oldest of three boys, and one might say these were my first and only sisters.

  My memories of the Hiroshima Maidens are the fare of family life. Because they did not speak English, they seemed to be more comfortable and natural around children than adults. We engaged in activities with a shared spirit of innocence and wonder that made them easy to be with. It’s true they could be terribly unsure of themselves, but often that shyness would lead to a new experience. They liked to swim, for instance, but were too self-conscious to appear on a public beach in bathing suits, so on warm summer evenings when my father came home from work, he would drive us all to a private cove where we would wade into Long Island Sound under cover of night.

  My contact with the Maidens taught me something valuable and lasting. They were people who in their own quiet way continued to be a lasting part of my consciousness. At an impressionable age I learned that war leaves a legacy of human suffering that does not end with peace. From then on I understood that at any given moment the world I knew could come to an end. To have learned that at an early age is no small thing, although I am not sure how much more differently inclined it made me than others who grew up in the fifties.

  Twenty-five years passed before the memory of the Maidens came around in such a way that I thought of it as a subject to be written about. At the time I was a free-lance journalist writing for a number of magazines, so the idea of doing a follow-up on the Hiroshima Maidens was framed as an article in my mind. But when my research revealed that there had been no books written about them in either English or Japanese, and that the several magazine attempts at updates were superficial and incomplete, it struck me that here was an unwritten story not only of great personal interest but timely and important. In the process of writing that story, I felt I would discover the meaning of the experience.

  Every writing assignment bristles with its own set of difficulties, and the complexities involved in researching this story were daunting. While there was a considerable amount of press coverage of the Maidens during their stay in America, for all intents and purposes they had dissolved as a group once they returned to Japan. No one knew what had happened to them individually, or, for that matter, how many of them were still alive.

  Over the next few months I tracked down a dozen or so American families who had hosted the Maidens, and I visited them in their homes, probing their memories and leafing through scrapbooks retrieved from their attics. Next I located and interviewed the key figures involved in organizing the project that brought the Maidens to America, including the surgeons who performed their operations. Thanks to a grant from a foundation in Japan willing to pay my way over and back in exchange for a series of articles about my impressions of Hiroshima, I was able to depart for Japan in the summer of 1979.

  The day I arrived in Hiroshima, I was made aware that the relationship between atomic bomb survivors and the press in that city had become an exceedingly difficult one. The news editor of a major daily newspaper met me at the train station; after escorting me to the newspaper’s main office building and leading me through a ceremonious round of civilities with department heads, he casually suggested that we pay a visit to Suzue Hiyama, one of the Hiroshima Maidens who had stayed with my family. I had half-expected this to come up — it made a good reunion story — but not so abruptly nor in this manner. I replied that I preferred to wait; etiquette alone dictated that I should talk with Suzue first and clear such a meeting.

  My hesitation seemed to take him by surprise. Surely, as a fellow journalist, I could see the value of an immediate visit, an experience captured live?

  It was assumed, I think, that we would have roughly the same aggressive attitude toward news. And, as I later learned, the idea of a detailed follow-up story on the Hiroshima Maidens had tantalized and frustrated Japanese journalists for years; the women either could not be found or reached, or flatly refused to be interviewed. It took some doing to convince my editor friend that I intended to handle this my way, and I was deliberately vague about giving assurances I would keep him informed of my plans so he could arrange for his paper’s sister broadcasting company to have a television crew standing by.

  Later that evening, with the assistance of a young Japanese woman I met at an international boarding house, I telephoned Suzue Hiyama. She was expecting my call. Reporters had been phoning her for weeks. I apologized for the inconvenience my coming had caused her and assured her that when we got together I would be alone except for an interpreter. We arranged to meet the following evening.

  On the phone she had said she lived in an apartment above her place of business, and when the taxi pulled up in front of a beauty parlor named after my home town in Connecticut and her home in the States — the Darien Beauty Shop — Suzue was waiting outside. She bowed, I nodded, and as she eyed me inquiringly, I appraised her. Her face still showed signs that it had something very much wrong with it; the flap of skin grafted to her left cheek was too smooth and had not wrinkled the way one would expect it to with age. But while that might have attracted the notice of a stranger seeing her for the first time, it corresponded with the mental picture that I had carried for twenty-five years. After all, scarred was the only way I had known her. She seemed more unsure of me, which was understandable enough considering the fac
t that she remembered an energetic, freckle-faced nine-year-old. Smiling down at her (she came barely up to my chest), I produced an old photograph taken the night she and her roommate dressed me up in a young girl’s kimono. Her embarrassed little smile let me know I had passed the test.

  We spent the next few hours catching up on the previous twenty-five years. I told her what had happened to my family, and she introduced me to hers. Her husband shook my hand and thanked me for the hospitality my parents had extended to his wife. Her two teenage daughters grinned sheepishly. Her grandchild burst into tears.

  I had already decided that at some point in the evening I would bring up the matter of why I had come to Hiroshima. So when we seemed to run out of questions for each other and it was clear she was relaxed with me, I told her my primary reason for coming was to research a book about the Hiroshima Maidens. She looked down in apparent distress. She said she had cooperated with the making of a film about them several years earlier, as a way of showing people she was doing well, and she was not happy with the way the film had turned out.

  Before coming to Hiroshima I had seen that film. It was titled The Scars of Hiroshima. Suzue had not granted an interview, but she had allowed herself to be filmed at work, styling a patron’s hair. The camera angles and close-ups took every advantage of the irony of her work as a beautician to highlight the horror of her past: zooming in on fingers she was still unable to straighten or spread, filling the screen with the side of her face scarred most severely. I had wondered what it must be like seeing one’s disfigurement displayed with such artless sentimentality. Apparently it had been mortifying.

  The presumption behind my objective was beginning to cause me considerable discomfort. I had come in hopes of gaining access to the inner minds of the people around whom this story revolved. Now I saw that, if being a man and a foreigner trying to tap into the thoughts and feelings of women from a culture where expressions were almost always veiled and who had known great tragedy in their personal lives was not barrier enough, these were people already traumatized by hit-and-run journalists.

  Speaking slowly so all the nuances were clearly communicated in the translation, I told her I was aware of the challenges involved in this undertaking but hoped that in the months ahead I would be able to convince her and the other Maidens that I was a person who would keep in mind a proper respect for their feelings and interests while writing about them.

  Suzue’s reaction, I could see, was ambivalent. Sensing this was not the time to press the matter, I chose to remark on the media interest my visit had generated. I said I wanted her to know that, apart from everything, my primary loyalty lay with the Maidens. I did not want my presence to hurt or embarrass them, and as far as I was concerned, all my conversations and interactions would be considered a private affair.

  Although I had declared my intentions, I had done so in a way that did not require an immediate answer but left the matter open to future discussion. I felt at the time that if I were sensitive to her feelings and prepared to move slowly, then things would happen. And they did. I had been in Hiroshima less than a month when I received a phone call from Suzue checking in on me and inviting me to a dinner party that was being given in my behalf by the Maidens.

  It was held at a tempura restaurant in a private room behind sliding paper doors. Only the Maidens and I were present. The tables were arranged in a rectangle, with a setting at the head table designated as mine. Suzue sat beside me, and to my right was a woman whose command of English was proficient enough for her to serve as interpreter. Looking around, I thought to myself that these women were more matronly than maidenly now, and that they could have passed for a group of club women were it not for certain facial peculiarities — uneven or slightly smeared features, all heavily covered with make-up — that marked each of them like members of some secret society.

  The protocol was natural, forthright, friendly. Each woman introduced herself while I did my best to memorize each face and name. Then I presented them with letters and tape-recorded messages I had brought from friends in America. It was obvious that their ties to America were still strong, which created an opening for explaining my purpose in coming. Trying to be both precise and brief, I said that many of the people who had had the privilege of meeting them twenty-five years ago considered the Hiroshima Maidens the leading ladies in an epic of international goodwill that had been all but lost in history. I said I had come to Hiroshima in hopes of rescuing their story for those people and generations who had not known nor heard of them. How successfully this could be done depended on them, on whether they agreed theirs was an experience worth preserving and if they chose to cooperate with my research.

  The ensuing discussion, conducted in Japanese, was surprisingly short, leading me to conclude that my proposal had already been talked about in depth and that this meeting was the occasion for announcing their decision. The Maiden who knew English raised her glass and proposed a toast. “To your success.” My eyes went around the room to confirm that she was speaking for the group. Humbled, I murmured the Japanese words for thank you. Another toast followed — “No more Hiroshimas” — and we all drank to that. Then there was an awkward moment of silence that was joyfully relieved when a Maiden at the far end of the table sang out, “Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.”

  Torn though they were about having public attention beamed on their private lives, the Maidens felt a sense of indebtedness to those Americans who had taken them into their homes and hearts, and saw in me an opportunity to repay them.

  Acknowledgements

  Much of the material contained in this book was collected under conditions impossible to repeat, not the least because some of the principals are no longer living. Dr. Arthur Barsky is gone, as are Dr. Sidney Kahn and the Reverend Marvin Green; I am honored that they allowed me to be the custodian of their final thoughts on the Hiroshima Maidens Project.

  Essential to this effort was the trust and cooperation of Norman Cousins and Helen Yokoyama. As two people who figured prominently in the story, they could have sought to align my perspective of the overall events with their own. But both fully recognized that truths are best perceived after looking at all sides, and for permitting me to distill and order the varying and sometimes conflicting impressions and viewpoints in the way I saw fit, they have my respect and appreciation.

  The skill and sensitivity with which an interpreter is able to convey a spirit of compassion while probing for details and insights is crucial to the success of an inquiry into a delicate and difficult subject. For their fine work I wish to express my admiration and gratitude to my talented interpreters Naoko Naganuma, Keiko Ogura, and Torn Kinoshita.

  For their assistance in arranging interviews and providing resources that facilitated a broad understanding of Hiroshima and its legacy, I must also acknowledge the valuable help of the Hiroshima daily newspaper Chugoku Shinbun and of the Hiroshima International Cultural Foundation, and in particular its Secretary-General, Mr. Koichiro Kanai.

  Thanks must go to Ned Jaros, for without his friendship and backing I would not have been able to devote myself full-time to the research and writing of this book; and I am especially indebted to Star York, whose assistance took many forms, and without whom this work would have been longer in the making and minus much of its aesthetic grace.

  NB: This book maintains American spellings.

  Prelude – This Is Your Life

  In 1955, Ralph Edwards’s This Is Your Life on NBC ranked among the Top Ten in the television popularity ratings, reaching an estimated forty million viewers weekly. Much of the appeal of the half-hour live Wednesday night program was due to its provocative format: Edwards went to unorthodox lengths to trick outstanding personalities onto his stage, where they were informed their life story was about to be recreated before a coast-to-coast television audience. Edwards acted as narrator and a supporting cast of friends, relatives, and surprise guests were secretly assembled backstage and brought on to highlight even
ts from the “star’s” past.

  On May 11, 1955, the show began as usual. An offstage orchestra struck up the catchy symphonic theme song, and an announcer took the cue: “This Is Your Life, America’s most talked about program, brought to you by America’s most talked about cosmetics: Hazel Bishop long-lasting lipstick, Hazel Bishop long-lasting nail polish, Hazel Bishop long-lasting complexion cream. And now, Mister This Is Your Life himself, Ralph Edwards.”

  Seated on a divan, the avuncular emcee smiled broadly at the camera. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to This Is Your Life. The ticking you hear in the background is a clock counting off the seconds to 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945. And seated here with me is a gentleman whose life was changed by the last tick of that clock as it reached 8:15. Good evening, sir. Would you tell us your name?”

  The camera pulled back to reveal a short, compact Japanese man in a baggy blue suit, seated beside Edwards.

  “Kiyoshi Tanimoto,” the man replied in accented English.

  “And what is your occupation?”

  “I am a minister.”

  “And where is your home?”

  “Hiroshima, Japan.”

  “And where were you on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning?”

  The answer was drowned out by a deafening ticking sound. The camera cut to an enormous clock with hands set at 8:15. A photograph of an atomic bomb explosion flashed on the screen, accompanied by a blast from kettledrums.

  Edwards spoke in a sobering voice. “This is Hiroshima, and in that fateful second on August 6, 1945, a new concept of life and death was given its baptism. And tonight’s principal subject, you, Reverend Tanimoto, were an unsuspecting part of that concept. Reverend Tanimoto, when did you arrive in this country?”

  “Two days ago.”