Two Waltzes Towards Civilisation: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[Apologies for the Great Hiatus, and even further apologies for returning with this piece.]

CONTENT/TRIGGER WARNING: This is a post about the atomic bomb museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Major triggers include child death, radiation-induced disability, nuclear war, and...basically, it's about nuclear war, please exercise caution when reading.

_______________________________________________________________________

The stench of a city drowned in flames, a parade of puppets in the rain.

- Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (2011)

I picked the object up and hefted it one-handed. It was mottled in colour, birled and twisted like something dug out of the ground in raw form; flat if bubbly on one side, lumpy on others, ranging in tone from ochre to red to blister-black. It could have been iron ore. It weighed, at a guess, about nine lb. It was roughly spherical.

There was a sign next to it in Japanese, English, and Korean which affirmed that it was safe to touch.

Once upon a time this had been the roof tile of an urban house, and the little girl's pink pinafore in the case next to it had not had any holes or scorch marks in the cloth, and the saké cups in the case to its right had not been fused together by a bomb whose heat, at the moment of detonation, was equal to the surface temperature of the Sun.

Today I was in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, as I had been in the Nagasaki A-Bomb Museum two days ago, trying very hard not to throw up after reading the explanatory label on the case with the fingernails.

There, in Hiroshima, in the first moments of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)

There are significant differences between the way the two cities memorialise their catastrophes, of course. Hiroshima's museum is large, loud, aboveground, and fronted by an enormous fountain; Nagasaki's is smaller, darker, and underground. To enter the Nagasaki museum, you must walk down a curving circular walkway. The walls are strung with what looks like a continuous sequence of human spinal columns. It's only when you look closely that you realise each 'vertebra' is a tiny paper crane, no bigger than my thumbnail: thousands of them packed densely on their strings. Both museums have reconstructions or dioramas of the destruction. At Nagasaki, there is a replica of the south side of Urakami Cathedral, along with a twisted fire tower and a water tank with its legs so buckled beneath it that it looks like one of the Martians from The War of the Worlds. At Hiroshima, a passage of crumbled brickwork leads into a diorama of three mannequins (a woman and two children), latex 'skin' hanging off their hands, dressed in ragged clothes, slouching against a backdrop of flaming ruins.

While the structure of the cathedral in the Nagasaki museum may be a replica, its statues are not. The faces of Maria-sama (the Virgin Mary), St. John, St. Peter, and assorted angels are scorched or streaked with black from flash-burns. On some of the carved heads, the stone is peeling in onion-skin layers or has bubbled due to the intense heat of the blast.

I cannot describe how unnerving it is to stand in front of a statue of Mary and realise that those carved stone eyes watched the H-bomb fall.

This, then, was the human dignity of the A-bomb survivors: that they did not commit suicide when they could easily have done so.

- Oe Kenzaburo, Hiroshima Notes (1969)

Both cities recovered from the bombings, physically at least, with a remarkable quickness. They're both now noisy, lively, thriving places, but their centres of memory are viewed from different angles. Hiroshima has the Peace Park [Heiwa Kinen Koen], the international ceremonies, and the A-Bomb Dome; Nagasaki has only a small, quiet circular park with a statue and a cenotaph to mark the hypocentre of the bomb. Yet for all the grandeur of the Peace Park, Hiroshima's hypocentre is muffled - I found it quite by accident, a brick and metal plaque, in a side street. One of Nagasaki's most important memorial sites is the recostructed Urakami Cathedral. Kyushu was always Japan's most heavily Christian region, having been the first place to be contacted by Christian missionaries, and there was a thriving Christian population in Nagasaki in 1945. (The memorial museum holds a large collection of rosaries found in the wreckage of Urakami Cathedral.) Hence increased anti-American sentiment in Nagasaki postwar, proportional to Hiroshima: there was a sentiment that America, as a majority-Christian country, had broken faith with its fellow Christians in Japan.

It is the relics of individual suffering which speak the loudest: a melted desktop Buddha, a twisted pair of spectacles, a wristwatch stopped at 8.15.

- Alan Booth, The Roads to Sata (1989)

Both museums hold personal effcts of those who died: the students' uniforms, people's charred fountain pens and stopped pocketwatches. There is a horror peculiar to hese objects because of the awareness of how much is represented by such small things: every set of saké cups was a marriage, every student's identity card was a Shinto baby blessing, every desktop Buddha was a piece of daily faith. Hiroshima's museum goes beyond that to physical artifacts of suffering: its glass cases hold the fingernails, skin, hair, tongues, and excised keloid scar tissue of people who either survived for decades or died within a week.

Along with tangible objects, there are examples in both museums of the notorious 'human shadows'. There's essentially an urban legend which claims that the human-shaped shadows found on walls and stairs in both cities were the remains of people who were vapourised by the heat of the bomb (it shows up, amongst other places, in the 'Hiroshima shadow lovers' of Alan Moore's Watchmen). It's now believed that that isn't true - the 'shadows' were the result of the blast heat scorching the surrounding stone white, while the opacity of the human body preserved some parts of the wall or step in its original (darker) colour.

This isn't to say that the shadow-shapes of a human and a ladder burnt into a wall aren't disconcerting as fuck, of course.

One of the worst ones was a circular shadow on a set of stone steps: a person had been sitting outside when the bomb dropped. It was the worst, I think, because of the bathos i provoked. How terrible must it be to die in the world's first nuclear holocaust, and yet the only visible signifier of your death is a shadowy buttprint seared into a set of steps forever?

Then there were the photographs. I can only really talk about one, in Hiroshima.

A little girl, three or so years old, is lying in the back of a flatbed truck. She is wrapped in blankets and laid on a pile of burlap sacks. Her face is unburnt, but her eyes are closed and her face shows the most profound, pained resignation I have ever seen. A soldier is squatting next to her, his back to the camera: in his left hand he holds a tin cup full of water, obviously trying to persuade her to drink. 

There is nothing, materially, that the water could have done for her in any major way; she was almost certainly badly burned beneath the blankets, she was certainly irradiated, and it is equally certain that she died shortly after this photograph was taken. The only thing the water could have done for her would have been to make her death a little bit easier.

It was a beautiful day in August, a day much like this one, in fact; very much like this.

What impressed me most about both memorials, I think, is the emphasis they put on international suffering. It's no secret that Japanese history textbooks are often openly revisionist, and that the louder section of the far-right in this country likes to engage in denialism of e.g. Japanese crimes aginst humanity in Korea and occupied Manchuria. Yet both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in a phrase, Not Here For That Shit. There is a special monument in the Heiwa Kinen Koen dedicated to all of the Korean victims of the A-Bomb; there is a library in Nagasaki devoted to resources on the lives and deaths of Korean and Chinese prisoners of war. Both museums explicitly stated that the suffering experienced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was interntional in nature and both were critical of Japanese actions in the Pacific theatre. 

There was a quiet resistance to nationalist fuckery; a quiet insistence that suffering is solidarity.

Sympathy for Lady Gio: Some Temples of Kyoto

(I'm consolidating observations of/thoughts on the sacred sites we've visited into one post, because at last count we've visited two Shinto shrines and at least ten Buddhist temples.)

Kyoto is a god-ridden city. The streets are filled with shrines, from the neon orange Chinese architecture of the Heian Jingu Shinto shrine to the street altars no bigger than a shoebox, each with its own stick of incense and sake in a cheap bright cup. What shocks people initially about the little shrines and the god shelves is their decorative patterns of swastikas: the flat-armed version from ancient India rather than the Nazi Hakenkreuz dangling menacingly on one point. What surprises them is that the shelves and shrines house no gods. Often there's no image inside - where an equivalent Christian altar might house a statuette of a saint or a picture of Jesus, the street shrines have only flowers, or a small torii gate, or sacred paper strips. These altars are Shinto and the gods they honour are pantheistic: the god is not a human figure (not the god of the street) but the god who is the street, the god who is the tarmac and the girders and the gears of the bicycle leaning against the barrel full of pickled radish, which is itself the god.

Shinto is one of the indigenous religions of Japan (the beliefs of the Ainu, Ezo, Michihase, and Ebisu not getting much of a look-in). It is pantheistic, believing that divine spirits reside within all things, with some natural phenomena having particularly famous or important gods - this applies mostly to mountains, like Hieizan in Kyoto and Iwakisan in Tohoku. The earliest collection of religious texts pertaining to Shintoism is the early medieval Kojiki ['The Record of Ancient Matters']. To make matters slightly confusing, Shintoism is both pantheistic and polytheistic in that there's also a pantheon of anthropomorphic deities. The first two humanoid gods, says the Kojiki, were Izanami and her brother Izanagi. Together they had multiple children: their first attempt at having children was a disaster, because Izanami spoke before her brother did. The resultant offspring was so hideous that it was called the Leech Child, promptly put into a basket, and pushed off into the ocean, never to be mentioned again. Hurrah for the patriarchy. Eventually the gods had several children, including Amaterasu Omikami (the Heaven-Shining Great Sun Goddess) and her brother Susano (a merry prankster who enjoyed such shenanigans as painting her throne room with horseshit and skinning some horses, then making their flayed bodies dance around her palace. Early Japanese mythology is...very. It's extremely very). The Emperors of Japan historically claimed direct descent from Amaterasu Omikami; the bond between Shintoism and the Imperial Family was condensed in the 1930s and 40s into what's known as 'state Shinto' or 'wartime Shinto' - now, of course, obsolete.

For some idea of what state Shinto was like, Yukio Mishima's novel Wild Horses (Honda in Japanese) gives an excellent impression. Mainly because Mishima was a committed and enthusiastic Shinto nationalist. His characters fervently denounce Buddhism as an imported, foreign, and therefore 'un-Japanese' faith. (Somewhere, the ghost of Nichiren - ultra-militant medieval Buddhist monk - is laughing very, very bitterly.) Buddhism is in fact not native to Japan: it arrived from China via Korea in the 6th century CE and was promptly embraced alongside Shintoism. The two faiths essentially dovetail - Buddhism has little interest in birth and wedding rituals and Shintosm sees death as dirty and ritually impure, hence the popular Japanese truism that one is 'born Shinto and dies Buddhist'. Hieizan is the perfect example: great and venerable Buddhist temples are built on the mountain which is a god.

I am personally a Buddhist (Jodo Shinshu / True Pure Land School sect), but Buddhism here is less concerned with existential belief than with modes of practice, as is Shinto. Cleanliness is not next to godliness in Shintoism. It's better than godliness. All visitors to Shinto shrines are required to rinse their hands and mouths before entering; both faiths believe that divine attention can be attracted by ringing a bell. The bellrope at Nasaka Shine, dedicated to the shit-stirring god Susano, is as thick around as my arm, but the bell's rattle is suprisingly tinny and high-pitched. The bell at Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion (another Mishima novel...), sounds listless and irritable like a sick person coughing. Only the big bell of Enryakuji Temple on Hieizan, where worshippers slam a heavy wooden battering beam into the side of the bell, gave a sonorous noise.

Many of the temples we visited were ancient and venerable - Ryoanji with its Zen garden, Kiyomizu-dera with its clearwater spring, Ginkakuji with its teahouse - but my two favourites so far have been Kenniji and Gio-ji. Kenniji is in northern central Kyoto: it's a Soto Zen temple which contains a rumpled, unshakeable sense of peace. The engawa (wooden walkways and verandahs) have been dulled into a greyish brown colour and smoothed to matte softness by worshippers' feet. Its tatami floors are comfortably mouse-coloured rather than grand and gold; its most impressive feature is its fractal architecture, where a brief glance though a doorway gives you a glimpse of more corridors branching out like a Zen TARDIS, all giving the impression of an organic system bigger than what can be seen.

The other temple, Gio-ji, is what gives this blog post its name. It's less of a temple and more of a two-room hut in the depths of the Arashiyama bamboo forest, about thirty minutes' mountain-hike from the train station. We went there on the hottest day we've yet spent in Kyoto. Outside the hut, there are five Buddhist graves: inside, there are devotional statues of four women and the Buddha, a small prayer bowl, and some seats for worshippers. This was the temple sacred to the memory of Lady Gio. She appears in the Heike Monogatari as a dancer who became the mistress of the aristocratic megalomaniac Taira no Kiyomori; after three years, he cast her aside in favour of a younger dancer who had cone to his attention through Lady Gio's own kindness. She spent a year in humiliation before being summoned back to the palace in order to entertain Kiyomori and the girl who had replaced him. Unable to bear this insult, and quite rightly too, she (along with her younger sister Ginjo, their mother, and eventually Kiyomori's other mistress) renounced the world and became Buddhist nuns in this isolated two-room hut. I saw no ghosts but the women have not left; in the Buddhist sense, and in the context of what happened to the rest of the Heike, they - like Mishima's Gesshu Abbess - lived happily ever after in the end.

Kyoto: impressions of the first three days

I apologise for the delay to this blog. The first three days in Japan have taught me many interesting and useful phrases, such as 'I spilt a matcha latte on it', 'Your motherboard is fried', 'You say it'll cost how much to repair it?!' and 'Thank you, the meal was delicious'. I'm typing this from my iPad in the comfort zone halfway between the cryptlike air conditioning of my room and the wet-hand-towel heat of the balcony outside. It is twenty minutes to midnight. Kyoto is not quite asleep.

Although - and surprisingly for such a large city - it does sink into a profound silence in the middle of the evenings. We had dinner in a traditional-style restaurant in the Gion quarter tonight; at 7.15 the dusk was already outlining the low humped roofs of the machiya houses and the lamps were coming on. At ten past ten the stone-paved streets were silent. What Kyoto shares with Oxford - perhaps why I find it so pleasant - is a smiling but firm sense of systems of privacy. The old city invites the admiration of tourists and thrives on their flattery even as it slides shut outer walls, screens the engawa verandahs, and permits doorways in walls which display a mastery of the art of architectural striptease, revealing only a small shrine, only a pine tree. Streets shoot off of main roads like shafts of light, each one worth years of investigation.

The concept of a backwards striptease, exciting the viewers by putting on layers of clothes, could as well apply to Kyoto's inhabitants - or more precisely Gion's inhabitants, or most precisely maiko and geisha. We encountered a scene in Hanamikoji (Cherry-blossom Viewing Alley) earlier; a young maiko, probably fifteen or sixteen, was being photographed for a magazine spread. She was wearing a cho-obi (the kind which hangs down the wearer's back like a long tail) painted with an image of a Gion-matsuri carriage; the professional photographer's assistants waved their arms and shouted, forbidding anyone else from taking pictures. Body language is a) something I struggle to read and b) extremely fluid across cultures, especially c) amongst people who are polite and charming for a living, but even her sleeves looked annoyed as she picked up the skirt of her kimono for the fifth time and posed where pointed. As we passed her on the bridge, the press cordon broken to let us through, she bowed and smiled slightly and returned to leaning on its barrier. What struck me about the scene was not her beauty, although she was beautiful, and was not the fetishistic pleasure of seeing a real live maiko out and about (as one of my housemates had declared in wonder earlier, on seeing a middle-aged lady in a neat yukata in Sanjo-dori: "Wow, that was my first person I ever saw in kimono!"). It was the sense of sly happiness I feel every time the world displays its sleights of hand with a certain lack of guile; the scaffolding of publicity that holds up what remains of the Floating World, or the lady who runs a spice shop in Gion and, when I was photographing her shop, made sure to remove her glasses and cheerily hold up a leaflet for her shop as I took her picture.

Canny ladies, canny city. And I met a cat stretched out on a hot garage floor who was limp and inert as I passed, but then stuck up its head and posed expectantly until I took its close-up. I saw the Minami-za Kabuki theatre from a distance and rattled the bell at the temple of Susano-no-wo-no-Mikoto and ate the creamed-off scum of tofu paste prepared in three different ways. My housemates (the three youngest and nicest) have embraced my pronouns with no fuss whatsoever, culminating in the hilarious remark 'We can't look too much like idiot American tourists! Lyman's from Britain, he has dignity.'

Kyoto has been interesting, so far.

It begins

"And I didn't know whether I was looking for a person, 

or looking for a country, or looking for the lost."

- Alan Booth, 'Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan' (1996)

Alan Booth's last book was published the year we moved to Japan, three years after his untimely death. We left in 1997. Tomorrow, I'm going back for the first time in sixteen years.

I expect things will have changed somewhat.

Other than that, I have no idea what the next six weeks are going to be like. I'll be in Kyoto for a month, then head to Kyushu and work my way northwards from there again; I won't be visiting anywhere I've been before, so I'm skirting around Tokyo and Kamakura and only going as far north as Kanazawa. 

This will most likely be a photography blog, updated whenever I can freebase some wifi.

I promise no instagram photos of ramen, though.