Witness to the Ghosts
of Hiroshima
By
Matt Condon
The Age, Australia
August 6, 2005
He was a small old
man and he sat alone in the tram. It was late July and very warm and the
tram was making its way through the southern suburbs of Hiroshima to the
ferry terminal for the sacred island
of Miyajima. The old man wore a
large, floppy-brimmed canvas hat and a beige safari suit. He cradled in
his lap a small bag. He had been watching me since I boarded near the
A-Bomb Dome and sat on a bench opposite him.
Radiation burns on the back of Kiyoshi Kitsukawa, a Hiroshima tram
conductor who was standing with his back to the blast about 1,000
yards from the center of the explosion. |
As the tram emptied
stop by stop along route two, he continued staring through his pair of
enormous, thick-lensed spectacles. On occasion, I glanced at his kind,
worn face and realized there was something not quite right with it - his
features were curiously out of alignment. His left eye was smaller than
his right, the difference exacerbated by the thick spectacle lenses. The
cheekbone below the pinched eye was flat, in defiance of the other, which
was round and full. It looked, to me, like a face that had suffered an
accident a long time ago, and the imperfections were far away, on the
horizon of a long life. At one point, it was just me and the old man in
the tram, and this was when he rose slowly and sat beside me. "Where are
you from?" he asked. His voice was thin and his English heavily accented
but clear. "Australia," I said, turning to him.
He stared down at the
carry bag in his hands. "Are you a soldier?" he asked.
I laughed at the
unusual question. "No," I said.
|
"I remember the
Australian soldiers in 1945," he said, "with the hats." He folded up one
side of his canvas brim, making an impromptu slouch hat. "Very nice," he
said, smiling.
Australian soldiers
had taught him to speak English at a school in Hiroshima after the war. He
had been born in 1928 and had been a "ship man" when he was younger. He
gripped an imaginary ship's wheel with his old hands and motioned to steer
from left to right. Then he said, unexpectedly: "I am of the atom bomb."
He rummaged in his
carry bag and I noticed that the texture of the skin on his left hand was
very smooth, an oddity consistent with his eye and his cheekbone. He was
an old man divided into two sides. Eventually he produced a thick blue
booklet the size of a passport. I had read of these books carried by
A-bomb survivors. They were medical record books. "I am going to the
hospital," he said, holding up the book. "Every week I go to the
hospital." He tapped his knee with the book before returning it to his
bag.
"I was visiting
Hiroshima on that day," he said, recalling August 6, 1945. "The atom bomb.
Wooosh." He raised a bunched fist and flicked his hand open to indicate
the explosion. He looked at me with that crooked face and smiled again.
"I am of the atom
bomb," he said.
I had come to Japan
to retrace the steps of legendary Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett.
As a young reporter, and in that early grappling for mentors and models, I
had known of Burchett for a singular achievement - he was the first
Western journalist into Hiroshima after the dropping of the atom bomb. In
the 60 years since Burchett filed his report, "The Atomic Plague", for
London's Daily Express, it has probably remained the greatest individual
newspaper "scoop" of the 20th century and into the millennium. It's
impossible to know now to what degree Burchett was writing for history,
but you get the feeling, from the opening line, that the young Victorian
reporter had an eye to posterity: "I write this as a warning to the
world."
Burchett was almost
34 years old when he made his solo journey from Tokyo to Hiroshima to
bring the facts of the bomb's devastation to the world, as he put it. At
tremendous risk to his safety, he took the long train journey south,
traveling in that delicate period between the dropping of the bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan's official surrender. It struck me, as a
journalist and a novelist, that one day I would write a novel about this
chapter in Burchett's life. The story had everything - war, flight,
danger, heroism and, at the centre of it all, one of the defining moments
in human history. I made some cursory notes.
Years later, I was
browsing through a book stall at a Gold Coast flea market when I came
across an extremely battered copy of one of the prolific Burchett's
polemic books, This Monstrous War. The book dealt with the Korean
conflict. By now I knew more about his life, his evolution into a
"radical" journalist and his ability to polarize readers, colleagues, even
governments. He was accused of being a communist spy, a traitor, a
fabricator. His own country, for a time, refused to grant him a passport
and re-entry into Australia. Since Hiroshima, his reputation had wobbled
and stumbled.
I developed a theory,
too, that the impact of what Burchett saw in Hiroshima, and the scoop
itself, changed something inside him: that the dropping of the A-bomb was
a schismatic moment for mankind, and also for Burchett's psychology. The
theory had no basis in fact. It was the fancy of the novelist, trying to
find a way into the head of an undeveloped character. I was already
knitting a person called Burchett with the grand, subterranean themes of
an unwritten novel. The A-bomb divided the 20th century. So, too, would
atoms split in the mind of my Mr. Burchett, altering his view of the
world, perhaps sending a hairline fracture through his soul.
When the Iraq
conflict broke out in the wake of September 11, 2001, and the world
witnessed the manipulation of the media by America, and truth, as they
say, became a casualty itself, I kept thinking of Burchett and Hiroshima.
In that instance, his purpose was the pursuit of truth. That purpose may
have been tangled up with notions of future fame and accolades, of
promotion and financial reward, of changing the world.
It is the dichotomy
of reporting: at some points in your career you write for the public, but
you also write for other journalists. "This is what I got," you're saying,
"and you didn't." It was a dangerous, renegade act (often the prerequisite
for defining moments) for which Burchett was later vilified by US
government officials, who claimed he had fallen victim to Japanese
propaganda. In some ways, it went to the very definition of reporting.
In the context of the
contemporary world, with television and print journalists "embedded" with
US troops invading Iraq (the word itself, embedded, so quickly redefined
and attached to the media), I thought of Burchett and that warm September
in 1945 when he walked through the ruins of Hiroshima with his notebook. I
felt that something had been lost. That we had mislaid something very
important about, or within, ourselves. That in modern times the media was
like sediment, layer after layer of it, rolled out over feeling and
empathy and rage and all those human responses to things that happen in
the world. That everything would set like sandstone, and one day, beneath
the many strata, a little fossilized truth would be found, embedded,
fragile as a mosquito.
I'd bought Burchett's
book This Monstrous War for $1, but didn't realize until I got home that
it had been inscribed by the author. His best wishes and signature were
scratched onto the title page in blue ink some time in the 1950s. When you
begin a writing project you accept, beyond logic or reason, all manner of
superstitions, totems, coincidences and signs. You believe they will help
guide the arrow.
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