The Mandatory Japanese Toilet Post

Ok, let's start with your basic toilet. The typical "Japanese style" toilet looks like the one above on the left--it's a squatter. The idea is that because you're not touching any part of it at any time, it's much more sanitary than a toilet you sit on. Having experienced this type of toilet many times throughout my life in such places as Taiwan and China, I am going to respectfully disagree with this point of view. I think they're vastly underestimating the splash factor. The toilet on the right is called a "Western style" toilet. As you can see, it's a regular sit on the seat toilet. The Japanese have somewhat improved upon the sanitation of this model by making toilet cleaner dispensers widely available in stalls with Western toilets. Usually this is a spray that you use to wipe the seat. Most public restrooms featured both types of toilets, although public school restrooms and a few subway restrooms remain Japanese style only. From a discussion of our homestays, however, it seemed that nearly all Japanese homes have converted to the Western sit-down model. 

The Western-style toilet above has a feature that I saw several times, on both Western and Japanese style toilets. Notice that the toilet tank is actually a sink, so that the water you wash your hands with is actually then used to flush. Ingenious! (I thought)

Now a few words about the amenities of a Japanese bathroom. In the picture above, you'll notice that the trash can in this bathroom stall can be opened by a wave of the hand over a motion sensor in the corner. These motion sensors were very common, for soap, faucets, and flushers, and the flusher sensor would often be located in the wall so that you can control when it flushes (unlike many automatic flushing toilets in the United States that awkwardly flush whenever you move slightly on the toilet). 

I failed to get a picture, but Japanese bathrooms almost always also have some sort of device to create sounds--sounds of flushing, sounds of waves, just ambient noise, whatever--whose sole purpose is to cover up whatever sounds you might be making! Wow that would've come in handy in high school, when I went through that phase of not wanting to ever pee whenever someone else was there because then they could hear it. 

Last but not least, I can't discuss amenities without talking about the fancy options on the Toto, the biggest manufacturer of toilets with serious options. If you return back to the picture of the Western-style toilet at the top, notice the buttons on the left. This is a less fancy version that probably doesn't do much more than spray bidet water at a couple of different pressures. The fancy ones will spray, dry, warm up the seat, and probably more things I never learned. I saw toilets with more than 10 buttons. I will say this--it's nice to sit on a warmed toilet seat. Let's definitely bring that to America. The bidet I could take or leave. 

Japanese public restrooms also consider babies and small children more so than other countries I've been. Many bathrooms offer (left) small urinals for young boys who go to the restroom with their mother, and (middle and right) stalls equipped with baby seats for moms who don't have anyone to hand the baby off to when it's time to pee. 

Regrettably, the Japanese do not seem to be overly interested in hand soap, which strikes me as strange, given all the other lengths they go to for the sake of cleanliness. I guess it just goes to show we all have different ideas about what's clean and what's not. In any case, a very high number of public restrooms, even fancy ones, were noticeably lacking hand soap. Note the pictures above. The one on the left features a special hook just for your umbrella--but no hand soap. The one on the right has taken care to provide you with a special garbage can for nappies--but no hand soap. And it's not like we have a situation where nothing is provided for--in China you always have to carry your own tissues with you because you never know if there's going to be toilet paper or not, but in Japan I didn't see an empty roll even once. Yet no hand soap. I don't get it, Japan.

The other random thing I noticed was that maybe Japanese toilet designers don't really think about privacy when they're designing. There were a number of instances when men doing their business was COMPLETELY visible from the entryway of the bathroom, two prominent examples above. Now, on one of my last days in Tokyo I went to this reproduction of an Edo-era village, and noticed that the town lavatories were designed so that the doors only came up about 3 feet, so when you're squatting people can still see your head. The logic is that that way people know whether or not the toilet is occupied. I noticed the next day on the train that the men's urinal had a WINDOW in the door so that you can see the back of whoever's inside people. Same concept? Hmmmmmm.....

Finally we come to the bathroom of the Japanese home. Unfortunately, I sort of forgot to take pictures in the houses I stayed at (hey, you don't bring your purse to the bathroom at home!) but here are a couple of the few I did take. In Japanese homes the bath/shower is always a separate room from the toilet, and there's often also a completely separate sink area for washing your hands. This is probably because people spend a significant amount of time in the bathtub, so you've got to make sure the toilet is available for other people to use. On the left, we have the bath/shower room. The shower is just the room itself with a big drain in the floor. When you take a shower, you sit on a little stool and scrub yourself down. Then you hop into the tub to soak. You clean yourself first because the same bathwater will be used for every person who takes a bath that night. In the picture, you can just barely see a digital display over the bathtub, letting us know how hot the water is and making sure it maintains temperature.

The middle picture is actually my hostel bathroom, not a home. But many homes, especially the more traditional ones, will have a separate set of slippers to be used only in the bathroom. They stay in the bathroom and are shared by the entire family.

And last, I just thought this scale was hilarious. ;)

Japanese Family Life

I’m really glad Japan Society arranged for us to have both a suburban homestay and a rural homestay—if anything it helped highlight the fact that just like the United States, Japan is also filled with great variations when it comes to cultural or familial norms. Being able to debrief with the other teachers about our homestay experiences as well was incredibly useful, because in our discussion we found more divergences, but were also able to pull out some similarities and trends. Here’s what we found:

Seems like your average family in Japan maintains fairly rigid gender roles as a method of creating stability and functionality in the home. Most of our families had a structure in which the dad worked long hours and didn’t return home until 9 or 10 in the evening. Meanwhile, the wife generally stayed at home with the kids and took responsibility for cooking, cleaning, etc. I saw quite a broad spectrum of this—seemed like in my Arida family, for example, this role was more clearly defined, as in if the host dad wanted a coffee, he’d literally ask the wife to do it instead of getting it himself, whereas in Obu I saw the host dad help clear the table, do the dishes, play with the kids, all that. But in general, you definitely have a “men work hard, and women work just as hard at home” kind of system. I asked Yuki if she ever thought about going back to work, and she said yes, a little wistfully, but she didn’t seem resentful that she had quit her job for her family.

The really surprising thing to all of us was the fact that it’s apparently pretty standard for kids to sleep in the same room as their parents. For instance, in my host family in Obu, they had the 4-year old daughter’s bed pushed right up against the big bed in the master bedroom, with the crib just alongside for the baby. As Americans, we were all pretty shocked by this. But what about their intimacy as a couple? What about their private time? Several of us asked about “date night” and discovered that the concept pretty much doesn’t exist. In fact, Yuki told me flat out that it’s frowned upon for parents to hire a babysitter in Japan. The only way you can leave your house without your kids is if you have your parents watch them for you. What I understood from talking to Yuki is that she sometimes was able to go out with her friends and her husband was sometimes able to go out with his friends, but they more or less never went out together. This was pretty incredible to us as Americans. We’re basically the most individualistic and selfish society on earth and here we were being shown a life in which you’re expected to give up romance, privacy, and career (if you’re a woman) for your family.

So what about this family? Most of the families we lived with seemed fairly healthy and happy (keep in mind, these families self-selected to host a foreign visitor), and the kids were pretty well-behaved. You know how whenever you’re with parents who have young children, there’s always a moment sooner or later when the parent just lose it and start screaming? I never saw that happen even once. When I mentioned it to Rob, he suggested that that was probably a function of the parents not wanting to cause a scene in front of guests—even if this is the case, it’s still amazing to me that public child tantrums are avoidable. All of us remarked on how calm and laidback the families were. A “hands-off” approach seemed to be happening with the parenting. This contrasts quite sharply with your typical middle class American family you see in the streets, in which the scenario is usually that a kid starts crying and the mom is immediately slobbering all over herself to appease it. A lot of us commented that there were a lot of toys and very little TV. In my family, there was maybe a half hour to an hour max of children’s TV a day. I was astonished by how little TV there was. It kind of seems to fit with the lack of technology in general that we’ve seen here. I’ll get to schools later, but classrooms are basically just chalkboards. A lot of the hotel rooms we’ve been in have been kind of dated in terms of gadgetry and TVs. I can’t seem to find a coffeehouse that has even a single outlet. And I think we were all surprised by how few tablets, etc, we’ve seen in general circulation. It’s not as if technology doesn’t exist or that Japan is behind—obviously it’s not. It’s just that it’s not as present as we were expecting given this high-tech electronica image we have of Japan.

Now, I don’t know what any of this means, I’m just making observations, but I’m going to throw out there that Japan is just much more family-oriented than I expected. In the past few years, apparently, they’ve increased paid maternity leave to over a year. When a woman gets pregnant, she gets handed all this information on healthcare, vaccinations, an schools by the government. Even in the public sphere, the family is just present. I don’t have kids, so I can’t really be an authority on this, but I get the impression that kids are kind of supposed to be hidden. No one wants to know that a woman is nursing, much less see it. Everyone glares whenever a baby is crying or a kid is throwing a tantrum. I never thought about what a woman with a baby must have to do when she needs to pee, but in Japan, they’ve thought about it! Women’s bathrooms usually have stalls equipped with a baby holder for a woman to put her baby while she pees! There’s usually also a little boy’s urinal for a little boy to use in the women’s restroom so he doesn’t have to go to the men’s room alone. I saw public spaces for kids everywhere in Japan. In a bakery, I saw a little playroom to the side for kids. It’s really clear to me that Japan is a society that considers families in a way that the United States doesn’t.

Baby seat in a stall in the women's room.

Little boy's urinal in the women's restroom

Small play area in a local bakery

Homestay in Arida, Wakayama Prefecture

Rice paddies

View of Arida from the Tanakas' hillside farm. 

       

My second homestay was in a more rural area where the people are predominantly farmers or fisherman, and the dynamic was radically different from what I saw in Obu. This homestay was both more interesting as well as more uncomfortable for me, and I think a lot of that probably has to do with the rural/urban divide laid on top of being with an unfamiliar family. There was a tendency among us Americans to compare the suburban family in Obu to a suburban American family, and likewise with this rural homestay, and I think to some extent, the comparison is very apt. In Obu, we drove around in a minivan and went to a big superstore to shop. Most of the families were younger with kids. In Arida, it like smalltown America  in some ways—everyone knew each other, gossip flowed like wine, people were a little more open and gregarious and “earthy” if you will, and the town seemed to be mostly older people since the youth had all packed up and moved to the city.

I think I can illustrate what the difference is between Obu and Arida by discussing my first night there. Remember in Obu, when there were formal introductions and gift exchanges with the mayor and a TV crew? Not to brag, but we were kind of a big deal. You know what happened Arida? They led us to this little community center were we waited in a tatami room before we met our host families. Rob casually mentioned that we would be having dinner in the community center, then mysteriously had us line up in some predetermined order for going upstairs to the dining room. So we lined up, walked up the stairs and through the hall…and then into a banquet room filled with basically the whole town. Everyone important was there. The vice-mayor, all the principals and vice principals from the local schools, our host families, and a bunch of other people whose identity I never learned. More formal speeches, then we were presented to our host families and sat with them for the banquet that followed. Looking around, I could see that everyone who made a speech had a copy of a SEATING CHART to refer to.  Now, in both Obu and Arida we were treated like local celebrities, but in Obu the host families didn’t really know each other, and everything was highly structured and formalized, hosted by the Obu International Association. In Arida, it genuinely felt like an entire community had come out to greet us.

Now, what did this mean in terms of setting the tone for the rest of my stay? Well, to be frank, it was a bit of a zoo and circus situation in which the host families had first row seats to watching the monkeys ride unicycles before we moved on to the next town. I suppose that’s only fair, though, since I’m now turning the tables and analyzing their behavior like a sociologist. =)

Here’s what it was like—my host family, let’s call them the Tanakas, were the most welcoming hosts you could ever wish for, and you could tell they genuinely wanted me to enjoy myself and be comfortable. The family make-up was the father and mother, both in their 60s I’d say, and the mother’s mother. They have two kids who are grown who live hours away and rarely visit. I want to try and describe my host father, since I interacted with him more than the other two. Hosting is clearly his gig, he does it every year, and the first thing he did when we got into the house was show me Facebook pictures of the last two people he hosted. He’s an older guy, but very spry and brown, I guess from working on the farm for most of his life (I actually noticed that more people in Arida were tanned than we’ve been seeing). He’s an easy-going type and laughs constantly. In fact, I’d venture to say he’s got a touch of the Most Embarrassing Dad In The World Syndrome in that he’s constantly repeating his stories and telling jokes that only he thinks are hilarious. He loves to refer to himself as “A Bad Boy” and plays up his laziness like it’s an old comfortable joke. I’m not sure how true it is, but he himself told me that while his mother-in-law and wife work on the farm all day, he usually just sleeps and eats and plays golf. Indeed, I think that’s the public image he’s comfortable with. He definitely enjoys the persona of Host that he can take on when foreign visitors come, and though his grasp of English grammar is weak he uses his words loudly and frequently and wildly gesticulated. I think he enjoys the attention and power of being the “interpreter.” In contrast, his wife—whom I really liked!—is quiet in public. The first night I met her I thought she was very severe, but turns out that is just her public face. At home, she laughs and jokes and chats lightly with host dad all the time. That said, she stayed home for almost all of the outings we had.

Mrs. Tanaka going about her morning in the kitchen

In contrast my host father—along with several other host dads—followed the teachers around the next day as we did our visit to city hall and two local schools. Whatever we were doing, you could always turn and see a few of the host dads laughing with each other and snapping pictures of us. They seemed to be having a grand old time, and I guess if they’re retired we would seem like an exciting change. They most definitely traded stories of us. I know this because since I can understand at least a little Japanese, I got the general gist of most of what the dad said in front of me. For instance, I heard the story of how Brad (another educator) was deathly sick the first night and his host mother offered him a banana but he wouldn’t take it three times over the course of the day, once to my host mother, and twice to other host dads. I know you’re thinking there’s more to this story, but nope, that’s the whole thing. Host dad also talked non-stop about me, unfortunately, indicating imminent full-blown Embarrassing Dad Disease. The day after he took me out for karaoke, he opened almost every conversation he had with a description of how I sang two Chinese songs and one Japanese one, isn’t that amazing? I got the playback on how I wrote an incredibly difficult kanji during calligraphy class, and when we met his daughter and her boyfriend (yes, I was an excuse to extort a visit from her all the way from Osaka), he actually pulled his camera out and began showing them pictures of me practicing a hit in Kendo club! I do understand where all this is coming from, and I’ll admit that Americans would probably do the same thing—behind their back, that is. I think what made it so uncomfortable is that it was playing out right in front of me.

One of the things we did was work clearing the weeds out of a rice paddy with 5th graders from the school. No pictures of me doing it because my host dad actually took a nap in his car and didn't wake up in time to take pictures, haha.

We also watched some of the local high school clubs. Minoshima High School is actually nationally ranked in several sports, so their sports clubs are also very high caliber. This is their club sumo practice. 

I guess any time you travel to another place, you will feel “other” no matter what. And in a homestay situation, everything will inevitably be a little artificial—I mean, what do you really know about this foreign person except: “This is Karen, she speaks Chinese. Her Japanese is excellent, and she has lived all over the United States. She’s thankfully not a vegetarian and she loves spicy food, isn’t that great?” I think that any encounter between two cultures is necessarily somewhat uncomfortable, and if you really want to learn about other people you kind of just have to embrace the discomfort. Every year that I host a Chinese teacher, I appreciate and understand this that much more. Seeing what it’s like from the other side (being the visitor instead of the host) only clarifies my understanding that it’s this uncomfortable feeling that is actually at the heart of traveling and exploring.

In conclusion—I had a valuable experience in Arida. Do I want to go back? Not so much. But I’m grateful to my host family for opening their home to me and showing me their world. In my time there, I visited a local karaoke bar, went to Adventure World to see the pandas, checked out the local vacation getaway beach, and worked in a rice paddy with 5^th graders. I must say that Wakayama is a very beautiful place and the mikan (mandarin oranges) are indeed delicious. You know I snatched up a bottle of that Arida mikan wine to take home. Slurp!

Me with host sister at Adventure World

Pandas in tense and heavy bamboo-eating competition

Mmmm, mikan wine!

Hiroshima and the Atom Bomb

1945

2013

Ok, so this blog entry has been the most difficult for me to write because I have so many random thoughts about EVERYTHING!  I decided to frontload some basic pictures from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum with simple captions first, and let the pictures tell the story of my experience, THEN write my thoughts about them.

I didn't realize that Hiroshima actually housed a huge military presence. It's a port city and has thus historically been a place for the mobilization of forces before expeditions to Korea and China, for example, or for many of the WWII Pacific endeavors. This map shows military posts in the city Green means it was there before 1894 (pre-Sino Japanese War), purple means it was built sometime between then and WWII.

I had no idea that there whole military maneuvers carried out to practice the dropping the A-bomb. Every yellow mark on this map represents a spot where a "dummy a-bomb" was dropped in the two months before the real bomb. Apparently the dummies killed almost 2000 on their own. 

Model of Hiroshima before the bomb

Model of Hiroshima after the bomb

A shirt burned most of the way through from the bomb

A lunchbox with its contents charred from bomb.

The heat burned through the black ink writing that had been on this cloth since black absorbs more heat

Metal that bubbled up from the heat of the bomb.

This radioactive "black rain" was sometimes consumed by survivors, desperately thirsty after becoming sickened by radiation. Drinking could kill them or make them sicker, giving them diarrhea for months.

And now for the lengthy discussion:

Victims for Peace?

Memorials and museums can be very tricky sometimes, because inevitably there will be some sort of perspective involved, and then it becomes an issue of whose perspective is it, how “accurate” is its recounting of events, what does it deliberately leave out, what does it fail to consider, and why has it undertaken the task of memorialization to begin with. Places that I can think of that have had to deal with these thorny questions are the Vietnam Memorial, Auschwitz (sp?), the Nanjing Massacre Museum, the 9/11 Memorial—the list goes on. For the subject of the atomic bomb and Hiroshima, recall the controversy over the manner in which the Smithsonian should display a restored Enola Gay (US plane that dropped the bomb) to mark the 50^th anniversary of the bomb. What’s the story there? The US won the war, so is this an artifact of victory and veteran pride? Or a symbol of the human tragedy that resulted from the bomb? What the Enola Gay means to Americans might be quite different from what it means to Japanese. In any case, some people threw a fit at the idea of suggesting that the United States did wrong to drop the bomb. There’s some good info related to the controversy here: http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/enola/

In Hiroshima, we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to yes, learn about the bomb and city, etc, but also to consider some of these questions. For me, I also came into it wondering how I could raise questions for my students about war and ethics and technology. How does technology bring new moral dilemmas or responsibilities into play? Does technology that removes the personal nature of killing facilitate state violence and war? Is there a moral code to waging war? Should there be one? Is it even meaningful to speak of “conventions of war” as long as we still wage war? (and also, has anyone ever really given a crap about the Geneva Convention?) I’ve been wanting to do something with nuclear deterrence and drone warfare for a while now, but have been looking for a way to tie in more “mainstream” standardized test material into it. I don’t know how much standardized test material I got out of this, actually, but I do know that I came out of this city with so many more questions than when I entered it—if I can somehow do the same for my students, then I’ll have accomplished my goal!

So one big question I have is, who’s a better proponent of peace than a victim of terrible violence? Japan today has kind of a dual symbolism. It’s often touted as the only pacifist country in the world, the only country without its own army, a country that has low crime rates, a country that having experienced the horrors of the bomb now advocates peace. On the flip side, we also have this image of the Japanese war criminal who rapes women and kills children indiscriminately, and the looming Japanese empire out to conquer all of the Pacific, and the picture of Pearl Harbor being bombed to smithereens to a theatrical Hollywood soundtrack. To some extent these identities are laid out for us chronologically, so that we have a vague idea that evil has somehow evolved into good. It’s really difficult for us to look at both visions of Japan at the same time because they don’t go very well together.

I bring up this dual persona only because this is really one of the most obvious issues the museum had to struggle with from the beginning. Victim or villain, either side is a caricature, and any museum worth its name would want to attempt a more balanced approach. Here’s how the museum dealt with that: The building is divided into two parts—the first half covers the history of Hiroshima as a military outpost and port city and goes through the early stages of WWII, including Japanese aggression—albeit slightly glossed over—then the 2^nd half of the museum covers the science of the bomb and both the immediate and long-term effects. You can probably tell from this description which section the pictures above fit into. Now here’s where it gets interesting. The 2^nd half of the museum begins with the visitor walking through a long corridor built to look like the inside of a damaged brick building. The walls behind the brick are painted with a landscape of razed and smoking trees and buildings backlight by a fiery glow. This is obviously meant to duplicate the experience of a survivor moments after the bomb exploded and to evoke the loneliness and despair of a city completely annihilated. As you turn the corner, you’re greeted by the sight of mannequins, faces raw, skin melting, clothes half-burned away. It’s very effective and very emotional, I will say that.

I was unsurprised to learn that the museum originally only contained this 2^nd half, adding that first half only after it received complaints that it ignored Japan’s military aggression. Can you imagine starting your museum experience with that corridor walk? Whatever came after, it would be very difficult to return to an analytical frame of mind. That section actually reminded me of the Nanjing Massacre Museum in Nanjing, China, which was BLACK, very dim and somber inside, and filled with mannequin scenes meant to make you feel horrified and dismayed. I think it’d be pretty difficult to walk out of that museum not feeling just a little angry towards Japan. In contrast, I’d have to say the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum did a respectable job of both evoking an emotional response AND conveying important scientific and historical context. Although a fellow teacher said she felt a little bit uncomfortable at times as an American, I didn’t actually get that sense at all. If anything, I felt that military aggression by BOTH the United States and Japan were downplayed. The firebombing of Tokyo, for instance, was scarcely mentioned. Forget about the Nanjing Massacre or the Bataan Death March.

I almost felt that the message being pushed was, “It doesn’t matter what happened before, what’s most important now is peace.” A subtle evasion of both casting blame and accepting blame by taking on the burden of a more righteous mission: world peace. Right away you’ll notice the name of the museum—the museum has an agenda and is very straightforward about it. It exists to promote the banning of nuclear weapons and to promote world peace. That’s the mission of the museum, and it’s visible in various aspects of its exhibitions. For instance, there are several walls that display hundreds of letters written by the mayors of Hiroshima to every country that has tested nuclear weapons on every known incidence of said testing (hint: most of them are to the United States and the Soviet Union. The most recent one is to Obama). There’s also a place for signing petitions to convene nuclear disarmament talks, etc.

 

Now, you can’t really take on the mantle of World Peace Promoter without also accepting a certain authority imparted by victimhood. Obviously I have zero problem with anyone promoting world peace and the banning of nuclear weapons, but I think the peace persona that Japan has taken on sometimes makes it way too easy to disguise the role the Japan and the Self-Defense Forces currently plays in American militarism.  Just a thought.

I want to discuss the surrounding environs of the memorial museum now. This museum and the park that surround it are located very near the epicenter of the atomic bomb dropped on city in 1945. Its main landmark is the Peace Dome (of note is that it’s actually called the “atomic bomb dome” in Japanese), the hollowed out, blasted remains of a building that is one of the few original structures left. 

The park is beautiful, excellently maintained, and contains numerous memorial statuary of its own, installed over the years for various reasons. There is, for instance, one devoted to the many schoolchildren who died. Before the bomb, children 8-12 had already been evacuated, while children older than that were put into workteams to demolish rows of houses to create firebreaks in the event of firebombing. A number of these teams were at work when the bomb hit. Rob problematized this memorial for us by raising the provocative question—they’re children, but of course they were being put to work for the war effort, so to what extent does that make or not make them combatants? A great question to add to my class discussions of the moral obligations of war.

Strings of paper cranes left at one of the memorials. These are everywhere in Hiroshima, and I think have come to represent the spirit of peace after the bomb, especially after Sadako's iconic story.  Apparently, Sadako's relatives have just donated one of the last 5 cranes she folded to Pearl Harbor. 

Peace Bell memorial. On the bell is carved a map of the world with no lines between the countries. 

Children's Peace Monument. This monument was unveiled on Children's Day (a national holiday in Japan) and commemorates Sadako and all other children who died as a result of the bomb. Sadako was a girl who died from radiation-induced leukemia a few years after the bomb. She folded over 1000 cranes according to the Japanese traditional belief that doing so grants you a wish. Children today visit this monument. The cranes they fold to wish for world peace are housed in the structures you see just behind the statues (now there are too many to house, however).

One of the more interesting side memorials I’ll point out is the memorial to Korean residents of Hiroshima who died in the bombing (some moved there for economic opportunities, some were forcibly brought by the Japanese military for labor). The memorial was originally erected outside of the park by the local Korean community, and not moved into the park until 1999 (shortly after it became possible for Koreans to attain Japanese citizenship without having to take Japanese names). Why should this memorial have been excluded from the sacred inner space to be begin with? I don’t know, but I’d guess it has something to do with the desire to maintain Japanese exclusivity over the rights to claim victimhood from the only atomic bomb ever used in war. We’d discussed already how the bomb, once only significant to Hiroshima, over time took on national symbolic significance. Japan as a nation eventually became the victim of the bomb, and this ideological shift must have been part and parcel of the Peace Movement in Japan in the later half of the 20^th century. You can’t really separate Japanese pacifism from its faultless victimhood, which I mentioned already. I think that persona I mentioned earlier, the “peaceful” one, is really something that helped construct post-war Japanese national identity. That might be one reason why Japan didn’t want to acknowledge other victims of the bomb—doing so might make Japanese victimhood less Japanese, if you know what I mean. I also think acknowledging those other victims, some of whom would not have perished had the Japanese military not forced them to move there, recall events that bring that peace-loving identity into question.

The turtle is a Korean motif indicating passage to heaven. There's a bowl of water in front of the turtle. We noticed that water is a common theme in many of the memorials, and there was some discussion whether this had to do with water being a purifying thing in Shinto, or whether it was referencing the thirst experienced by the many victims of the bomb. 

Hibakusha [survivor] Testimonials

Aside from the museum and the park, a big part of my experience in Hiroshima was talking to hibakusha, or survivors of the atom bomb. We spoke to two different survivors. It's one thing to read about a terrible tragedy and the human suffering it causes, or even to see pictures. It's quite another to hear someone talk about their own experiences and emotions. Anyone who has ever heard a Holocaust survivor speak will understand what I mean. As a history teacher, it was also a great opportunity for me to experience oral history, which, like eye-witness testimony, is heavily edited by the speaker after the fact and is not necessarily "accurate." So what makes these testimonies so valuable then? I think it's getting in touch with the human side of tragedy and empathizing. We don't need oral testimony to know what happened, we have plenty of records. The oral testimony though tells us what people remember, what made that lasting impression on them, and it shows us what the people who lived it think is most important.

The first hibakusha we spoke to was Ms. Toshiko Tanaka. I googled her later and found her story here: http://hibakushastories.org/toshiko-tanaka.html .  It's incredibly similar to what I heard from her that night. I guess when you retell a story this important it eventually takes on a practiced manner and becomes almost a performance. In short, Ms. Tanaka was 6 when the bomb hit. She felt the heat blast and suffered from radiation sickness for a few weeks (fevers, coma, burns) and witnessed many deaths and more serious cases. An image that really struck me when she described it was how people's skin looked after--raw, like a peeled tomato. It really stuck out to me that even to this day, she can't look at a tomato at a barbecue without thinking of it. I can't remember exactly when Ms. Tanaka began telling her story, but it was really recently, within a couple of years, I think. In fact, I want to say it was the Fukushima incident that inspired her to speak out (i can't find my notes!). She even began to do some research on radiation on her own and took a trip to visit Chernobyl. That really struck me, that she waited so many years to talk about it but that once something triggered that decision it turned into a kind of mission for her--now she tells her story quite frequently and promotes the banning of nuclear weapons. I could tell that it's difficult to talk about for her--she was very calm and even smiled a couple of times during her talk--it felt very much like a professional curtain that she'd dropped to keep some distance from her topic. Ms. Tanaka is actually an enamel artist, and she discussed that one of the reasons she got into art is because it was an emotional outlet for a lot of the unresolved feelings she had about the bomb. Her art is abstract, but there are definitely many themes relating to war and even the bomb directly. You can check out her art here: http://www.toshikotanaka.com/ 

The second survivor we spoke to was a Mr. Ito (I don't recall his first name, and my notes are packed away at the moment). This one was rough--most of us were tearing up throughout and we all needed a 5 minute break before the Q&A session. Like Ms. Tanaka, he did not speak out for most of his life. What inspired him to do so?--his son's death in the Twin Towers during 9/11. To me it sounds like it was his son's death that initially triggered the desire to speak, and at first he only spoke about 9/11, only adding his own experiences as a boy in Hiroshima later. Perhaps it's because 9/11 is so familiar to New Yorkers and Americans in general that his story touched a much rawer nerve for us. Mr. Ito was 10 years old when the bomb hit, and was in school 10km away from the epicenter. He felt the heat of the bomb and saw the mushroom cloud from the school. The building was fine, but the windows broke. The teacher sent everyone home, and Mr. Ito described seeing military trucks loaded with bodies and injured people on his way home. To me, that was an especially vivid image--imagine that feeling of dread, knowing that something awful has happened and only having the details being unveiled to you piece by piece--like when you see a car accident on a highway and begin driving past ambulances, then a burnt piece of car becomes visible, and so forth. Actually, Mr. Ito ended up returning to school to help with the relief efforts going on there. He described helping the burn victims by putting shaved cucumber and potato wraps on and fanning them. As things deteriorated, he helped pick maggots out of skin and dug large grave pits for the dead. Mr. Ito suffered no serious problems, but of the 361 students at his school, 20 passed away later from sickness. The hardest part to listen to though was when he spoke of the death of his brother, who was at a school somewhat closer to the epicenter. His brother was sick when he returned home, but the doctor couldn't diagnosis him, and he seemed to be recovering about 4-5 hours later anyway. So Mr. Ito went out to play with his brother, and only a little while later, he describes his brother removing his straw hat, and all of his hair sticking to the inside of it. His mother shaved his head and said it felt "soft and mushy." The worst, he said, was the terrible odor of his breath.

Mr. Ito went on to discuss his experience when his son died in 9/11, but I won't go too much into that since it digresses from the topic a bit. I'll just say that he left us with one strong image--that of he and his wife standing together at the Buddhist temple the same way he'd seen his parents do for his brother. He spoke a lot at the end, not necessarily about nuclear disarmament and peace, the way Ms. Tanaka had, but more about human compassion as a way of overcoming personal tragedy. He said, "You can't see people's hearts but you can see how they are kind to each other. You can't see people's thoughts but you can see their considerations towards each other." It does strike a chord that his first tragedy was the result of an American bomb, while his second was the result of a bomb targeting Americans. I think Mr. Ito above all was speaking to the universality of human experiences, even tragic ones.