Is This Our Life?
Rosenberg, Bernard
HIROSHIMA DIARY: THE JGURNAL OF A JAPANESE PHYSICIAN, AUGUST 6-SEPTEMBER 30, 1945, by Michihiko Hachiya. University of North Carolina Press. 238 pp. $3.50. All men are equal, only some are...
...If so, the American will have to look far to find it...
...Hiroshima was becoming a wicked town...
...Getting to my feet, I discovered that I had tripped over a man's head...
...Nevertheless, to be featureless, faceless, was perhaps less merciful a fate than to be headless...
...In extreme situations, which are a series of traumata bombarding the nervous system, men rapidly lose their special sensitiveness...
...Shall we belabor the fool who does not know which way is up when no man can tell for sure, any more than he can distinguish between left and right from one end of a small world to another...
...This man must be regarded as an artist: he agonizes over the esthetic adequacy of a medical report, and afterwards, regrets that he ever rushed into print with his manuscript...
...Rosy worms, the thickness and length of my finger, spattered with blood, with little white heads and innumerable legs, crawl around in the wound, held fast in the putrefaction...
...HIS BOOK reads like a highly contrived allegory with Dr...
...We can only recoil from the thought of such disfiguration...
...Doctor," asked Mr...
...I had to revise my meaning of the word to describe what I saw...
...However, it remained for America to fuse them in one apocalyptic moment of gorgeous annihilation...
...Bruno Bettelheim has written of long-time political prisoners in Dachau who, under sufficient duress but without the current brain-washing, tended to accept Nazi ideology...
...In two days I had become at home in this environment of chaos and despair...
...In many shades of pink, darker beneath the surface, lighter at the edges, scabby, unevenly congealed with blood, it is as wide open as a mine pit...
...Devastation may be a better word, but really, I know of no word or words to describe the view from my twisted iron bed in the firegutted ward of the Communication Hospital...
...This is the burden our frail ethic must bear...
...The young ladies were exhibited over television but only behind screens and in silhouette...
...From inside our bales of cotton such a combination produces no great sense of incongruity...
...If we ever thought that, although human beings were individually mortal, the species itself was immortal, even this illusion has been shattered and taken from us...
...August 15: "After supper, Mr...
...The rest of us here and there were traumatized...
...By the same token, man's situation is always extreme, only sometimes it is more extreme...
...Hirohata, "a human being who has been roasted becomes quite small, doesn't he...
...We know how a number of inordinately ethical C.O.'s, when subjected to a systematic semi-starvation at the University of Minnesota, took to stealing and lost interest in their outside obligations...
...Heaven help us, this is our life...
...Hachiya compares the creatures around him with scarecrows, dry codfish, or rats, we know how carefully he has selected his metaphor...
...Hachiya as Everyman...
...Close up there is still another obstacle...
...blood-stained pus...
...Or Miss Susukida with features twisted into what appeared to be a comic mask...
...If the medical doctor, presumably inured to death and suffering, experiences such a reaction, how much more certain it is to dehumanize the layman...
...Actually, about Nagasaki there is nothing but silence...
...That he had to do it for us does not entitle us to blame him-not unless we can honestly say we would have decided differently...
...The head had belonged to a young officer whose body was crushed beneath a massive gate...
...The horizon disappears and there is no way to tell right from left, up from down...
...Judging from some of the reviews, Hiroshima Diary is being used rather widely as an anodyne to what might otherwise be guilt feelings...
...Hachiya's purity of style and economy of expression are also reminiscent of Kafka, although they no doubt stem from such poetic forms as the haiku in which he is well versed...
...When, therefore, Dr...
...We are morally and politically, if not spatially, disoriented in just this fashion...
...Hachiya leaves no doubt that he is a devout and compassionate soul...
...Finally, there is no vocabulary suited to describe the unutterable...
...The program, which provided an air of absolute fantasticality, was called "This Is Your Life...
...For acres and acres the city was like a desert except for the scattered piles of brick and roof tile...
...Those who were close to the hypocenter in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and did not look away as a parachute laden with one bomb fell lazily to earth, simply had their eyes burnt out...
...I see that from a distance...
...There was no answer...
...Hachiya of a dirty plaster doll tossed on a trash heap...
...Still, as the Atomic Age reached its second day, he had already begun to castigate himself for his inhumanity...
...But apart from that, today we are all equally implicated...
...The Western reader cannot but be reminded of Franz Kafka...
...Saeki and I lingered in the dining room...
...Any unduly extreme situation converts men, victims and perpetrators alike, into sub-men, a new species whose life expectancy is not very great...
...THE CLINICAL definition of trauma is a state that results from an overwhelming experience, such as birth or death, which is greater than the psyche's ability to absorb it...
...Dr...
...Last year the Hiroshima Maidens were brought to America: they are here to have their faces lifted so that they may become presentable once more...
...As a direct result of that unassimilable shock, most men would now be spiritually at home in an Antarctic 'whiteout...
...perhaps some sense of- residual guilt lies behind the absence of a Nagasaki Diary...
...Mizoguchi, Miss Kado, old Mrs...
...With only a trifling change of the symptoms that are noted, the following passage from Kafka's prophetic story, "A Country Doctor," could as easily have come from this journal: Yes, now I see that the boy is really sick...
...Men become dizzy and have difficulty standing...
...Could anyone else have re corded the question asked by a certain Mr...
...And, again, the vision of man transformed into an inanimate object or a ravening beast or a paltry insect establishes a transcendent affinity between the Czech novelist and the Japanese physician...
...Rexford Tugwell has remembered that "When Harry S. Truman had to decide whether the United States should produce H bombs, he was acting as our surrogate...
...It is as if they were suspended inside a bale of cotton...
...From the madhouse, the concentration camp, the death factory, the experimental laboratory, and the ruins of a radioactive city, the same hypotheses are regularly validated...
...human beings without eyes, noses, or mouths, who looked as if their ears had melted off...
...The diarist reports bad nocturnal dreams-which are no worse than the real experiences he has just had...
...Hasada whose badly swollen face looked like a glazed bun sprinkled with white powder...
...Hachiya's searing description...
...The first A bomb produced a huge cloud that rose angrily over Hiroshima "and, on both sides of the main cloud beautiful smaller clouds spread out like a golden screen," says one witness who adds, "I have never seen anything so magnificent in my life...
...One envelopes the other until we have been drawn into a phantasmagoric but unendurably real world...
...The violence of art and the art of violence have frequently been noted in Japanese culture...
...No survivor of Nagasaki has so far thanked us for the second, more destructive and even less justified explosion...
...Some of the supplies we received this morning had already been stolen out of the hospital...
...This climatological phenomenon was described the other day by an Associated Press correspondent as he touched upon one of several hazards connected with a forthcoming international geo-physical expedition: In a "white-out the sun's rays slant through snow clouds to create a great white void...
...Dr, Hachiya, himself a victim-with no fewer than one hundred and fifty separate little wounds-absolves America for having dropped the bomb...
...Bodies that were burned and swollen, sheets of skin peeled away from their tissues as they glistened with ugly secretions...
...Where does wahrheit end and dichtung begin...
...In what language shall we represent Miss Yama, half of whose body was so scorched that she reminded Dr...
...In his right side, near the hip, he has a wound as big as a dinner plate...
...Or Dr...
...All men are equal, only some are more equal than others...
...This flight of the "diseased imagination" is qualitatively no different from what Dr...
...Is it not obscene that so many should shrug off the whole matter and that some should even find solace in Dr...
...Vandals even came with carts and hauled away everything they could carry...
...We were and are in it with him...
...University of North Carolina Press...
...This reflection is probably to be found on a subliminal level everywhere in the world, and it is brought to the foreground of our consciousness by a book like Michihiko Hachiyas' Hiroshima Diary...
...Hirohata who witnessed what survivors in and around Hiroshima called the pika or flash-boom...
...It is enough to make one whistle...
...When there is nothing but sorrow, pain and horror all around us, our emotions are bound to be coarsened, dulled and finally, blunted altogether...
...HIROSHIMA DIARY: THE JGURNAL OF A JAPANESE PHYSICIAN, AUGUST 6-SEPTEMBER 30, 1945, by Michihiko Hachiya...
...A few years ago Harold Orlansky gave us an unforgettable picture of his own brutalization and that of his fellow attendants assigned to work in a mental hospital...
...Hachiya saw minutes after the people of Hiroshima were incinerated...
...I learned people were looting the supply dump at the engineering corps...
...They even emulated the SS...
...The man was dead...
...Excuse me, excuse me, please,' I cried hysterically...
...One wishes that there were even a little more depth to Truman so that by now, at least, he could realize the awesomeness of his initial deci, sion...
...He will surely have to look beyond the memoirs of Harry Truman, who has reaffirmed his conviction that we had to use the bombs, not by dropping them first, let us say, on a desert island and thus advertising their power, but just as they were used...
...When we are gripped by the universal madness, slaughter and beauty seem logically conjoined...
...There were even some Jews in the Warsaw ghetto who capitalized on the misery of their fellows-till they too were reduced to inorganic matter...
Vol. 4 • July 1957 • No. 3
