These ideas about the presence of absence bring to mind my encounter with T, the first of a series of people I met who are as uncategorizable as me, and someone I never saw again. She must have been around twenty years old, and I met her on the second trip I took to Hiroshima after being adopted and carted off to the United States. Oddly enough, T declared herself asexual, and though asexuality is now considered a category, it remains a tenuous one. People have a hard time understanding absence. They’re better at gauging what is excessive—overabundance, extravagant desire, a wild orgy. Hunger is assumed to be a lack of food, but few people get what it really is: a lack of something that is unreferenced, a hole that is full of hole. It’s the same as asexuality, which people consider a lack of sexual desire, but not a thing in itself.
T wasn’t injured by Little Boy, but by a different bomb: the rain. The thick black liquid that came down after the explosion. Everyone was drenched in it, and T, like the others, didn’t think to protect herself. Nobody could imagine that the oily fluid, which some went so far as to drink, carried a bomb in each drop, like an assault rifle that shot invisible pellets of ulcers and cancer, and that would sprout one day strong as potatoes. What a spectacular ability it had to recycle itself. It went on like that for years; people were fine until suddenly they weren’t. So the bomb wasn’t entirely sincere: you could no longer distinguish the living from the dead by characteristics like appearance or movement. For the first six months following the explosion, T was as visibly healthy as she was silently dead. In the end she survived, though she traces the origin of her asexuality to that terrain of apathy, that field of indifference between what is moving and what is static, what stands erect and sprouting on one side and what is limp and weak on the other. T said she lost her sexual appetite after the explosion. She was asexual in the most literal sense of the word. She felt close to other creatures that exist in nature like her, and whenever she would pronounce words like jellyfish, starfish, or salamander, something filled her mouth that I would say is akin to desire. So you see? Same as everyone else, maybe I’m incapable of seeing presence in no-desire.
Jim could never have imagined that after his experiences in the Burmese Death Railway and the Oryoku Maru, he’d be called to occupy the country responsible for torturing him. He would have preferred to go home, but there was nobody special waiting for him there, and in a way military life gave him a sense of belonging to a bigger picture where his presence was required. The truth is, he knew full well how dispensable he was, just the same as any other soldier, but he allowed himself to be persuaded by his commanders’ spiel about the importance of individuals and found some relief in that—they’d won the war, after all, and there was no reason not to believe he’d had a hand in that himself. Might be true after all.
Jim was liberated in September 1945 by the North American troops. The first contingent of occupying forces comprised 15,000 soldiers. Thousands more would join them over the next seven years. Jim was about as familiar with the Japanese mind-set as he could be, knowing how impossible that really was, but the Americans arriving in Japan now found themselves confronting a society they’d never before encountered. And they barely knew anything about the country. Sadao Araki, a general in Japan’s imperial army, coined a slogan to describe his pride over the cultural differences between them and the invaders: “The sword is our steel Bible.” Every image, every word, refuted the biblical traditionalism of the occupation forces by a people whose moral code was not circumscribed by sacred scriptures but by an imperial dynasty descended from the sun itself. Every element of the American way of life found its antithesis in Japan. My fathers, my brothers, they didn’t need the words of some prophet when the heat of the sun could be felt across the continents, its power conveyed not through the ears but manifest through the skin itself, temperature as a physical, inarguable fact. The sun, the ball of fire illuminating the earth, belonged by birth to Japan alone, and my country felt itself the rightful proprietor of precepts that should extend, like rays of sunlight, across the globe. While the United States fought to expand its empire, Japan fought for the same cause but with a single difference: the North Americans justified themselves with weapons and speeches, while the Japanese only bore arms, since the fact that the sun rose every day was an authority beyond rhetoric.
Having known Jim, more than anything else having known love with Jim, turned me into a sponge that absorbed every piece of news, every story, every testimony of Japan’s tragedy. Love for a foreigner is what got me interested in my own people’s tragedy, since I’d been so broken by them before I met him that I’d probably have disentangled myself from my own roots, little by little. But once I met Jim, I started paying attention. I remember a government propaganda movie meant to describe the Japanese spirit that was sent to the North Americans in 1945. One of the descriptions had to do with the sun. According to the narration, the emperor, being a direct descendant of the sun, was the most brilliant, the tallest of them all, and his roles included president of the United States, prime minister of Great Britain, pope, archbishop of Canterbury, and head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Everything flowed from and was sustained by Emperor Hirohito. First-floor windows were closed when he walked down the street, the propaganda video explained, to shield houses from the radiation, as of a great star passing by. The difference between the American and the Japanese ways of thinking was evident. Though one thing remained clear: “We must try to understand Japan, since the Japanese and the Americans have been engaged in the closest of all possible relationships: war. And like it or not, we and the Japanese are doomed to remain friends for a long time.”
These videos were meant to prepare the occupation troops for the years ahead. The first North Americans to land in Japan liberated their compatriots from the concentration camps and were horror-stricken at the sight of tortured bodies: the starving, the dying, and the dead. But the reaction was mitigated by what they learned of the suffering the Japanese civilians had endured. There were thousands of orphans wandering around, begging and thieving in the streets of Tokyo and other devastated cities. Food and water were scarce. Some ate sawdust for a daily ration of starch and their protein mainly came, at the behest of the government, from reptiles, rats, and insects. I heard the testimony once of a Japanese woman who lived through the occupation, Kitty Teraki, who said it had been impossible to survive on government rations. A professor tried to disprove this statement by refusing to buy anything on the black market. He died within a short time.
Another witness said the only task the living had for months was to bury the dead. The everlasting act of burial made a deep impression on me then, as it still does now. There are certain accounts one can’t ever forget, whether direct or indirect. I remember a witness’s narration of his feelings in a film recording of the Christmas Eve mass in Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral in 1945. Everything around the cathedral had been destruction, wasteland, and death, but the angelic voices that rose inside the cathedral—he used that very word—created a sort of mirage in contrast to the desolation outside. Entering the cathedral, he saw women dressed in kimonos singing “Silent Night.” Urakami, or St. Mary’s, had been built in 1875 thanks to the robust presence of Christians living in the area, and it was totally destroyed by the atomic bomb in Nagasaki. It had originally been built at a time when the persecution of Christians came to an end. The sight of the women’s serene faces, their kimonos as unsoiled as circumstances allowed, and the sound of their voices that Christmas Eve melded two different prototypes of martyr together, according to Daniel Machover: those who lost their lives defending a religion and those who lost it defending an empire. The canticles were hymns of death, beautiful, but hymns of the dead who survived only by remaining dead.