Beneath the cherry blossoms of Hiroshima, memories of devastation linger — but so does hope. This exclusive extract from Six Minutes to Winter, Mark Lynas’s urgent new book on the threat of nuclear war, reflects on survival, remembrance and the future we must fight for
The rail line to Hiroshima from Tokyo passes not far from the lower slopes of Mount Fuji. As we shoot past on the bullet train, I gaze at the familiar symmetrical, snow-covered cone hovering above a layer of haze. It presides over scenery that would resemble a traditional Japanese landscape painting were it not for the malls and factories flashing by in between wooded hills in the foreground. In the seat next to me is my half-Japanese godson, Didier Delgorge, who will be acting as my guide and interpreter, having recently moved from Oxford back to Tokyo. To me he looks Japanese, but it soon becomes clear that everyone in Japan thinks he’s European. We munch on seaweed-wrapped salmon rice balls as we stop at Nagoya, Kyoto and Osaka stations, and Hiroshima draws closer.
I later discover something fascinating. Hiroshima isn’t just famous for its A-bomb. It’s also famous for its oysters. On our first day after arriving in the city, we take a ferry out into the bay, past dozens of oyster farms to Miyajima Island. The island has long been a site of pilgrimage, with the sprawling Itsukushima shrine extending its multi-storey wooden pagodas around the coast and into the sea. The nearby village street is lined with restaurants, and oysters are the main dish – served boiled, battered, fried, any which way, but oddly hardly ever raw. After an oyster-heavy lunch, Didier and I head up the forested Mount Misen, through primeval forests of oak and Japanese hemlock, accompanied by invisible but strikingly noisy Japanese bush warblers. The 535-metre summit, with its huge, well-worn boulders, yields panoramic views: to the north, across the bay and laid out as if on a map, I can spot the parallel delta rivers of Hiroshima, three of which enter the sea almost at right angles. It’s a peaceful scene, but I can’t help imagining what I might have seen from this very spot at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945. Once the initial nuclear flash has faded, I imagine the mushroom cloud rising and transforming into a violent thunderhead dropping fearsome black rain as the city and its inhabitants burned. Today there is another thunderstorm gathering, with sheets of rain already obscuring the forested mountains behind Hiroshima, the same hills into which the ragged survivors fled in the days after the atomic bomb fell.
On the way down from Mount Misen, following steps and narrow paths through the trees in the gathering gloom of a rainy dusk, we run into a smaller shrine, with smoke billowing out from a wide wooden doorway. Inside, surrounded by candles, a log fire smoulders in a square stone fireplace in the centre of the building. This is Kiezu-no-hi, an eternal flame said to have been lit by the Buddhist monk Kōbō Daishi in the year 806, and which is consequently claimed to have burned non-stop for 1,200 years. Most recently it was used to light the ‘Flame of Peace’ in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. For a small offering you can light your own candle and say a prayer. In my case this is ¥300 in return for a nuclear weapons-free world – a bargain by any stretch. It’s dark by the time we get the ferry back to the mainland, and as we walk to the hotel, we pass a cinema where Didier notices a poster in the window advertising the movie Oppenheimer. The cinema is empty: perhaps no-one in Hiroshima fancies watching Oppenheimer tonight.
I asked Teruko Yahata, a survivor of the atomic bomb that Robert Oppenheimer helped design, whether she had seen the film when we met in a downstairs room at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum the following day. With Didier interpreting, she told me she had, though her main complaint was regarding the sound effects rather than the subject. ‘The banging sound [in a scene where everyone is stomping their feet in a lecture hall] felt like being hit on the head for us seniors,’ she complained with a dry smile. ‘It really gave me a headache.’ And the content? ‘It made me feel really eerie,’ she admitted. She acknowledges that the Americans dropped the bomb to try to avoid a ground war and the higher number of casualties that would have resulted while Japan was still seemingly determined to fight until the last man. But for her, this doesn’t make it any less of a crime. ‘For us, indiscriminate destruction and killing in an instant are things that are still unforgivable. Even now.’
While she answers my questions in Japanese, she begins by making a small speech in English. ‘I was eight years old when the atomic bomb was dropped,’ she recalls. She had started at Hiroshima Municipal Koi National School the previous year, in 1944. She still remembers stirring announcements played over the radio from Imperial General Headquarters about the stunning victories won by the Japanese over the Americans in the Pacific War. The senior students marched around the schoolyard singing, ‘With our swords we will give our lives to kill one hundred, one thousand.’ ‘They were determined to fight on Japanese soil, believing Japan would definitely win the war.’ But there is another detail that really sticks with me: ‘The cherry blossom trees were in full bloom, and the petals flew around, turning the school ground a pale-pink colour,’ she relates.
Yahata’s house was 2.5 kilometres west of the hypocentre. She remembers the intense brightness of the flash of light, likening it to the ‘heavens being illuminated by a huge fluorescent light’. She lost consciousness as she was blown several metres through the air by the atomic blast, before being awakened by a shout from her mother, who gathered everyone inside what was left of their wrecked house, under a blanket, waiting for a second bomb. When it didn’t come, the family fled through the smoking ruins to the nearby mountainside as a strange heavy rain began to fall, soaking them to the skin. ‘There was no way for us to know at the time that this was the so-called black rain,’ Yahata relates. The rain began perhaps 40 minutes after the bomb dropped, with large drops ‘soon turning into a downpour… White shirts turned greyish-black, stained by the dirty rain from the radiation fallout.’
The family passed other people fleeing from the ruined city. ‘Their hair was standing on end and their bodies were sometimes completely burned. They were covered in dust and the skin that was peeling off their arms and dangling from their fingertips resembled old rags.’ Tens, hundreds of people were flocking towards them, emerging from the dust and smoke ‘like a river of ghosts’. Evacuated to a family member’s house, Teruko Yahata watched as ‘the city continued to burn, all through the night’. I don’t tell her why, but for me the fire is of particular interest, because the firestorm that burned Hiroshima is the prototype for the mass fires that would create a nuclear winter, and Yahata saw it at first hand. ‘It was an incredibly intense and continuous blaze,’ she tells me after some thought. ‘Columns of fire could be seen rising here and there, creating a whirlwind of flames.’ During the daytime height of the firestorm, ‘the whole city became dark like it was dusk’. It burned right through until noon the next day.
Fortunately Yahata’s family had escaped with only minor injuries. Seeing a wound on her forehead, her father took her to the local school to seek first aid. But as they passed the gates, they could already hear screams and moans from the critically injured. Inside it was full of tightly packed bodies, ‘their faces blistered so badly that they could no longer open their eyes’. The dead were being ferried to the sports ground on makeshift stretchers, where huge holes had been dug for mass cremations. ‘The smoke and stench seemed to fill every corner of the school.’ Rows of white paper bags on a table near the gate caught her eye. Thinking they must be handing out sweets, she joined the queue. But the bags were not filled with sweets. They contained ashes and bones from those who had been cremated, for family members to take home for memorial services. On 9 August (the same day that Nagasaki was bombed), seeing that the fires of Hiroshima had subsided, Yahata’s mother and father joined a search team looking for his best friend, accompanied by the man’s wife. As they walked through the devastated streets, they stepped over the charred remains of corpses. They searched for days, drinking water trickling from broken pipes. Arriving at the workplace of the friend, they dug around in the rubble and debris, unearthing a man’s skeleton. A child’s ID tag on a nearby suitcase confirmed his identity.
‘It is said that their baby, who was being carried on his wife’s back, reacted by letting out a blood-curdling scream as his wife broke down in tears sobbing. My parents stood silently weeping. They took the skull of my father’s friend home with them. Everyone put their hands together in prayer.’
Looking at drawings of these scenes done by survivors, even today, Yahata still feels ‘an eerie sensation coming over me, as if something is tugging at my heart’. By way of ending, I ask her the obvious question, namely whether the bombing was in any way justified by the need for a rapid end to the war.
She tells Didier in Japanese: ‘I’m practising answering this sort of question in English. May I say it?’ Then she switches languages and begins, and it’s as if she’s addressing the whole world rather than just me alone: ‘First of all everyone, please try to imagine for yourself if the same thing happened in your home town or city and an atomic bomb was dropped on your parents, brothers and sisters, children, grandchildren, teachers and friends.
‘People around you who are trying their very best to bring up children and to give them a bright future. What, then, if in a moment, in a microsecond, they were reduced to fine powder. Not even a single bone left. Charred black remains. Male or female indistinguishable from one another.Writhing in excruciating pain having suffered horrific burns of unimaginable degree. The after-effects of radiation gradually tearing them apart from the inside out for years to come.
‘How do you think that you would feel? Nuclear weapons are capable of the complete destruction of human life and cause indiscriminate instant death. We must work our very hardest to abolish nuclear weapons and to remove them from the earth forever. Before they destroy everything we hold dear.’
She takes a breath.
‘It is no longer about the complex emotions that cause hatred or about bearing grudges which we must somehow try to overcome, it is about the future. Our future. The future of civilisation, humanity and the planet.’
I ponder Teruko Yahata’s challenge as we leave the museum and wander down to the cenotaph, where the Hiroshima Flame of Peace burns on a stone pedestal set in a pond. It’s in a direct line of sight between the memorial cenotaph and the A-Bomb Dome a few hundred metres away over the river. A granite inscription reads: ‘Symbolizing the universal desire for a world free from nuclear weapons the flame will burn until the day when all such weapons shall have disappeared from the Earth.’ It occurs to me that this is the place I have been looking for, the perfect location for the world leaders’ ceremony that will take place on the day we reach global zero. Our movement should be there, too, perhaps a million of us or more, thronging the streets, parks and riversides of Hiroshima in every direction, relishing each moment and the part we have played. I write in my notebook: ‘This is one flame which must not be eternal.’ Our collective goal must be to put it out. The exact moment when the flame dies is critically important, too, I also realise. If the atomic age began with the Trinity test at 5.29 am (US Mountain Time) in New Mexico on 16 July 1945, then perhaps it should end exactly a century later, at 8.29 pm Japan time on 16 July 2045, when the eternal flame at Hiroshima is extinguished forever because the last nuclear weapon has vanished from this Earth. (Earlier would of course be better, albeit less poetic).
That evening, in proper modern Japanese style, we head for a karaoke bar. It;s mostly empty and the owner welcomes us with undisguised curiosity as we sit cross-legged on cushions on a platform around the bar. Fortified by beer followed by local saké, Didier and I take turns with the microphone. I belt out Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now, diplomatically skipping the line about the atom bomb, and Didier follows with a 1980s Japanese classic. An old man at the corner of the bar applauds politely, stubs out his cigarette and motions for the mic. He and the karaoke bar owner then duet an Irish ballad, sung entirely phonetically from Japanese characters on the screen. It’s an impressive performance and calls for something memorable on our part. The choice is obvious, and Didier and I tackle it together. He does better than me in capturing Louis Armstrong’s gravelly voice, but as we sing about skies of blue and clouds of white, I feel a strong sense of optimism and hope rising in me. I think to myself, it is indeed a wonderful world. And we are all going to save it.
As if on cue, the following morning does indeed dawn clear and blue. We head back down to the A-Bomb Dome, where I stop and take a photo at an old willow tree. Just 370 metres from the hypocentre, it’s the nearest of the trees – all of which have been meticulously labelled and catalogued – to survive the A-bomb. Lush new spring growth erupts from the twisted branches. The tree has plenty of life within it yet.
Along the river promenade, I see that the cherry trees of Hiroshima are coming into bloom and local families are beginning to unpack picnics as they spread mats underneath. As it was on Teruko Yahata’s first day of school in 1944, the air is full of pink petals as a soft wind stirs the leaves. The children chase each other and no-one looks at the sky. They are safe now, and somewhere in the distance Hiroshima’s ‘peace bell’ tolls.
