ZNet | Japan

Expressing the horror of Hiroshima in 17 syllables

by David McNeill; August 05, 2005

Shigemoto Yasuhiko is recalling the day he first saw the incinerated 
city of Hiroshima as a 15-year-old boy.

"I had escaped the blast and I came to check on my friends," he says. 
"I walked across this bridge and even five days after the bomb, it was 
covered with charred bodies. I had to step over them, but there were so 
many I walked on someone. The river underneath was full of people too, 
floating like dead fish. There are no words to describe what I felt."

He looks down at the rebuilt stone bridge over the Motoyasu River, just 
yards from the iconic Hiroshima Dome, where foreign tourists laugh and 
pose for photographs in the blistering summer heat.
And with that, this modest retired schoolteacher, now an old man of 75, 
turns silent, lost in his memories of the horrific aftermath of the 
nuclear blast on Aug.6th 1945; perhaps silently reciting one of his own 
poems:

Hiroshima Day –
I believe there must be bones
Under the paved street

How are artists to record unspeakable tragedy? Primo Levi described the 
Holocaust in the detached prose of the dispassionate novelist; the 
Dadaists famously responded to the carnage of the First World War by 
retreating into surrealism; the horrors of the current conflict in Iraq 
may well be remembered in the future through the Internet blog.

When Shigemoto began to write, aged 55, about the Hiroshima blast, in 
which half the children in his school died, he chose the shortest of 
literary styles: the 17-syllable haiku. He had spent years wondering 
why among the voluminous writings on the A-Bomb attack, there was 
little written in this most traditional of Japanese art forms.

At that time, few Japanese haiku poets wrote about Hiroshima, "perhaps 
because they thought it was too short," he says. "But I believe the 
shortness can be very profound. If you write well, the connotations of 
haiku, and the ability to stimulate the imagination, is very strong -- 
not like a story at all."

The British poet James Kirkup, who has championed Shigemoto's work 
through two collections: My Haiku of Hiroshima I & II, says the brevity 
of the poems is "curiously touching". "Behind even the blackest images 
we can feel the poet's deep sincerity, his conviction that his vision 
of Hiroshima is a unique one, to be shared with all the world in his 
own plain words."

Shigemoto reaches for his poetry book to explain what he means. "My 
aunt lost all six of her children in the explosion, and all her life 
she wandered around clasping a photo album of her family. It was filthy 
and battered from being in her hands for so long, and she cried when 
she looked at it. I wrote this poem for her."

Child in a photo
Old mother murmurs his name
Hiroshima Day.

Shigemoto's sparing, nonjudgmental observations in the classic haiku 
verse of 5, 7, 5 syllables and usually including a 'seasonal' word, are 
like snapshots of moments in time, and contrast starkly with the work 
of the most famous Hiroshima poet, Toge Sankichi, whose graphic epics 
leave the reader angry, wrung out. In Toge's famous August 6th he 
wrote:

Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse, Pot-bellied, one-eyed with half 
their skin peeled off, bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved

Shigemoto says he respects Toge's 'direct' style, but wanted to do 
something different. "I'm not against direct messages, or political 
poems, but I'm not a politician. There are enough politicians. I'm a 
poet and the power of poetry is to make people think. I want people to 
silently contemplate, not shout at each other."

"People tell me that there is no message in my poems. I think that's 
good. I just describe what I see. I do this to heal myself, and somehow 
others get something from it. I don't want to preach to anyone. I only 
want to express that I'm still alive."

Like many who witnessed the bomb, Shigemoto survived thanks to blind 
luck and has spent the rest of his life wondering why; he was shielded 
from the blast while working in the hills around the city as his school 
friends, who were all killed, worked on a different detail in the city 
center.

The victims arrived hours later, "like ghosts" with arms stretched out 
in front begging for water. "They walked like that because the dangling 
skin would have stuck to their bodies."
He says one of the ghosts called his name, but he didn't recognise his 
classmate because he was so badly burnt. "It is so strange and 
unexpected to be alive because I saw so many people die," he recalls. 
"It almost feels like a sin."

These experiences, which he calls "the most inhuman in the history of 
mankind," have been the motivation for most of his 160 poems, but in 
September 2001, Shigemoto was stirred by another mass-killing as he 
watched hijacked planes sail into the World Trade Center. The result 
was a set of haiku dedicated to the people of New York, including this 
one:

Chill wind
Blowing through the ruins of
New York skyscrapers

Unlike some victims of the A-bomb, he appears utterly without malice or 
anger toward the US, and his poems brim with as much joy in the simple 
pleasures of living, as they do in the memories of death. There are 
even unexpected shards of humor, such as his observation of people 
'licking popsicles' and being 'bitten by mosquitoes' as they gaze up at 
the Dome.

Still, he professes wonder at the American reaction to 9/11. "Americans 
were terrified by what happened, but not by Hiroshima. Which was the 
most terrible?"

At the end of a long interview, and a day with the Independent 
photographer posing in the heat next to the city's sites: the Dome, the 
Peace Park Memorial, and the famous Hiroshima tree, blasted bare by the 
force of the blast, but now a thriving symbol of new life, Shigemoto 
looks exhausted beneath his eager-to-please smile.

"Like most people my age, I don't want to remember," he says. "It makes 
me sad and tired, but our lives are getting shorter and we have to 
speak out. Most people today do not know or have forgotten what 
happened.

When I walk around this city today I see young children playing beneath 
the cherry blossoms. They have no idea.

And he reads another poem.

The children hunting
a cicada -- not seeing
the Atom Bomb Dome

Shigemoto Yasuhiko's website can be found at 
http://www.fureai-ch.ne.jp/~haiku/. His books My Haiku of Hiroshima I & 
II, are both published by Keisuisha.


This is a greatly expanded version of an article that appeared in The 
Independent on August 4, 2005. David McNeill is a Tokyo-based 
journalist and a coordinator of Japan Focus.

===
Hal

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