This Scorching Earth. Donald Richie
prisoners-of-war were clearing the smoking ruins. They wore red uniforms and carried blankets for the removal of the dead.
Eventually he recognized the Susaki district. Yesterday it had been a pleasure center, with gayly-colored decorations, sidewalk stalls, girls peeping from behind lattice-work screens, and music. Now there was nothing. The houses, like the decorations, had been made only of wood and paper and had burned almost at once. Now in the early morning the district was very quiet, and no one moved.
He turned back. The small bridges across the canals had been burned. He had to stay on the large island connected to Nihombashi by the bridge across the Sumida. He looked across the canals and saw people still alive on the little, smoking islands. They shouted and waved, but there was nothing he could do, so he went on. Some were swimming across to the large island. They had to push aside others who floated there face down.
In a burned primary school he saw the bodies of children who had run there, to their teachers, for protection. Later he learned there had been two thousand dead children in that school alone. They lay face down on the scorched concrete floor, as though asleep. The kimonos of some still smoked. The teachers to whom they had fled lay among them.
It Was past noon when, suddenly very tired, he walked back across the bridge, back past Shirokiya where only twenty-four hours before he had been eating noodles, buying his mother a present, stealing a look at his uniform in a mirror. He took a trolley to Shinagawa. It was almost night before he reached his uncle's house. The trolley stopped continually. It was filled with wounded, and others, less wounded, hung from the roof and the sides. He could have arrived sooner by walking, but there was a fascination in the macabre ride from which he could not tear himself away.
At his uncle's house he found his brother and, surprisingly, his uncle. The latter's arm was badly burned, and he was wounded about the face and head. He had come home that afternoon, walking the entire distance. He told them about their family.
They had been sitting around the table drinking beer, his sister and himself. The younger girls had already gone to bed, and his brother-in-law was at Susaki. He said that first the planes bombed the outskirts of Fukagawa and Honjo, then closed the circle, making it smaller and smaller. It was difficult to escape because it happened so swiftly. Almost instantly there was fire on all sides.
By the time the air-raid sirens had begun they heard the explosions, and flames were leaping up in the distance. The airplanes wheeled over them, and the circle of fire was much nearer. They got the little girls up, but by the time they were dressed the fire was only a block away. They tried to escape from the lumberyard, but the little bridge which led to the Tokyo road was burning. So they climbed into the canal in back of the house.
Sticks of bombs were dropping constantly, and finally one of them hit the house. The heat was terrible. Even the logs in the canal began to smoke. They watched the fire spread, in just a few seconds, to the storehouses and then to the entire island. Tadashi's mother and sisters held on to a log and began crying.
Their uncle found a pan and dipped water over their heads and shoulders. The little fur hoods with cats embroidered on them helped protect the children for a while, but when the fur began smoking he tore off the hoods and poured water directly on their hair. The portion of the log above water cracked in the heat, but he kept on pouring water.
There he remained until early morning. About one, the fires burning around them just as fiercely as before, he became very tired. He tried to get a better grip on the log but found his arm so burned that it stuck to the wood. He was unable both to hold up his sister and nieces and at the same time continue to pour water over them. They were very quiet and, he was sure, unconscious. His arm was so tired that he too must have lost consciousness. The pain of his arm's slipping across the the burning log woke him. The mother and two little girls were gone.
The next day Tadashi and his brother went again to Fukagawa. It was now filled with rescue workers. They found their canal and the ruins of their home. Everything was gone. Only the earth and a few stones remained. They identified the house from its unburned foundation stones. Near where the house had been they were removing bodies. He tried to find some of his neighbors but couldn't. Everyone there was a stranger. No one knew where his father's workers were either. They had lived above the warehouse where the finished lumber had been stored.
Later he learned that thirty thousand people had been killed that evening. Some said it was the unseasonable wind that had done the most damage. It spread the fire and the heat. The explosions caused more wind until, about one in the morning, it flew through the flames at a mile a minute.
It was almost a week before the Emperor inspected the ruins. By this time the bodies had all been removed. Already the streets were being re-mapped, and bright wooden bridges connected the islands. The people Tadashi talked to all felt that the Army had delayed the Emperor's arrival. They didn't want him to see how terrible the fire had been. If he had, he would have stopped the war at once. But now, with a new week's fighting begun, he naturally could do nothing about it. It was the fault of the Army.
For the rest of the summer Tadashi's brother went to live with his uncle. Lieutenant Tadashi was sent to Tachikawa Air Base. Then soon it was August, and the war was over. About the same time, Shirokiya sent the bolt of cloth he'd ordered for his mother. There was no house at the address, and they sent him a card about it.
When he saw Fukagawa again he was surprised. People were living there once more. The main business was still lumber. Before the fire there had been over two thousand lumber dealers, but now there were only slightly over a hundred. There were no chemical industries, but the dye-works were open and the canals were green again. The Chinese restaurants were thriving as usual, and even small Korean centers had sprung up. But now their old occupation—opening oysters—had been taken over by Japanese. It was about the only way of making a living.
He no longer liked Fukagawa. Its atmosphere was gone, as was Asakusa's. It was now only the poorest section of the city. Whole families lived in four-and-a-half mat rooms; some lived in U. S. Army packing cases or former air-raid shelters. It was no longer a unique district. It was being rebuilt, like every place else, only it was uglier than most. He hated going there and very rarely had occasion to do so since few Americans ever went there. He never went back to where his house had been, nor to the green canal behind it.
But sometimes, after work, he would take the slow and noisy trolley past Fukagawa to the old Susaki district. It alone remained black and empty, a barren field, with no ruins, no trace of life. Sometimes he stood there for fifteen minutes or so, his head bowed.
The MP walked over.
"Looky, Joe," he said, "you been standing here staring for the last fifteen minutes. Gimme your stub. Trip ticket. That's right."
The soldier took the ticket. "O. K., Joe, she no come. You go." He made waving motions with his hands. "Go on now—hayaku. Your lady-friend's not gonna turn up."
As Tadashi was climbing into the sedan the MP felt in his breast pocket and brought out some cigarettes. He handed half a dozen to Tadashi.
"Here, Jackson, for your trouble," he said and smiled.
That was the second smile he'd received. Tadashi touched his hat gratefully, took the cigarettes and the trip ticket, and smiled back. The MP winked, went back to the entrance, took a parade-rest stance, and held both it and the wink. Tadashi laughed and started his motor.
Just as he was backing out a soldier ran up to him and, in Japanese, said: "Can you please take me to Shinjuku?"
Tadashi was both surprised and embarrassed. If it had been English, he "wouldn't have understood or, at least, could have pretended not to. But the soldier's Japanese was remarkably good. So Tadashi could only shake his head.
"Please," said the soldier. "I'm late for work."
Tadashi put his foot on the accelerator and released the brake. It was against the rules. One must have a trip ticket. An Occupation driver could not drive just anyone who asked him. Those were the rules.
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