'Hibakusha'

"HIBAKUSHA" is the Japanese term used to refer to survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago.

Curious about the term, I did some research and was amazed at how much has been produced about the hibakusha. One particularly fascinating article looked at how the themes of atomic bombs and the threat of nuclear war have become a distinct genre in Japanese cinema (including the "Godzilla" films!) as well as manga comics.

The more I read about the hibakusha, the more I felt that in many ways, regardless of age or nationality, we are all hibakusha, torn between wanting to remember and yet fearing the pain that comes with those memories.

Heroes, villains

Last week, I wrote about a symposium organized by the Phi Kappa Phi at the University of the Philippines (UP) on "Truth-telling and national healing," with Dr. Ma. Lourdes Carandang as the guest speaker. Everyone agreed it was important to remember the past, but there were different views on how we should go about it.

An example comes with the Japanese occupation, which receives so little attention in our history classes and textbooks. My "memories" of the war come mainly from my mother, about the day the war broke out and people shouting, "Gyera na! Gyera na!" [The war has started!] It was about living in constant fear of the Japanese soldiers encamped right across their home. It was about Japanese soldiers coming one day and arresting her father. He was jailed at Fort Santiago and sentenced to death for being one of the leaders in the Chinese business community that boycotted Japanese goods. It was about the Americans returning and working for them as a secretary, which included censoring soldiers' letters for any mention of where they were, and for curse words.

Growing up on my mother's recollections spelled out American heroes and Japanese villains. College history lessons topped off this fare with tales of guerrilla heroes and traitorous collaborators.

Dr. Emerenciana Arcellana, professor emeritus in political science, was at the UP symposium and while she agreed that we need to remember the past, she also warned against simplistic conclusions, especially around the issue of collaborators. She reminded the audience that Filipinos were never conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army, unlike the Koreans, for example, and that this happened in part because Filipino officials were able to negotiate with the Japanese occupation forces.

As she spoke, I thought, too, of the resistance against the Japanese, valiant to be sure, but then there was also Ferdinand Marcos and his claims to being one of the most fearless of these fighters.

'Nikkei-jin'

A more concrete example of the need to rethink the past comes with the way we look at the Japanese who came to the Philippines before the war. UP Iloilo professor Ma. Luisa Mabunay (Meloy to me from way back) dropped by my office the other day for a bit of "memory-searching," her current research interest being the Nikkei-jin, descendants of those Japanese.

When the war broke out, the Japanese in the Philippines were rounded up and placed in internment camps, like their counterparts in the United States. They were freed when the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the Philippines, and many of their men were hastily drafted into military service. Since many Filipinos at that time remember seeing their former civilian neighbors suddenly wearing military uniforms, it's not surprising they concluded all these Japanese were sent in before the war as spies.

We will never know if they were spies, but Meloy says the Japanese who came here were often impoverished, taking up jobs as gardeners, construction laborers and farmers. The largest sector among the Japanese in Iloilo province consisted of fishers from Okinawa. After the war broke out, Filipinos understandably became quite hostile to them and toward the end of the war, these Japanese civilians suffered terribly. Meloy interviewed some of the survivors, who told her about how they fled Iloilo City, attempting to get to Leon for refuge.

Most never made it. In the hills of Cabatuan and Maasin, they found themselves trapped between American and Filipino troops. Many were ready for "jiketsu," or "self-determination," a euphemism for an honorable suicide. But the guerrilla troops got to the Japanese first, executing women and children. Survivors remember some of the children crying out after the massacre; they had survived because their mothers had shielded them with their bodies.

Vaporized

The Aug. 1 issue of Time magazine quotes one atomic bomb survivor's description of the blast as "blue-yellow and very beautiful." As she ran through the streets, she saw "people moaning from pain, with eyes popped out and intestines coming out of their stomachs."

The magazine also quotes Col. Paul Tibbets, the commanding officer for the Hiroshima mission, as he visited Nagasaki after the blast: "I saw a lot of hatred in their eyes, but I could also see that they were glad the war was over... I went up to the top of a hill where a hospital was. I saw a poor guy begging by the side of it; it looked as if he was still bleeding, and his clothes were all ripped up. I felt so sorry for him. Inside the hospital I saw a shadow on the wall-a person had obviously been walking by that wall when the bomb went off."

The atomic bomb literally vaporized people.

Those who saw World War II are now over 60. Their memories need to be retrieved and conserved for future generations. It's clear, too, the memory-keeping must come from all "sides." I've written about a photo exhibit at the Remedios church in the Malate district showing Manila at the end of the war. At the Museo Iloilo, ongoing till Sept. 30, Meloy has a photographic exhibit showing the lives of the Nikkei-jin on Panay Island. Those pictures of Nikkei-jin families and schoolchildren should become part of our memories as well.

The shadows of the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki should remind us, too, that we still live in another kind of terrible shadow today, that of thousands of nuclear warheads. In 1945, there were only six nuclear stockpiles, all belonging to the United States. By 1986, at the height of the Cold War, there were 65,000 known stockpiles. The tension has eased but in 2002, there were still about 20,000 stockpiles, the United States and Russia accounting for 90 percent of them.
The nuclear race continues, affecting us often in unexpected ways. This latest crisis of spiraling oil prices was set off when Iran retaliated against world pressure to stop its nuclear program.

The American pilots who dropped the bombs are hibakusha, too, their voices blending with those of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the Nikkei-jin to remind us that with or without atomic bombs, war turns us all into fragile beings, ready at any time to be obliterated.