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I’ve never been to Japan, never set foot
there, but my Dad went. Thus Japan has
touched me in ways obvious and ways
hard to explain. The obvious is easy. I
drive a Honda. I take digital photographs
with a Fuji S3000. Japan Victor Company
built my flatscreen. Sony manufactured
my home sound system. My Vortex
binoculars came from Japan. I talk on
Panasonic telephones.
The rest is less straightforward and
weightier. My Japanese musings took
over me the day I heard about Chrysler’s
bankruptcy. For me, Chrysler sits at
the intersection of two key memories,
memories of a boyhood discovery and
a 1956 Plymouth, turquoise and white,
with delicate fins. It’s the first car I
remember Dad buying, not that long
after World War II. Dad pretty much
bought Chrysler cars all his life.
We who buy Japanese cars drove a
few nails in Chrysler’s coffin, but don’t
blame us. Japanese cars last. They’ve
come to embody the phoenix-like rise
of a country leveled by war, demolished
by us in a way like no other but brought
back by us as well.
From a nuclear funeral pyre, Japan
rose to give us dependable cars, radios,
TVs, telephones, and more. Japan, the
vanquished enemy, conquered as no
country has ever been conquered, came
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roaring back.
The other memory
goes way back as well.
Rambling through closets
as a boy I discovered
silk flags, relics of Dad’s
time in Japan. Unfolding
them, a rising sun with
spectacular rays burst
off the alabaster silk as if
afire. Japan—Land of the
Rising Sun.
The Imperial Japanese
Navy flew those flags as
did the Japanese Army.
In battle, those flags were
among the last sights many
warriors on both sides saw.
To me, they were playthings. I made
parachutes of those silk flags, tying a rock
to them, hurling them up, and watching
them drift lazily back to Georgia soil.
Somewhere in my boyhood those
flags disappeared. What a loss. I’d love
to have one framed with an inscription.
“Liberated and brought to the United
States by Sergeant John M. Poland Jr.”
With Japan’s surrender August 14, 1945,
Allied Occupation Forces banned the
Rising Sun flags. Maybe that’s how Dad
came by them. Confiscated.
Thus it began. Dad journeyed to
Japan on a troop carrier in Operation
2436 Main Street
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803-438-3249
Tom Poland
Columnist
Our Changing World
Touched by Hiroshima
Downfall, the Allied plan
to invade Japan. Along
the way the atom bomb
brought Japan to its
knees, and some 200,000
servicemen, would-be
invaders, occupied Japan
instead.
My thoughts drift to
Hiroshima. My father
served in U.S. Army
Ordnance and he spent
time in Yokohama but he
also went to Hiroshima
not long after the Enola
Gay dropped “Little
Boy.”
There in the land of
geishas and samurai, he might as well
have been walking on the surface of
the sun. He was at most, 19 or 20. The
things he must have seen as he tread
Hiroshima’s toxic soil. There was no way
he could avoid horrors. Skinless people.
Men with stripes burnt onto their skin.
They were wearing striped shirts when
the brilliant flash hit them, the nuclear
burst that stenciled dress patterns onto
women’s bodies. Dad never talked about
things like that, but they happened. That
and worse.
He returned to Georgia with evidence
of his Hiroshima days: the flags and
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horrific photos. The photos, taken from a
low, wide perspective, reveal block after
block of charred rubble with I-beams
drooping like melted candles. The
next time you drive past a field of corn
chopped close to the ground, imagine it
burnt too. That’s what Hiroshima looked
like, a charred, leveled cornfield.
At ground zero the heat reached
millions of degrees. Some victims left
shadows etched into rock ... vaporized
... perhaps that’s why censors placed
rectangles black as midnight on some
of Dad’s photos. No need to generate
sympathy for the enemy. By the end of
1945, radiation and injuries, burns in
many cases, raised the total to 140,000
dead.
Even as a kid, those photos told me Hell
itself had been unleashed on Hiroshima.
It didn’t come as a surprise. Awaiting the
bomb’s first test, Robert Oppenheimer,
father of the atomic bomb, held onto a
post to steady himself as the seconds
ticked down ... “3, 2, 1, Now!” A brilliant
burst of light and a deep growling roar
staggered him. Apocalyptic words
escaped his lips: “I am become Death,
the destroyer of worlds” ... words from
the “Song of God,” a treasured Sanskrit
Hindu scripture. Worlds destroyed sixty-
•See Hiroshima, Page 15
The Blythewood Leader May 21, 2009 Page 7