Features

Katashi Taniguchi, 70, a resident of Hiroshima City’s Nishi Ward, skillfully handled shears, measuring half his height, while perched on a ladder. Mr. Taniguchi was born in Koi-machi, a town long known for its thriving landscape gardening industry, and took over the family business. At some point, he came to realize that the generation born after the war was now at the forefront.

“People in the same industry sometimes ask me if I’m scared to climb tall trees at my age. These days, people may laugh at me, but for me, dying for a cause is not something regrettable or frightening,” said Mr. Taniguchi. With his sun-tanned face turned into a smile, he added that working 15 or 16 meters aboveground was not unusual for him.

Students lined up every morning to go to work

In 1945, when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city, Mr. Taniguchi was a fourth-year student at Hiroshima Second Middle School. His younger brother, Isao, 13 at the time, was a first-year student in Class 2. Mr. Taniguchi said, “We had been mobilized to work at the Mitsubishi Kanon factory every day starting the previous year, doing everything from hauling soil to prepare the site to making screws with cast metal.” They would line up at 8:00 every morning before heading out to work and working until 5:00 in the evening. They would work every day like one of the war songs sung in Japan about “ceaseless toil from Monday to Friday.”

On August 6, he experienced the atomic bombing while working at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ machinery plant, located 3.8 kilometers from the hypocenter in Hiroshima. When Mr. Taniguchi returned home, Isao was not there, so he headed to Nakajima-shinmachi, where the first-year students had been mobilized for work. He crossed three rivers on bridges that were on the verge of collapse and found Masateru Nishimura, a resident of the same Koi-machi who was 12 years old and in Class 1, near the west end of the Dobashi streetcar stop shortly after noon that day. Mr. Taniguchi then took Masateru to his family.

Standing in front of the Dobashi streetcar stop, Mr. Taniguchi looked back at that moment and said, “My younger brother was also near the streetcar stop. He noticed me, but later told me he ‘thought you would come back again.’ He was the kind that wouldn’t say anything unless someone spoke to him first.”

Found younger brother in air-raid shelter

Mr. Taniguchi searched the city for Isao together with his father, finally finding him around midnight on August 6. He was with Asahiko Nishimoto, a 12-year-old student at the time in Class 5, in an air-raid shelter in front of the streetcar stop. One of the entrances to the shelter, which measured five meters long and two meters wide, was filled with the bodies of the dead. In the darkness and the stench of death, Isao called out, “Take me and Nishimoto home.”

At dawn on August 7, Mr. Taniguchi and his father carried Isao and his friend Asahiko on their backs toward Asahiko’s home in Koi-machi. Before taking his last breath, Asahiko said, “Give me water. Let my mother know about me.” Shortly after noon, Isao was carried along the way to a mountain on a stretcher to avoid attacks from the air. His last words were, “We’re gradually getting closer to home, aren’t we?”

At sea be my body water-soaked/ On land be it with grass overgrown/ Let me die by the side of my Sovereign/ Never will I look back

After the atomic bombing, first-year students and others had jumped into the Honkawa River. Many of them sang the song that includes the line, “At sea be my body water-soaked,” shouting, “Tenno-heika, banzai!” (in English, ‘Long Live the Emperor!’) at the top of their lungs. The poem from which the line originates was written by Otomo-no-Yakamochi, a poet featured in the Manyoshu (oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled in the 8th century). The song was set to music in 1937.

Changing causes, devoted himself to work

Recalling that time, Mr. Taniguchi said, “There were no students who couldn’t sing that song.” Both upper- and lower-grade students would recite the song together. He added, “In the vaguest of senses, we thought nothing of dying for our country. That was the only thought we had.”

However, as soon as Japan lost the war, military drill instructors disappeared from schools, and junior high school students returning from pilot training began indulging in smoking and drinking. Mr. Taniguchi felt that everything “had fallen into chaos.” He then spoke openly about feelings that remain with him to this day.

He said, “I was educated to give my life for a cause, and I devoted myself to working as hard as I could, now in ‘landscape gardening’ after ‘striving to win the war.’ But I don’t know what to say about the fact that my younger brother and others died without ever having that opportunity.”

It is about 300 meters from the Honkawa River, into which Isao and others had jumped, to the Dobashi streetcar stop. The boys walked that distance at the cost of their lives.

(Originally published on November 21, 1999)