[00:00.00]Lesson Four
[00:03.08] Text
[00:05.67]Zero Hour: Forty-Three Seconds over Hiroshima Peter Goldman
[00:14.00]On a brilliant summer's morning in 1945,
[00:19.44]Kaz Tanaka looked up into the sky over Hiroshima
[00:25.08]and saw the beginning of the end of her world.
[00:29.73]She was 18 then, and her mind was filled with teenage things.
[00:37.17]She had wakened with a slight fever,
[00:40.93]just bothersome enough to keep her home from her job in a war plant.
[00:47.41]But she felt well enough to be up and about;
[00:52.14]her father had asked her to water a tree in front of their house.
[00:57.89]She ran across the courtyard and let herself out the front gate.
[01:04.13]A girlfriend was standing across the street.
[01:08.88]Kaz waved, and the two were gossiping happily
[01:14.55]when they heard the drone of a B-29 bomber six miles up.
[01:21.40]It was a minute or so before 8: 15.
[01:26.75]The plane did not frighten Kaz.
[01:31.12]For one thing,Hiroshima had gone almost untouched by the air war.
[01:37.36]For another, Kaz had been born in California,
[01:43.03]and although her father had returned to Japan while she was still in diapers
[01:49.69]she liked to tell people she was the American in the family.
[01:55.33]She even felt a kind of distant kinship with the B-29s
[02:01.81]that flew regularly overhead, bound north for Tokyo and other targets.
[02:09.67]She waved at the plane."Hi, angel!" she called.
[02:16.33]A white spot appeared in the sky,
[02:20.38]as small and innocent looking as a scrap of paper.
[02:25.66]It was falling away from the plane,drifting down toward them.
[02:31.82]The journey took seconds.
[02:36.08]The air exploded in blinding light and color,
[02:41.25]the rays shooting outward as in a child's drawing of the sun,
[02:47.92]and Kaz was flung to the ground so violently
[02:53.06]that her two front teeth broke off;she had sunk into unconsciousness.
[03:00.82]Kaz's father had been out back tending the vegetables,in his undershorts.
[03:07.30]When he came staggering out of the garden,
[03:11.95]blood was running from his nose and mouth.
[03:16.60]By the next day the exposed parts of his body would turn a chocolate brown.
[03:23.15]What had been the finest house in the neighborhood came crashing down.
[03:29.71]Kaz had herself been hit in the back by the flying timber.
[03:35.46]She felt nothing.People were only shapes in dense, gray fog of dust and ash.
[03:43.79]A mushroom cloud towered seven miles over the remains of the city,
[03:50.77]the signature of a terrifying new age.Kaz never saw it.
[03:57.92]She was inside it Kaz Tanaka had wakened in a frightening new world
[04:06.67]a world whose dominant sound was a silence broken only by the cries of the dying
[04:13.94]The very air seemed hostile,
[04:18.01]so thick with dust and ash that she could barely see.
[04:23.76]She found her girl friend next to her.
[04:28.02]"What happened?" they both blurted at once.
[04:33.48]There were no answers;no one knew."Are you hurt?" Kaz asked.
[04:41.44]"No, I can get up,"her girlfriend answered."Thank heaven!" Kaz said.
[04:50.19]She struggled to her own feet then,
[04:55.05]and took her first steps onto the ruin of her life.
[05:01.11]That life had been a comfortable one,
[05:05.08]wanting in nothing not,at least,until the war.
[05:10.41]Kaz's father had been born to a family of some wealthand social position
[05:16.76]in Hiroshima,
[05:19.71]and had migrated to America in the early 1920s in the spirit of adventure,
[05:26.97]not of need or flight;he never intended to stay.
[05:32.93]He moved back to Hiroshima at 40;
[05:37.48]it was expected of him as the sole male heir to their name.
[05:43.85]But he brought his American baby girl with him,
[05:48.71]and a lifestyle flavored with American ways.
[05:53.25]The house he built was a spacious one.
[05:57.62]There was a courtyard in front of the place and two gardens in back,
[06:04.75]one to provide vegetables,
[06:08.30]one to delight the eye in the formal Japanese fashion.
[06:13.76]One of the two livin rooms was American,with easy chairs instead of tatami,
[06:21.13]and so were the kitchen and bathroom fittings.
[06:25.49]Dinner was Japanese,the family sitting on the floor in the traditional way.
[06:32.72]Breakfast was American pancakes or bacon and eggs,
[06:38.89]taken at the kitchen table.
[06:42.42]When the news came that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor,
[06:48.76]Kaz's father retired to his garden and stayed all day,
[06:54.72]shaking his head and refusing to speak to anyone.
[07:00.18]But he could not shut the war out of the sheltered world
[07:03.84]he had built for himself and his family.
[07:09.30]His children went to the factories part time.
[07:13.97]Food was short; his vegetable garden became less a hobby than a necessity,
[07:21.34]helping feed not only his own household but his neighbors as well.
[07:27.79]What remained of the life he had made was blown to bits though his home
[07:34.43]was more than a mile from the hypocenter.
[07:39.57]He was working on the side facing zero,
[07:45.32]and had the front of his body burnt.
[07:49.76]His flesh, when Kaz touched him, had the soft feel of a boiled tomato.
[07:56.84]Kaz was anxiously waiting for the return of another member of her family
[08:03.37]when a tall figure appeared where the gate had been.
[08:08.33]"He's back!" she shotted; her brother,at six feet,
[08:14.86]towered over most Japanese men and she knew at a glimpse that it was he.
[08:21.92]But when she drew closer, she could barely recognize him through his wounds.
[08:27.98]His school had fallen down around him.
[08:32.34]He had struggled to a first aid station.
[08:37.02]They had splashed some medicine on the wounds
[08:41.69]tied them with a bandage and sent him on his way.
[08:46.55]For a moment, he stood swaying at the ruins of the gate.
[08:52.11]Kaz stared at him.
[08:55.28]Later, when night fell Kaz and her brother made for the mountains;
[09:02.35]a friend from Kaz's factory lived in a village on a hill
[09:08.21]behind the city and had offered to take them in.
[09:13.27]It was midnight by the time they found her place.
[09:18.03]Kaz looked back.The city was on fire.
[09:22.99]She was seized with fear, not for herself,but for her parents.
[09:29.23]She left her brother behind,
[09:33.00]and was running down the hillside toward the flames.
[09:37.96]The streets were filled with the dead and the barely living.
[09:43.39]She kept on running,knowing only that she had to be home
[09:49.74]Kaz's family had been luckier than most.
[09:54.78]Her father had to lie outdoors on a tatami with his bums,
[10:00.74]and her brother's wounds refused to close.
[10:05.18]But they had at least survived,
[10:09.31]and they began, painfully, to rebuild their lives.
[10:14.77]They had two wells for water and an uncle who livedon an island
[10:21.32]off the coast brought them a great sack of food every week.
[10:26.68]Kaz's father found a carpenter willing to raise a new house
[10:32.45]out of the wreckage of the old in exchange for whatever wood was left over.
[10:38.30]The house more nearly resembled a hovel.
[10:42.66]Kaz could see the first snowflakes of winter
[10:47.92]through cracks between the boards on the roof.
[10:52.59]By the standards of Hiroshima after the bomb,it was a mansion.
[10:58.83]In time the visible wounds healed.
[11:02.99]The burns on Kaz's father's chest
[11:07.35]left scars which looked like maps of Japan and America,
[11:12.91]side by side the way they ought to be,
[11:17.07]and when the subject of the bomb came up he resisted blaming anyone.
[11:23.73]"The war," he would say, "is finished.
[11:29.50]"But as the others were recovering,
[11:33.86] Kaz had fallen illwith all the symptoms of radiation sickness.
[11:40.21]The disease was one of the frightening aftershocks of the bomb;
[11:45.85]the scientists in Los Alamos were surprised by its extent
[11:52.20]they thought the blast would do most of the killing.
[11:56.96]Kaz felt as if she was dying. She ran a fever.
[12:03.80]She felt sick and dizzy, almost drunk.
[12:08.76]Her gums and her bowels were bleeding.She looked like a ghost.
[12:15.22]"I'm next," she thought matter of factly;
[12:20.18]she was an 18 year old girl waiting her turn to die.
[12:26.11]On the first day of 1946,
[12:30.79]Kaz's mother was determined that Kaz would spend at least a bit of it on her feet
[12:38.05]It was an old superstition among the Japanese
[12:43.01]that a person would spend the entire yearas he or she spent New Year's Day.
[12:50.38]A neighbor helped.
[12:54.32]They got her outside,and propped her upright for a few minutes.
[13:00.56]The medicine worked better than anything in the doctor's bag,
[13:05.84]since the only known treatment for radiation sickness was rest
[13:12.08]As winter gave way to spring and spring to summer, Kaz began to mend.
[13:19.56]The illness had not really left her;
[13:24.10]it had gone into hiding,instead,
[13:29.27]and the physical and mental after effects
[13:33.32]of August 6, 1945would trouble Kaz all the rest of her life. |