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By Root 1103 0

burns’. He wanted to help, but her nakedness stopped him. Robert J. Lifton finds indication here of ‘perverse sexual and aggressive fantasies’, and that may be, though he might have contemplated his own role as a male interviewer possibly perceived to be soliciting such honest and uncomfortable testimony. A more benign interpretation of the man’s recollections is that he, and everyone, was appalled at circumstances that created widespread public nakedness, not sexually exciting but a demonstration of mass exposure and therefore vulnerability. Respectable Japanese do not walk the streets naked. A feeling of shame was the order of the day. The unclothed felt it; the clothed felt it when they saw the naked and burned. Dr Hachiya was ashamed to be as well dressed as he was in a patched shirt and filthy pants when he saw patients including ‘an old lady..., in nothing but an undershirt’ and ‘a horribly burned young man lying naked on a pallet’, and Toyofumi Ogura, witnessing the naked, despised himself for not having resisted the ‘militarists’ surrounding the Emperor who had brought things to this pass.34

Apart from shame, many in Hiroshima underwent a loss of feeling. They were ‘stunned’, ‘numb’, unable to grasp and thus unable to respond to the cataclysm they faced. Human feeling, like light in deep ocean water, may be inaccessible in conditions of unprecedented upheaval and horror. And the enormity of what survivors confronted all but required them not to feel. They had, most of all, to cope with the horror, with the gruesome sights and rotting stench, and with the dead. ‘After a while they became just like objects or goods that we handled in a very businesslike way,’ a soldier reminisced about removing corpses. ‘Of course, I didn’t regard them simply as pieces of wood—they were dead bodies—but if we had been sentimental we couldn’t have done the work... We had no emotions.’ Toyofumi Ogura: ‘There were objects that appeared to be lumps of flesh lying on the ground. Some of these squirmed from time to time, like exhibits in a freak show at a fair ground.’ Without feeling or instinct to guide them, many fell back on following routine, going by the book. A soldier on leave in the suburbs rushed back to his Hiroshima-based unit ‘almost without thinking’. It was what he had been ordered to do. Nearly everyone was dead, so he hunted up the military code book—rather, a clump ofashes that had once been the book—and took it off to headquarters the next morning. Looking, aghast, at the destruction around him, Ogura nevertheless resolved that he must go the following day to his temporary job as supervisor of a student work squad at the Nippon Steel Manufacturing Company factory to the east, where his charges were making, of all things, hand grenades.35

There was a cruel logic to the order in which people died at Hiroshima. Those closest to ground zero were likeliest to perish. People caught outside without any kind of shielding from the blast—a wall between themselves and the explosion, or a berm created by a ditch—had little chance ofescap-ing serious injury if they were less than 2 kilometers from the hypocenter. Those outdoors but partly shielded might well have escaped blast or burn, but if they were under 1.5 kilometers from the center they had a ‘moderate’ chance of injury by radiation. It was not necessarily better to have been caught inside a wooden house, as within 4 kilometers of the hypocenter, this was likely to have collapsed in the blast wave, and injury or death by fire or radiation threatened those inside such buildings as much as it did those shielded but outdoors. The safest place was inside a concrete structure. Such buildings were rare near the city center, and even in them radiation injury loomed within a half kilometer of ground zero.36

At the same time, there was a bizarre randomness as to whether objects were destroyed and people were hurt or killed or escaped harm altogether. After the bombing, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge returned to his room to salvage what he could. His wooden desk had been smashed to bits,