A Lesson in Shame

Thursday marked the 52nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. In recognition of the date, my school was nominally in full session: all students were required to attend. After the remembrance ceremony, the students apparently were to take placement tests and take care of other administrative things. All 700 students were in attendance, as were about 35 of the 50 teachers on faculty. I had known about this since my first full day on the job. I had also known that I was to be formally introduced to the school on this day, following the ceremony. To that end, I was asked to prepare a brief speech, which I did, and with the help of Urata-sensei, I translated it into Japanese. Again, I was aware of the day on which I'd be giving this speech. I, however, am still having trouble adjusting to the time difference, so I lost a day. I was convinced that it was a day earlier than it was.

I arrived at school early--at about 7:50--to find the office abuzz, easily the most crowded since I've been here. (Most of the teachers spend the inter-session summer months on vacation, or outdoors coaching the students' club activities.) As I unpacked my laptop, it slowly dawned on me that the ceremony was in fact Thursday, and that I had lost a day somewhere. I hastily began memorizing my speech, still not stopping to dwell on the significance of the day.

At about 9:45, the faculty headed to the gym, where the student body was already gathered, seated on the floor. I stood next to some of the other teachers, and after a few minutes, an older man walked into the gymnasium. Everyone who greeted him--principal, vice principal, the regular teachers--did so very respectfully, with much more than the standard bow, as the man headed for the stage. He smiled at me, and I bowed as low as the other teachers had. He got to the stage, and greeted the gathered students and teachers.

As he began speaking, I realized that this man had lived in Nagasaki on the day the bomb was dropped. A survivor of the bombing was speaking to us.

In my first week here, I've realized that my Japanese is far better than I ever gave myself credit for; all it needed was to be put to good use. I've discovered I can get by remarkably well for having been here for a few days. Even so, my listening comprehension is still sorely lacking. (To be fair, the man was older, and was likely speaking with an accent, which I've heard can give even native Japanese speakers trouble.) I tried my best to keep up with him, and I was indeed able to make out the tenses of verbs, and the occasional noun. I wasn't able to tie them all together, and I realized that I've never learned any vocabulary that would tell me when he got to the part where the bombing began. I haven't learned words like detonate, explosion, fire, or even die and kill. So, while I was able to keep up with him fairly well as he talked about being in his first year of middle school, and what his parents and friends were doing on the days leading up to August 9, what little comprehension I had mustered dropped off quickly.

About fifteen minutes into his speech, I noticed several teachers around me crying. An overhead projector had been hooked up; a teacher put up a slide of a photograph depicting what once had been a city block--maybe where the man had lived--but was simply not there anymore.

I felt singularly out of place: a citizen of the country responsible for causing this horrible disaster, sitting in a gymnasium one hundred miles from the city itself, amid 750 Japanese, many of whom had never met an American before. I didn't know how to act, so I simply bowed my head and tried to keep up with the speech.

As he finished his speech at about 10:55, the only sound in the gym was intermittent sniffling. The crowd applauded him, and he left the stage. A teacher spoke briefly, mentioning the time, and at 11, he finished, and silence fell over the crowd. At precisely 11:02am, when the bomb was dropped, air raid sirens went off throughout the city below us. The sirens lasted for a full two minutes, during which I was literally shivering.

Once the sirens stopped, a teacher said something further, a student stood and thanked the man on behalf of the rest of the school, and the man headed for the back of the gym.

At this point, one of the teachers came to me, smiling, and asked me to come to the stage. I was going to be introduced. As I was led, dumbstruck, I again met the man who gave the speech, and I thanked him in Japanese. He began talking to me, in Japanese, and thankfully the teacher leading me to the stage translated for me. He was very kind, and asked me where I was from. When I answered that I was from America, he didn't flinch--I was watching for the slightest change in his expression. He mentioned, through the teacher, that he had flown to California to give a similar speech to students there. I thanked him again, still feeling completely out of place, and followed the teacher to the stage.

Once at the stage, I followed the principal up, and took a seat beside the podium. He began speaking about me, mentioning that I was the new ALT, where I'm from, that sort of thing. He then turned the podium over to me, and I stood before the crowd, standing exactly where the man who had spoken was standing not ten minutes prior, and offered my introduction into the dead silence.

That the introduction went fine didn't really register. That I didn't even have to use the script I'd brought, or that I even got a laugh from the crowd when I mentioned--amid what apparently was impressively correct Japanese--that my Japanese is not very good, just sort of rolled off of me. I still felt horribly uncomfortable. The crowd applauded me loudly, and I left the stage to a sea of smiles and thumbs up from Urata and Murahashi.

I felt terrible, but nobody else seemed to notice, or hold anything against me. They had told us this at Tokyo Orientation, but I had refused to accept it. Apparently they were right--none of the teachers or students have expressed anything resembling hostility or even resentment toward me.

The prospect of speaking before a crowd of 750 people wasn't really bothering me. It was the weight of the occasion that got to me. But, sure enough, after the ceremony, a lot of kids stopped me in the hall to say hello and try out their English. The teachers all congratulated me on the speech, and how impressed they were that I didn't even need my script.

You hear about how terrible the bombings were. You see clips of the mushroom cloud, pictures of the memorials, and footnotes in Wikipedia's "On This Day..." section. I even read an article run in the New Yorker exactly one year after the bombing of Hiroshima, containing interviews with survivors of the bombing. But none of that gives you half of the perspective that you gain from being in the country and hearing a survivor speak on its anniversary. I can't imagine how much more intense it would have been if I'd actually been able to understand everything he said.

I'm going to be in Nagasaki for a conference at the end of the month, so I'll get to see the Peace Park there. That ought to be rough.