Ghosts of Hiroshima

Volume 16 | Issue 21 | Number 3 | Article ID 5213 | Nov 01, 2018 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Ghosts of Hiroshima Charles Pellegrino You could not make these landscapes up and The novel was an obscure “penny dreadful” have people believe it. Even as fiction, no one —which, commercially, had failed miserably. It would believe it. That is why, for over sixty was regarded in its day as a story-line so years, I kept what I saw to myself… until the improbable and so contrived that no reader day others [who] spoke about it, were called could be expected to suspend disbelief. As it liars, [supposedly] because the atom bombs turned out, scientific and historical reality could not have happened that way. For people eventually caught up with and exceeded underneath an A-bomb to have becomescience fiction. shadows on the wall, and charcoals, before they On a cold April night in 1912, the Royal Mail could fall to the ground, no one wanted to Steamship Titanic struck an iceberg during its believe it. But it happened. maiden voyage, just like Morgan Robertson’s Miyuki Broadwater, a child of Nagasaki fictional ship. It struck on the starboard side, just as Robertson’s ship did. It was filled with Prologue: BEYOND THE SPECTRUM some of the world’s richest and most famous people, just like Robertson’s ship. In 1948, a former OSS agent named Walter Lord—who had interrogated (or, from a certain The science fiction ship was 800 feet long; point of view, “interviewed”) many of Japan’s Walter’s real-life Titanic was 882.5 feet long. surviving naval officers—was struggling to turn Both ships were nearly 70,000 tons a series of non-job-related interviews into his displacement with three large and remarkably first book: A Night to Remember. powerful propellers, capable of accelerating each vessel above 22 knots. The crews of both The book itself was defeating Walter. Although ships were complacent about racing ahead at he now had enough material for a second book nearly full speed into the night toward an ice (fated to become the basis for a film titled, field they’d been warned lay directly Tora! Tora! Tora!), he feared that neither book ahead—because each ship was believed would ever be published. Walter had not yet “unsinkable.” found “the music of the words,” had not yet And stranger still, Walter Lord thought, that found his voice. Morgan Robertson had named his science- fictional ship, the Titan. About the spring of that same year, he came across a novel by another struggling writer, And it happened again. named Morgan Robertson, who in 1898 had published a science fiction story about a Decades later, after interviewing Walter about futuristic luxury Atlantic steamship—the the Japanese experience of World War II, a largest floating object ever built by human colleague stumbled upon another strange hands, destined to make its acquaintance with science fiction novel—a two-volume story, in hubris and an iceberg on a cold April night, fact, published by the firm of M.F. Mansfield, in during its first and last voyage. 1908. 1 16 | 21 | 3 APJ | JF Titled, Beyond the Spectrum, the tale read as if of print almost as soon as it hit the someone had thrown open a window,bookshelves: A tale too fantastical to seem showcasing technology that did not exist in believable, even by the likes of H.G. Wells or 1908. In that year, the most advanced airplanes Jules Verne. “And strangest of all” Walter in the world were “spit-and-glue flimsies” remarked, “to see, on the cover of Beyond the —barely more than glorified kites with motors; Spectrum, Morgan Robertson’s name—again.” and yet the author wrote of a great human change arising from a global war fought in the The fictional weapon was called a “sun bomb” air, on the high seas, and deep under them. The and it marked the moment at which humanity skies became filled with flying fortresses and was forcefully awakened to the possibility that gleaming metal fighter planes. At the war’s civilization would die of civilization. start, Japanese-Americans were herded out of The real weapon was called U.S. cities and driven like cattle to internment atomic—“unleashing the power of the sun” camps, where whole families were held behind —and it marked the beginning of a challenging barbed wire and machine gun towers. In the new phase for civilization, filled with peril, but fictional Beyond the Spectrum war, America’s also with a certain amount of promise. This is a entry into the conflict began on a December phase through which we seem on the verge (if morning, when naval forces from the Empire of we are wise, and pay attention) of being able to Japan bombed Manila and Hawaii from the air. sustain the kind of civilization that can actually thrive on Earth—and afterward, as H.G. Wells The war itself, as it stimulated technological once envisioned our kind, we may stand up as a advance, led up to a split second that ended up child stands upon a footstool, and reach out mirroring, as if by prophetic warning, key among the planets, and beyond. aspects of the moment in which our species entered its nuclear adolescence. Thus begins an inevitable stage in the life of any electronic civilization’s history, a phase Beyond the Spectrum concludes its war with that (succeed or fail) must be so brief and so America’s development and threatened mass- rare as to now be happening only once among manufacture of a weapon that blazes forth with all the stars in our galaxy (if other civilizations a fearful light (including deadly wavelengths have evolved, they long ago succeeded or beyond what the human eye can normally failed). With such grace do we move forward, see—exactly as occurred above Hiroshima and as probably the newest, brightest, and most Nagasaki). The fictional weapon’s light was interesting creatures around. capable of inflicting burns out to a distance of several miles. The 1908 novel described This is the story of a human awakening, of a smoldering ships limping into port, driven by clock that began ticking at 8:15 AM, August 6, stokers or anyone else who happened to be 1945—toward what end, no one knows. Truly located below deck at the moment ofno one. Our odyssey begins precisely where it detonation, because the flash was so intense began for our entire species—during that first that it burned or blinded officers and crew who one hundred millionth of a second above Japan. had been on the bridge or anywhere else topside. ### And, how strange to think that the author of I remember the very strong scent of cherry- Beyond the Spectrum died in frustration and wood sap. I remember the cherry blossoms in obscurity, in much the same way that an 1898 spring. On August 6, I saw the orchards of novel about “the wreck of the Titan” went out Hiroshima aflame. It smelled like cherry pie. 2 16 | 21 | 3 APJ | JF - Memories of a young girl, Case # 2016-B his skin with some small measure of protection (1985) from the searing white glare. On the wall print behind him, marking the moment of the sun’s SUNRISE awakening, could be seen the shadow of a leaf that had just detached from its vine and though The day Homo sapiens became adult began falling, would never reach the ground. Nearby with unsettling calm and beauty. lay five glass marbles. They would be found days later—melted and re-solidified into green As dawn approached, only gentle breezes blobs. stirred. Even the usual buzz of cicada song seemed oddly subdued. Southward, the sea Deep within the Matsuda boy’s radius from the sparkled like a field of polished beads, brass hypocenter, young Aoyama Nenkai’s mother bright against the universe. On an inland lake, must have been outdoors and already at work, the air was still, with the reflection of a castle on the same patch of ground she had been reproduced in such exquisite detail, that if koi working every other morning by 8:15. She were not occasionally gulping at the water’s tended a temple garden with a half dozen surface, the lake would have been monks. The vegetable patch was adjacent to an indistinguishable from a carefully polished eerily shock-cocooned landmark that history mirror1. would one day name, “the Peace Dome.” On Near the lake’s shore, during that first chip of this particular day, Mrs. Aoyama had saved her time, turtles were raising their golden eyes son’s life by having suddenly, as if in a panic, above the koi—each turtlehead, a set of twin rushed him out of their home and away to his periscopes gazing in opposite directions. Even school’s work detail nearly an hour early. reptilian brains would have registered almost Nenkai’s last memory of his mother was her immediately that something had gone terribly inexplicable command, “You must hurry.” wrong with the sunrise—the second dawn of “Maybe she had a premonition,” Nenkai would the day. Faster than nerves could respond, reflect, years later. “I just don’t know.” At faster than water could begin to ripple, the Moment Zero and nearly a mile behind the boy, turtles were blind and the tops of their shells ash and blood-derived steam exploded away were bleached. The mirror-lake reflected cicadas in flight, and dragonflies, and birds, all from the place where his mother had been blazing forth like dazzling diamonds.

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