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The Beginning Of The End

August 1945’ the war was going badly for Japan bringing bitter uncertainty and fear for its people, a legacy faced by lieutenant Arida Hakiro and his bride to be Onura Yamata entering the state of marriage with young lovers hope’s and belief in a future world of peace. A hope and situation they faced, as did their counterparts all over the world their lives disrupted and governed by war. A tedious military handicap young lovers of the world overcame by ignoring it and marrying, helped by friends and family to snatch two days for their honeymoon; forty-eight hours of bliss before the young man returned to the steel yoke embrace of the military with memories of his loved one and plans for the future, that unfortunately for many was not too be after their brief step into the world of tender love and passion when their life’s ended abruptly on some unknown muddy battlefield.
A pattern that applied to the young lieutenant about too be married and not allowed to leave the area where he was stationed in Hiroshima, for he could be recalled to duty at a moments notice. A situation remedied with the help of lieutenant Hakiro’s commanding officer, an elderly gentleman endowed with the wisdom of age and memory of youth coming to the lover’s aid by making available to them his personal cottage for their two-day honeymoon retreat.
A picturest cottage perched on a hillside overlooking the city where the problems of the world ceased for the young lovers Arida and Onura stepping over its threshold on their wedding night on the fifth of August 1945. A place of tranquil secure peace where the lovers embraced and consummated their love in passionate tenderness, then enfolded in each other’s arms slept until the first grey streaks of dawn turned to burnished gold that bathed their hillside love nest as the Sun rose above the horizon. A scene of euphoric peaceful silence, so still it woke the sleeping Arida cradling the sleeping Onura in his arms and never wanting to let her go in that serene moment that brought him reflections of his past life and the spirals of fate that brought him to his beloved in just three short years that turned the boy Arida into a man.
A metamorphosis accelerated by war that disrupted his life and plans, to rob not only him of his youth but his counterparts all over the world in that time of chaotic insanity that finally lead him to his beautiful bride and destiny. A thought that pleased Arida wistfully looking through the open window’s of the veranda too see nature’s silent beauty unfurl under the warm embrace of the sun washing over the land like a quiet healing tide of peace that revived memories of innocent days when he was a happy student in the summer of nineteen forty-two.
A crucial time of destiny for Arida and his fellow graduate friends, young men he could see in his minds eye standing on the steps of Tokyo university, happy and full of life as they posed for a group photograph of the momentous occasion of their graduation, holding aloft their new degrees for their parents and families to see the documents that had taken so much hard work to gain before they left the well-ordered university life with bold plans for the future. Exciting youthful plans, a luxury fate decreed would not be theirs, for no sooner had the ink dried on their degrees and the Saki ceased to flow in their festivities Arida and his fellow graduates were summoned by Imperial Emperor Hirohito to fight for the land of the rising Sun against America and its allies.
A royal command that turned youthful dreams and ambitions to dust in one fell swoop and made Arida an army lieutenant of engineers serving in the Philippine islands, where he was wounded and returned to Japan to recuperate before being stationed in Hiroshima. A fortunate posting for him it being the city where he met and married Onura the most beautiful girl in the world, the high point of his young life and one he thanked the twisting spirals of destiny for.
Pleasant gentle thoughts that lulled and returned Arida to peaceful slumbers and dreams of his future life with Onura and the family they dearly desired, slumbers brought to a close when Arida was wakened from this pleasured state by the suns rays streaming through the open veranda windows and the rustle of Onura’s silk kimono as she busily prepared their wedding breakfast out on the veranda, it being such a beautiful sunny morning with insects buzzing and songbirds singing brightly, just for them it seemed on their first day of marriage.
A day of tradition when a Japanese wife must show genteel subservience to her husband, a practice Onura followed when ushering her handsome Arida to the hot bath she prepared for him, then helped him bathe before returning to the veranda where she fussed over their wedding breakfast. A labour of love guided by her mother’s voice echoing advice handed down from generation to generation of young brides that always ended with, ‘remember you should be respectful and subservient to your husband at all times.’
A ritual Arida was happy to be part of when sitting at the head of the table dressed in fine robes, sternly surveying everything as her lord and master should. That is until Onura overtaken with a fit of giggling broke the spell by mimicking the folded arms and fierce look of her not so dominant male, before falling into his arms to kiss and hold him, not wishing to be apart even for a second as they clung to each other in the morning sun wanting that sublime moment to go on forever.
A moment of tender young love lost to shocked fear and awareness, when singing birds and buzzing insects grew ominously quiet, the very air itself clawing fearful apprehension by a sound they had come to know so well, the powerful throbbing engines of an American B29 bomber. An angel of death that left Tinian island in the Pacific Ocean for a destination that would go down in the annuls of history as mans insane inhumanity to man in the city of Hiroshima, where wailing sirens warned its inhabitants of an imminent air raid and Onura clung fearfully to Arida consoling her with assurances that they were safe, for the Americans were after the city factories, not their little love nest tucked safely away from harm. Arida’s assurances momentarily calming Onura’s agitation until excitedly she pointed skywards calling look! Following the line of Onura’s pointing finger Arida could see the reason for her excitement, a lone canister like object drifting majestically as if in slow motion as it descended on Hiroshima, causing Arida too reassure his beloved, you see my love there’s nothing to worry about we’re safe here.
Gentle reassurance that made Onura feel sheepish and put her arm around Arida’s waist, while thinking how silly she had been as she joined her husband too hypnotically watch the canister drop gracefully over the city as the clock behind the lovers chimed eight thirty a:m, in tandem with the searing blinding light of the first atom bomb erupting on the sixth of August nineteen forty five to vaporise the population and city of Hiroshima, the sound of the chiming clock and the blinding searing light being the last things the young lovers heard and saw before being drawn into the mushroom cloud of death that rose to the heavens.
A holocaust watched at a safe distance by Colonel Paul Tibbets captain of the black goggled crew of the American B29 bomber with the name Enola Gay emblazoned on its cockpit fuselage. The crew happy in the knowledge they were bringing an insane bloody viscous war to its end, but ignorant of the true fact that they had unleashed Armageddon on that fateful day that echoed the speech of a rightly angry betrayed President Theodore Roosevelt on the sneak Japanese attack on Pearl harbour, when he stated that Sunday December seventh nineteen forty-one was a day of infamy that would go down in the annals of human history.
Words the President little realised at the beginning of the war with Japan would mirror and echo its end and the beginning of misery for unborn innocents the world over saturated with strontium ninety, created by that spiralling cavernous mushroom of death that left in its wake a world poisoned for generations to come, a horrendous crime and folly paid for by the innocent tomorrow people, the children of today unable to cry infamy at that cataclysmic time.

Ged Burns

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