In Memoriam: Kenichi Yokota
December 18, 1905 - October 15, 2001

By Ryan Masaaki Yokota
Written on October 17, 2001

In October of last year, my Ji-chan (grandfather) died, and things will never be the same again.

I can only mourn the loss.

He was a quiet man, and in his later years, he lived an almost Zen-like existence. Usually he spent his time reading books, watching Japanese TV or baseball, enjoying some sake or beer, or puttering around in his garden. Yet who would have known the life he had lived and the things he had seen in the 95 years that he had been alive.

You see my Ba-chan (grandmother) was a Kibei Nisei, a second-generation Japanese American who went back to Japan, met my Ji-chan there, married, and had four sons. Ji-chan worked for the City Department of Education in Hiroshima, and had served as a middle school principal.

They were in Hiroshima when the nuclear bomb was dropped on that fateful day of August 6, 1945. In many ways the story of my family was a lucky one, as unlike many people in Hiroshima that day, we lost no one in our immediate family to the tragedy of that terrible blast.

Our family was saved in three main ways. The first was that following the bombing raids on Tokyo, when the bombs lit fires that raged throughout the small, closely lined buildings in the city, the city planners in Hiroshima decided to open up the streets in the city, so the same firestorms could be prevented if there was a bombing raid on Hiroshima. Because of the need for that precaution, our family was relocated from their house some two kilometers away to the countryside another one and a half kilometers away, with Hijiyama Hill directly between the blast and where they were living. This hill served to bear the brunt of the nuclear blast, and in this way, my Ba-chan and father were saved as well. This was the first thing that saved my family, as they surely would have been incinerated in the initial nuclear blast. At the same time, however, they didn't escape unscathed. My Ba-chan was blown clear across the room in which she was standing, and the windows shattered under the blast, turning the glass into tiny shards that cut her all over her body.

The second thing that saved my family was that because Ji-chan worked for the Department of Education, and they had feared for the students in the event of a bombing raid, they moved the education-related personnel to a location farther from the center of the city, many kilometers away. If they hadn't taken this step, Ji-chan would probably have been in city hall, directly near the epicenter of the blast, and would have been killed this way. He told me how he had seen the Enola Gay flying into the city on his way to work, and when the blast hit, the ceiling caved in on him, but he was able to get under a table and escape major injury.

After leaving the building, he had to walk several kilometers through the wasteland that was once Hiroshima city, in order to get home. He talked about the smell of burnt ash and charred human flesh that wafted around the flattened remains of the city.

Finally, because my family lived in the southeast, and the winds blew to the northwest, the winds blew the acid rain and fallout away from my family, and thus, they avoided the worst effects of radiation poisoning that many other families had to deal with.

After Japan's surrender, being one of the few city officials left alive, Ji-chan was the person in charge of receiving orders from General Douglas MacArthur and sending them out.

During the fifties, my family decided to go to Los Angeles, most likely because my Ba-chan's father, my great-grandfather was still here. It must have been extremely hard for Ji-chan to come here and start over in this foreign country, and make it here. Despite having been well educated, he had to work as a gardener, and that's how he made his living here in the U.S.

Also, despite having been here for over forty years, he never learned English, and perhaps in that small way maintained his connection to his homeland. One of my goals in life was to learn Nihongo to the point where I could actually hold a conversation with him.

Through it all, however, he remained extremely informed about history and current affairs. And although he was somewhat politically conservative, he was also, as my dad stated, a "pacifist." Though it seems a strange contradiction in the U.S., it seemed logical considering his background and lived experiences. If only we had more conservative pacifists right now.

All in all, it's sad to know that he will no longer be here to learn from. With all the lessons and insight that he had, there were many lessons from him that I had yet to learn. And I will always regret that I was never able to have a decent conversation with him in Nihongo, which I would have wanted greatly. In any case, Ji-chan, we'll miss you and my dance at the Obon this year was for you.

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