Canadian Mennonite
Volume 11, No. 06
March 19, 2007
From the smell of death to a sense of wholeness
Baden, Ont.
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Many of us cannot imagine the horrors of war. But not Morio Ogasawara, a member of Shantz Mennonite Church, who was psychologically scarred during World War II in his native Japan.
Tokyo had been the target of massive incendiary bombings by the Allied Air Force from early 1945 to the end of war later that year. On March 9 and 10, B-29 bombers dropped nearly a half-million M-69 incendiary cylinders, which created intense fires. This bombing—the largest air raid in history—reduced 17 square miles of the city core to ashes.
Morio was eight years old then, and although his family was living in a suburb that was not bombed on those two days, he watched as the whole sky turned red from huge fires burning in the city. He doesn’t remember being afraid, but was more awestruck by the sheer scale of the catastrophe.
A couple of days later, when he returned to school (students went to school every day except when actual bombing was going on—then they had a “bomb day” much like a “snow day” in Canada), Morio learned that a stray bomb had killed a friend with whom he went to Kindergarten. Morio was told that Mitchan (the girl’s nickname) and her mother, with her youngest daughter strapped on her back, were hit by one of the incendiary cluster bombs that had discharged high above them.
A few weeks later, as bombing spread to the suburbs, Morio’s parents decided to evacuate the family from Tokyo. In order to get to the train station, they had to go through the downtown area. Fearing what the three children might see, their mother blindfolded the children until they reached the station.
As they were waiting to board the evacuation train, Morio smelled a strange smell. He put that smell and the story of Mitchan together and instantly fainted. He later learned that a couple of days earlier, a few platforms away from where they stood, a passenger train had received a direct hit, and hundreds of people had perished. The smell had lingered.
Ogasawara believes that a part of him was frozen in terror on that spot and was left there as an eight-year-old boy. Since that day he has experienced fainting spells, which have always been accompanied—or triggered—by the sense of smell.
The fainting spells have been a physical response to his history, but it has been the emotional part that has been the greatest struggle.
A prayer vigil at Hillcrest Mennonite Church in New Hamburg, Ont., kick-started his incredible journey of healing. Then, on Nov. 20, 2001, he attended a Steve Bell concert. Bell, a popular Christian musician, told the audience of a dream that dealt with hurt, violence, frustration and, ultimately, healing. It was a powerful, even provocative testimony at a time when many still reeled from the 9/11 attack and the war in Afghanistan.
Ogasawara also attended a lecture at St. Jacobs Mennonite Church by Koko Kondo, an atomic bomb survivor. She expressed her hatred for the crew of the B-29 bombers for all their destruction. Ogasawara had never blamed or hated the crew of the bombers, but at eight he already knew that the enemy was not the flight crew, nor America, nor Japan, but war itself.
“How much easier would it be if I hated someone in particular?” he wondered. “Then the moment I forgive someone, hard though it may be, I would also be freed and healed, as it had happened for Koko. How much heavier a burden could there be for anyone, let alone a child, to carry? It was a sense of the ‘fallen-ness’ of humankind which manifested [itself] in the horrible war. Whom could I forgive and how?”
Ogasawara reflected on the humble advice that Kondo had given him about his anger: “Tell your story, no matter how painful it is to do so and how unresolved your troubles are, and by doing so you are helping to heal yourself.” As he hugged tiny Kondo—her growth stunted by nuclear radiation—he knew that God had led her to him.
He was finally ready to reveal his scars. While singing “Silent Night” at the 2001 Christmas Eve service at Shantz, he felt that God had carried him back 56 years in time to reunite him with the little boy who was left on the platform of the Tokyo train terminal. When the hymn came to the end, Ogasawara found himself completely whole for the first time in many years.
He was finally ready to tell his story. He also knew that he would never have a fainting spell again.