If you want to know more about a person, it is common to first check with his relatives. In his profile in the book "The Centennial History of Japanese Americans in the United States," which he wrote and edited, Shinichi Kato mentions his wife and children. Since his wife is probably already deceased, I decided to look into Kenneth Nao, who is listed as his only child.
It is unclear whether Kenneth was born in Japan or America, but Kenneth is thought to be his English name and Nao is his Japanese name, and he graduated from Shudo Gakuen High School, a prestigious private school in Hiroshima. This school originated as a domain school called "Kogakusho" opened by Asano Yoshinaga, the fifth lord of the Hiroshima domain, in 1725 (Kyoho 10). Currently, it houses Shudo Junior and Senior High School, an integrated junior and senior high school, as well as Hiroshima Shudo University.
After graduating from high school, Kenneth went to the United States and worked at the Bank of Tokyo's Rafu branch, i.e. the Los Angeles branch, when this book was published in 1961. The Bank of Tokyo, whose predecessor was the Yokohama Specie Bank, was the only foreign exchange bank in Japan, but in 1996 it merged with Mitsubishi Bank and the bank's name eventually disappeared from the bank's name.
I remembered that the father of an acquaintance of mine had once worked at the Bank of Tokyo's American branch, so I thought that if I could find someone who worked at the bank's San Francisco branch in the 1960s through my acquaintance's route, and if I could find someone who knew the bank's Los Angeles branch in 1961, I might be able to trace Kenneth Kato from there. However, unfortunately, there was no one who knew anything about that time.
Exploring Kato's time at the Chugoku Shimbun newspaper
Deciding that it would be difficult to find information on Kato Shinichi's relatives right away, I decided that my next route would be to trace him back to the Shin Nichibei Shimbunsha, the publisher of "Centennial History." However, it seems that Shin Nichibei Shimbunsha was a short-lived company in Los Angeles, and tracing its history seemed quite difficult. The next step I considered was to look into the Chugoku Shimbunsha, where Kato worked after returning to Hiroshima after the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States. Once again, I repeatedly searched the web for Kato Shinichi and the Chugoku Shimbun. Then, I came across a newspaper article.
The article was "1945 Atomic Bomb and the Chugoku Shimbun ① The Destruction of Hiroshima" published in the Chugoku Shimbun (headquarters in Hiroshima) on Saturday, March 24, 2012. It appears to be the first in a series of articles, and the introduction to the article read as follows:
"The Chugoku Shimbun will celebrate its 120th anniversary on May 5th. We are a comprehensive media company that delivers information in the broadcasting and digital fields. During this time, we have experienced many hardships. The atomic bombing of August 6th, 1945 claimed the lives of over 100 employees, and our headquarters was burned down. The surviving employees were also injured, and many lost family members. From this unprecedented situation, we resumed publication of the newspaper, appealing for relief and reconstruction, and conveying the wishes of Hiroshima. We will dig up related records and testimonies about the exposure of news organizations to the atomic bomb and their steps toward a fresh start. What questions do the war and the beginning of the "nuclear" age still ask us today? We will report on this in seven parts, every Saturday until May 5th. (Editorial Committee Member, Nishimoto Masami)"
In an article examining the atomic bomb and newspapers
From the preamble, one could imagine that this was a series examining the atomic bomb and newspapers, unique to a news organization that had been publishing a newspaper in Hiroshima since before the war and had been exposed to the atomic bomb.
The first issue, with headlines such as "900 meters from ground zero, head office completely destroyed" and "Rushing through flames," describes the situation of the media in Hiroshima on August 6th, the day the atomic bomb was dropped, and introduces some of the actions and testimonies of the company's employees before and after the bombing. One of them was by Shinichi Kato.
The article said:
"Shinichi Kato (44) was the head of the news department and commuted from Hirara Village (Hatsukaichi City). He was at the end of a long line of people waiting to transfer to the city tram at Koi Station (Nishi-Hiroshima Station) on the Miyajima Line when he was looking through the morning paper ('Journey through the Atomic Bomb Hell', written in 1971).
According to this, Kato was on his way to the head office in the city.
"The Chugoku Shimbun headquarters is about 900 meters east of the hypocenter.
Kato arrived at the head office at noon, "hearing the death cries of people and apologizing in his heart, 'Please forgive me. There is nothing we can do.'"
The three-story reinforced concrete headquarters with two rotary presses and the new 11-story building that housed the Hiroshima branch of Domei Tsushin and the Hiroshima Central Broadcasting Station (NHK) were both "unaffected by the outside, but inside there was a roaring roar and flames were burning." Seeing that, Kato thought, "All is lost."
On the morning of August 6, we saw and heard the voice of Kato Shinichi in downtown Hiroshima. Kato, who drove around the United States to write "The Centennial History of Japanese Americans in the United States," had had the harrowing experience 16 years earlier of walking around the hypocenter as a newspaper reporter, sometimes hearing the screams of the dead.
As an interpreter and guide for Dr. Juno
Furthermore, if we follow the serial articles of "The Atomic Bomb and the Chugoku Shimbun," we find Kato Shinichi's name popping up again in the sixth installment, "Reporting and Another Disaster." In this installment, the Chugoku Shimbun's reporting system is written about about one month after the atomic bomb was dropped.
According to the article, the Chugoku Shimbun suffered devastating damage in the atomic bombing, including its headquarters being set ablaze, but managed to resume publication on its own on September 3rd. The article reported on the activities of a group of American reporters who arrived on the scene that same day, as well as the U.S. military atomic bomb investigation team (led by Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, who had been involved in the Manhattan Project, the development of the American atomic bomb), which arrived five days later, and Dr. Marcel Junod, chief representative of the Red Cross in Japan, who accompanied the team.
In this regard, the following is stated in the article:
"The person who acted as the doctor's interpreter and guide was Shinichi Kato (44), then head of the press department. 'At the request of the prefecture, he accompanied the doctor on a jeep tour of the entire city' (document attached to the Atomic Bomb Survivors' Health Handbook in 1967). The following day, the 11th, an article was published in which Rihei Numata (43), then head of the Itsukushima branch office, had interviewed the research team."
"Both of them went to the US in their teens and were former editors of the Japanese language newspaper "Beikoku Sangyo Nippo" published in Los Angeles ("History of the Japanese in Southern California" published in 1957). Numata returned home in 1940, the year before the outbreak of war between Japan and the US, and Kato returned home the following year, 1942, on the first Japanese-American exchange ship."
Kato was running around here again, this time riding in a jeep with the Americans touring the atomic bomb site.
Mixed feelings as someone who knows Japan and the US?
Kato, who graduated from high school in the United States, was probably chosen for this mission because of his English skills and the way he dealt with Americans, or perhaps because he volunteered to do so. Kato spent his youth in America, which must have had some influence on him, so what were his thoughts as he took on the job of translating and guiding Americans while witnessing the devastated land and the people of his hometown who had died cruelly? It is only our imagination, but there must have been some complicated feelings.
The same was probably true for Numata Rihei, who is mentioned in the article. Furthermore, if we consider that many people from Hiroshima emigrated overseas and some returned to Japan, there must have been many people like Kato and Numata in Hiroshima, and just like Japanese Americans in the United States, there must have been quite a few Hiroshima people who felt torn between two countries by the war and the horrors of the atomic bomb.
Kato had a unique experience as a newspaper reporter, but in October 1952, he also served as Secretary General of the First World Federalist Asian Conference in Hiroshima. Was this also part of another of Kato's activities? What kind of work and activities did Kato do in Japan? When I was about to continue my research, I happened to come across a connection with an old acquaintance, and the complete picture of Kato came into view all at once.
(Titles omitted)
© 2021 Ryusuke Kawai
