The first time I have seen a torii gate—the tree trunk poles, the slightly concave roof—was at the Botanic Garden in the unceded homeland of the Lenape people. In the garden that quiet, humid morning, I listened for the hum of traffic that usually carries its quick and cacophonous voice along Washington Avenue and Flatbush. Instead, the streets were nearly silent. Our cloth masks pressed pink and white flowers, blue and black paisleys, to our lips in the hazy air. We hardly saw anyone among the hedges and trellises, and when we did, we backed away nervously. Even being outside in a public place like this felt like breaking a rule. Birdsong filled the trees, and I stopped with my spouse and toddler to admire little yellow flowers.
I’d moved to Brooklyn from New Mexico a few months before the pandemic, so this was my first time at the Botanic Garden. I’ve never been to Japan, and I don’t recall seeing a torii gate in person in any gardens I might have visited as a child or young adult. That August morning, the garden sunny and empty, was one of the first times the public could re-enter this beloved place during the first summer of the pandemic. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden officially re-opened at limited capacity on August 7, 2020, a day after the seventy-fifth anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima.
Somewhere, I wrote down the names of the starlike growths in the green. My toddler stopped to pick up sweet gum seed pods—spiny little worlds slightly smaller than golf balls. And then we rounded a corner. There we saw the wooden Shinto gate, reddish orange, standing at the edge of the pond. The structure reflected itself, stretching into the pond and up into the sky, extending in two directions. Upward and downward. This world and its mirror. We wound our way up the path, leaving the stroller at the bottom of some steps, and found the Shinto shrine guarded by two stone foxes. My daughter fed their open mouths the sweet gum seeds she had carried in her tiny hands.
I would later learn the foxes are guardians of the shrine itself—messengers of the inari, deities of agriculture, of rice, and of fertility. The shrine, empty except for the air that passes through it, felt sacred to me that morning. Especially on that strangely quiet day. This space in the city created a place for nature to pass through you. The shrine sat nestled in the trees, its placard fallen over from a recent storm. The moss on the north side of the trees smelled wet, like dirt. I thought about all of the dead, all of those we lost so quickly to the virus, all of the spirits suddenly in another place. Sometimes, when I walked through the city that summer, catching the scent of leaves or passing through a cloud of golden gnats, I would feel the touch of those who died and loved the city, those who left so quickly.
The US military base on Okinawa is called Torii Station, named after the Shinto gates at the front entrance. The island came under US naval command at the very end of July 1945, after the battle of Okinawa, where close to 150,000 Japanese civilians and over 12,000 US military personnel died. 150,000 Japanese civilians. On August 9, 1945, how was it that after nearly running out of fuel, the plane Bockscar which dropped the “Fat Man” atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, landed on Okinawa? The B-29 landed with five minutes of fuel left in the tank, engines dying, without clearance from the radio tower. The giant cigar, as my grandfather would call it, slammed into parked B-24s. After all of this, the whole crew on Bockscar thought they were in fact flying the plane the Great Artiste. The city that was supposed to be bombed—Kokura—roiled with smoke from USAF bombings the previous day. So many facts get lost in the clouds. And the plane that opened its bomb doors and released the more than 10,000-pound nuclear bomb? On a city that wasn’t part of the initial plan for that day—while it was on the list of proposed cities? It nearly crashed afterward not on the emergency landing field at Iwo Jima, but on Okinawa, an island first colonized by Japan and then by the United States. Now the island is part of Japan but controlled by the US military.
I was there. I was there, my grandfather said. Interviewed to drop the bomb. A decoy plane. This is classified—I shouldn’t—He stands up from the couch and walks into another room in my memory.
How could the name of a military base controlled by the United States that has been marked with such violence, a place taken from its history, a place that landed the plane that murdered so many people, be given such a sacred name?
Torii Station.
When I first stood before a torii gate in Brooklyn, that summer day, I found myself entranced by the shimmer in the water underneath it. The rippling red beams reflected there. And the stillness in the water.
Back in my apartment, I look at a photograph of two torii gates positioned as archways above an access road at the US Army Garrison on Okinawa.
Military vehicles pass underneath and through the beams.
You are not supposed to walk directly through a torii gate.
This is where the deity passes.
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The Bomb Cloud is published by Unbound Edition Press. This excerpt from it is reprinted with permission.
