"Voices of Those Directly Affected by 9/11

How do people rise again from grief?

The World Trade Center in New York is on fire-.
That was the site of the Fuji Bank New York Branch, where the author’s son worked.
“Guraundo Zero no Uta(Song of Ground Zero)” is a memoir that portrays the profound sorrow and inner struggle of a father who lost his son in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The account goes beyond a chronological report of events; it is also an interior record of one person’s encounter with despair and the path by which he began to confront it.

One evening, as the author sat watching television at ease, he suddenly witnessed an unbelievable scene.
The building where his son worked was burning. Before long, the screen showed an airplane plowing into the other tower. “I could not grasp, in that instant, what was happening there,” the author recalls.
Some time later, learning that his son had been caught up in the attack, the father went to New York to search for him, but found no leads.
“I could do nothing. My colleagues at work helped me get through my duties somehow, but at the back of my mind I was always thinking of my son.”

During this period the author began to compose tanka poems. Painful as the work was, “each time a poem took shape, I felt my heart ease just a little,” he writes. In those poems dwell his deep love for his son, the pitilessness of the attack, and his dissatisfaction with public commentary in Japan.

Accepting reality through the act of composing poems

“The last duty left to father and mother:
we give our DNA samples and leave them behind.”

Few people truly understand what DNA identification meant at the New York disaster site. It was an act premised on the impossibility of survival. As the New York mayor said at a memorial service, “many victims will likely leave not even a trace.” The harsh reality is that countless people vanished from this world without a trace.

“I cannot think you live;
and yet I cannot bring myself to think you do not.”

And yet, through these poems we sense the author, little by little, coming to accept his son’s death.

Peace begins with a sense of involvement

Songs from Ground Zero is a valuable work for understanding the anguish of the victims of terrorism and their families, and at the same time it prompts deep reflection on terrorism and the international community. It is a book that gives strength to move forward beyond sorrow; through the author’s candid words and tanka, readers gain an opportunity to reconsider the preciousness of lives lost and the meaning of going on living.

“Meanwhile, I found myself uneasy with the tenor of domestic commentary on the incident. (…) One newspaper wrote that, in the primary sense, the party concerned was America. (…) But are not the ninety-one countries that lost citizens also parties to this incident, at the very least?”

This memoir forcefully insists that the attacks were not a problem for one country alone, but an assault on all humanity that loves peace. Moreover, it shows that each of us has something we can do to build a peaceful world. Perhaps the first step needed to begin a substantive discussion is to adopt the stance of being directly concerned.

Text by Norie Tsutsui.

Author Profile

Kazusada Sumiyama
Born in Nagoya in 1937; resides in Meguro Ward, Tokyo. Graduated from the Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, Tohoku University. Worked at Nippon Light Metal Co., Ltd. and at the Industrial Property Cooperation Center before retiring."