Magic in Hiroshima

In Hiroshima, a few minutes past eight on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, 37-year-old Tomikazu Matsui, owner of the largest printing company in town, was bicycling past a big wooden building on his way to his office. At that moment the bomb burst. The building collapsed, spilled into the street. Matsui was buried in the wreckage. His arm was broken and his head deeply gashed, but he managed to crawl from the wreckage, staggered on to his plant half a kilometer away. There, where his great Sogo Printing Co. had stood, he found nothing but ruins.

It took Matsui and his surviving workers two months to clear away the debris. When the job was done, all that was left was a single air-raid shelter. Matsui ordered a sign reading "Capital" fixed to the shelter. "This," he boomed to his workers, "is the capital from which we will rebuild."

"Kore Da!" Matsui did rebuild, but he was not to remain Hiroshima's leading printer of beer and sake labels, government securities, and Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere bonds. In the time of Hiroshima's agony he had found a new work. One day he noticed five small schoolchildren, dressed in rags and sitting on boxes in the midst of the rubble. In front of them, their teacher was drawing kana characters (syllable symbols) with a charcoal stick on a piece of slate. The sight changed Matsui's plans instantly. "Kore da!" he said to himself. "This is it!" Hiroshima's children needed books: he would print them.

For the next few weeks he consulted teachers, set up a research staff to determine what colors and print his young readers would like. He even submitted sample texts to groups of the children to find out what interested them.

He decided he would print a new sort of magazine, filled with bright cartoons as well as simple articles on science, music and history. There would be adventure stories centered about the lives of historical figures, and short biographies of foreign notables, from General MacArthur to Helen Keller, to balance the Japanese heroes. Silver Bells, he decided, would be unlike anything Japan had seen before.

It was, and the children loved it. Soon, other Matsui books and magazines followed--Playmate for the kindergarten ages, Blue Skies for teen-age girls, reprints of the world's classics, textbooks and histories. Matsui mixed entertainment with education, plugged for democracy and world understanding. "Japan," began one of his histories, "is really a beautiful country . . . But if we look out at the broad world, we will find all sorts of high mountains and great rivers . . . bustling cities and differing customs which we could not see in our own country." Matsui quickly won the admiration and support of the Ministry of Education and the U.S. occupation forces alike.

Jingle, Jingle. Last week in Hiroshima 41-year-old Tomikazu Matsui had 14 buildings, 39 branch offices, 1,200 employees. Silver Bells' circulation had boomed to 1,200,000. He was composing his annual New Year's poem for his workers. "Oh," sang Poet Matsui, "the Silver Bells are ringing. Jingle, jingle, jingle, how they are ringing." But to Matsui, the jingling meant more than coins.

"I am like a department store," says he. "Everything interests me." At his main plant, almost every day he holds some special event--a party or lecture for children, or a teachers' conference about some new plan. "Money," says he, "can be the magic key to many things. But money plus a noble objective is the real magic key." Today, four years after the bomb, Matsui thinks he has found the key.

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