Something was odd about the scenery.
As the train approached the heart of New York, I suddenly realized that the Twin Towers didn’t exist anymore. Spending my first 10 years in New York, the World Trade Center was always in my drawings, right next to the Empire State Building. It was always there.
Though I knew it, ever since the moment the planes crashed into the buildings and made them collapse to the ground, it was a fact that was hard to accept.
“This barbaric act of mass murder should never happen again.” “God bless the USA.” On flags not only American but also French, Italian, Canadian and others, hundreds and hundreds of messages of all sorts were written and tied to the fence around St. Paul’s Chapel, located across the street from Ground Zero. Some were written on “I LOVE NY” T-shirts, others were on pieces of plastic or even paper.
Suddenly, colorful paper cranes threaded together with strings caught my eye. This was a “Senba-zuru,” a traditional Japanese handcraft that is often sent to people to express sympathy or wishes for good health. That reminded me of the 24 Japanese people who were killed in the terrorist attacks.
“I don’t like clear and sunny skies in New York anymore … because they remind me of 9/11,” said Takuro Sasao, 32. The Japanese businessman worked in one of the offices in the World Trade Center, and was miraculously lucky not to be one of the nearly 3,000 victims. Among the 5 workers in his office, he and a colleague were the only ones who survived.
None of the bodies was found.
“That day, for some reason, I wanted to have a nice iced latte at Starbucks, which I usually don’t like,” Sasao told me. “But that saved my life.”
After his cup of coffee, just before 9 a.m., Sasao was about to enter his office. Actually, he was on the elevator when he heard the roar of the first plane crashing into the opposite tower. His instincts told him he should get off.
“If I were on that elevator, I would’ve definitely been killed,” he said. He grabbed a taxi that just happened to drive by, and attempted to get away from the Twin Towers as fast as he could. “It was then that I heard the second plane crash,” he said. He looked out the windows of the cab, “right into the floor where my office was.”
He then took the subway and headed back home. Because of the attack, the subway was not running on schedule, so the stations were crowded with hundreds of people.
“Not a single person,” Sasao said, with his hand placed slightly over his mouth, “could utter a word on the train.”
As the father of a 2-year-old son, he repeatedly expressed deep sorrow for those who left children behind. “Most of them had kids, 5 or 6 years old, and that’s a time of life when you really need a parent, “ he said.
“I totally don’t understand how they can kill thousands of innocent people and justify it as a ‘jihad.’ The families may get millions of dollars in compensation, but what they have lost cannot be (replaced) by anything.” Sasao said the patriotism that arose in the U.S. felt natural to him. “Besides, I’m also one of the victims.”
Now, Sasao makes it routine to stop at Starbucks every morning.
“It took me a while before I could face what happened, the reality,” he said, with a brighter expression on his face. “Now I go there and buy coffee every day and I always tell them, in my heart, ‘Thank you for saving my life.’”
For a long time I had the impression that the streets between the World Trade Center buildings were very dark even in daylight, probably because the two tall buildings created shadows. Ironically, today the place is full of sunshine.
Maybe that is the reason why I don’t feel it was a place where something “ended,” but rather a place where something was going to start, something that would move forward toward a brighter future.
Notebook
By Ikuko Yuge, WPI ’02