Hiroshima Maidens

by Rodney Barker

  Not that all the weddings were easily achieved. Michiko Sako’s relationship with a National Railway worker nearly ended in tragedy. When they announced their engagement, his family opposed it on the grounds that the damage she had suffered would surely show up in their children, and they threatened to disown him if he went through with it. Michiko was brought to the point of utter despair when she discovered she was already carrying his child, and one morning when she could stand it no longer she boarded a train she thought was headed toward a famous shrine where she intended to take her life. But in her confusion she had taken the wrong train, and by the time she realized her mistake she was approaching a station close to the house where Helen Yokoyama was staying. The very day Helen found Michiko sobbing on the doorstep, she marched straight to the home of the girl’s fiancé and had it out with his family. Either they changed their minds or she would go to the newspapers with the story, which would look wonderful in the headlines: SUITOR CASTS OFF PREGNANT HIROSHIMA MAIDEN. Shortly afterward, grudging approval was received, and the couple was properly married.

  Nor did it all end happily ever after. When she returned, Atsuko Yamamoto took a position as a switchboard operator at the New Hiroshima Hotel, where she found herself courted by the assistant manager. He was handsome, athletic, university-educated, and she was flattered that he showed so much interest in her when there were so many other pretty women walking about town. There was a cunning streak in him that made her slightly wary, but that was characteristic of many “après-guerre” Japanese men, and it was also exciting to be around. He spoke relatively good English, and after they married he took charge of their American correspondence, writing long letters to her hostesses full of rhapsodic passages about Japanese traditions (plagiarized from English guidebooks to Japan) and profuse thank yous for the regular checks they sent that allowed Atsuko to purchase new clothes seasonally and him to join the Hiroshima Lawn and Tennis Club. It was shortly after Atsuko gave birth to a daughter (they named her Toshiko, meaning “fourteen,” the number of years after the bombing that she was born) that his letters began to include references to his personal frustrations as a “featureless hotel-man.” He wrote that he had come to realize the opportunities for advancement belonged to those with an education in hotel administration. The best had studied abroad, which brought him to the point: to help him actualize a longstanding dream, and to improve his position as provider for his wife and daughter, he wanted to come to the United States and attend an American university. The only hitch was that he could not afford to pay his own way. Would they be willing to sponsor him? Sensing they might be dealing with an opportunist, Atsuko’s hostess wrote back they were not in a position to finance his ambitions, and not long after that the marriage began to fray. Atsuko’s husband became surly with her and talked about his family responsibilities as a burden. He said he refused to sacrifice his future for the sake of a child, and eventually he found consolation in the company of another woman. Toshiko was three when her father left; Atsuko has not remarried.

  For many, the transforming success of the surgery and the tangible evidence of the Hiroshima Maidens’ ability to rise above their circumstances would be found in the final tally of marriages and number of robust babies they produced. Eventually, twelve would marry, exactly half, and nineteen healthy children would be born to them.

  While it was generally assumed that they all had their hearts set on becoming brides and mothers, in fact the desire for a traditional future was not the same for everyone. For several girls the yearning for intimate relations with a member of the opposite sex had passed; at some point they had given up imagining it was possible, and now they no longer contemplated men in that way. For a few the right marital partner never came along. All were exquisitely sensitive to the impression they would compromise their tastes and standards in men just because they were disfigured. The very thought of accepting a proposal from a man who was motivated by pity was enough to raise their sights to a level that parents and friends sometimes called unrealistic.

  At least one girl, however, was liberated from the notion that the only means of achieving a meaningful sense of self-completion was through marriage. Masako Wada’s interest in social work was directly tied to the atomic bomb; while recovering from her injuries she had realized that she would someday probably end up in the care of a social welfare organization, and she decided that until that day came she would like to work with the people who would eventually look after her. That was how she had come to be one of the Maidens hired on staff at the Reverend Tanimoto’s Blind Children’s Home, and why her American hostesses arranged for her to visit various institutions for the handicapped, and receive lessons on a braille typewriter at the Lighthouse in New York City. At the time there were no such things in Japan, but when Masako returned there were five: four bought for her by the Quakers, and one donated by the Lighthouse. She fully intended to resume her job at the Home, but conditions in the workplace had changed. Although Norman Cousins had made an earnest effort to extend some symbol of American friendship to the other eighteen Maidens by making certain they were given a chance to receive free surgery in Hiroshima, and facilitating an exchange of letters and gifts with a group of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Quakers, they still felt left out, and resented it. Her co-workers who had not been chosen to go to America made life so difficult with their petty jealousies that, to her bitter disappointment, Masako was forced to quit. But she did not give up. It was a setback of sorts, but in a good way, for upon hearing that she had lost her job, her Friends Meeting offered to finance her education — the two years of high school she had left, and four years at a university — and give her the means to answer the higher calling of becoming a social worker. The opportunity to receive academic training, and the special perspective her personal experiences gave her, came together with the force of a new mission in life, and she went on to become a highly respected caseworker at a home for solitary, aged A-bomb survivors in Hiroshima. She never married, but there were no regrets. When asked about it, she insisted it was not a matter of the atomic bomb closing down that option. Rather, she felt, it was the case that whatever situation she was put in it was her nature to try to make the best of it. Through her ordeals she developed certain strengths that led her in a particular direction, and they happened to be job-oriented.

  It would be hard to weigh all the private benefits and personal gains the experience of living with an American family and taking part in American community life gave the Maidens. Certainly their particular outlook on life was different from those of people who had never been out of the country; the chance to experience two entirely different ways of living in one lifetime broadened their thinking; and a new world of opportunities was opened to them at home. (Suzue Hiyama did become the Japanese distributor for Covermark.) But what they actually did with it, and how it helped them through the years ahead was expressed differently for every girl.

  In a literal sense, Masako Wada owed the opportunity to become a social worker to her host families for they had provided her with the scholarship that allowed her to complete her education. But as a caseworker, it was her overall experience while in America that she drew on as a source of wisdom, for it provided her with a model she tried to repeat in her practice. Just as she had never met any of her host families before entering their homes, the elderly patients who entered the nursing home where she worked came in as strangers; and just as the healing qualities of family life had helped her to become involved in the world positively, so she saw it as her role to help them learn how to live out the last of their lives actively and happily within a supportive community of friends.

  For Tazuko Shibata, there were things she could do now which she had not been able to do before, and would never have done if it were not for that experience. While in the States she lived with relatively wealthy families, including several company presidents who conducted much of their business out of their homes, assisted by personal secretaries. Her observatio
n of these crisply efficient and business-like women, so different from the obsequious “office girls” in Japan whose main job was keeping their boss’s teacups full, motivated her to want to become a “professional secretary.” When the Hiroshima Chamber of Commerce arranged for a series of job interviews for the Maidens with local businesses, Tazuko was hired by a firm that manufactured electrical switches, and although at first it seemed like a public relations move, in short order her attitude and abilities were noticed and she was promoted to an executive position. Eventually she became a chief of a project team, and she always credited her success to the exposure she had had to the American secretaries.

  Throughout her life, Yoshie Harada would carry her memories of America like a cross to ward off evil tidings. She was the first Maiden to marry, but her life was beset with difficulties thereafter. With two babies in the fold, her husband lost his job and remained unemployed for six years, forcing her to support the family on the meager income from a physically punishing job on an assembly line at a seaweed factory. There were times when she felt she almost could not go on, but then she discovered a secret source of strength. When faced with hardships that might otherwise have broken her spiritually and physically — the pain that came from working under sweltering conditions day after day, the despair she felt when her husband told her he was in love with another woman — she would retreat into reveries, remembering the surprise birthday party her American hostess threw for her, living in two worlds at once.

  It most definitely continued to inspire Hideko Hirata. More than any other girl, she seemed to grasp the essence of the project — that the tangible benefits of surgery were really secondary to the spiritual regeneration. She was the oldest Maiden and probably the most introspective: As the flash of the atomic explosion cut across the sky it had seared her retinas so badly she had permanent “blind spots” in each eye, and ever after she wondered if her limited vision was the direct consequence of her blind hatred toward the enemy during the war. There were not any outstanding incidents about her while she was in America, but she seemed to come to new depths of human feeling that prompted her, upon her return, to devote herself to another group of unfortunate people. She could have gone into business for herself, or worked for pay, but instead she decided to do volunteer social work with an outcast group known as the burakumin. These were the people engaged in such lowly tasks as the slaughter of animals, the tanning of leather, and the removal and disposal of refuse; and centuries of social and economic discrimination had kept them living in wretched slums. Equipped with a new electric sewing machine that had been sent to her by the Friends Meeting that sponsored her, Hideko opened a sewing class for the ostracized and impoverished burakumin women. It was deeply rewarding work for it filled her life with purpose, but it was done without her parents’ consent or comprehension. When Hideko talked about a personal Golden Rule — to do for others what had been done for her — her parents wondered if living abroad she had been exposed to and caught some Western habit.

  Hideko Hirata became a shining example of the girls’ newfound ability to empathize with the pain and suffering of others, and the desire to carry on the spirit of the project in some way, which was why she had been the initial choice of the project organizers to stay and study at Parsons. But the physical weakness she had cited in turning down the offer was more than an excuse. Never one to bring her problems to others, she never mentioned that with each passing day a pain deep inside her was getting worse. She continued to teach, adding a night class for women who worked at day jobs, even as her health weakened. By the time she went for an examination, cancer had infiltrated her stomach wall. A total gastrectomy was carried out at the Hiroshima University Hospital; twenty-eight days after surgery, on April 8, 1958, Hideko Hirata died. There was suggestive evidence linking exposure to high levels of radiation to stomach cancer, so her name was duly added to the toll of human lives taken by the atomic bomb.

  There was another side to the story, naturally. For an anthology of the lives of the Hiroshima Maidens to be complete it would have to include not only themes of transformation, resurrection, and reclamation, but tales of disillusionment, dashed hopes, and defeat. The America they experienced in 1955 was an open, wildly optimistic country, and pleasantly seduced by the American habit of thinking that they could do whatever they set out to do, at least one Maiden found that this conceit eventually brought even more heartache to what she had already endured. The spirit moved in Michiko Yamaoka was of the highest order — in her dreams she saw herself as a nurse in a hospital like the ones she had been in and out of for years — but she came back to a life of adversity almost beyond comprehension. She never knew her father, her mother worked in the amusement quarter of Hiroshima as a solicitor for prostitutes luring men into seedy hotels, and while Michiko was in America her mother’s dissipated life finally caught up with her. Too diseased to work any more, the pitiful old woman had sold all the furnishings in their home and borrowed money to cover her living expenses, so Michiko returned to an empty house and a list of debts. Forced to take menial work so they could be sure where their next meal would come from, Michiko continued to harbor the hope of someday becoming a nurse, and her Friends Meeting wanted to help her make it happen. But there were bills to pay off; one setback (a burglary) followed another (a fire); and then there was her mother’s natural genius for using guilt and ill health to control her daughter’s devotion. She talked incessantly about what a burden she was and how things would be easier if she were not around. Eking out a sparse existence doing free-lance sewing so she could be at home to take care of her mother, Michiko came to wonder if the way things turned out would not have been easier to accept if she had never known the difference. Imagining the life she might have led if only she had been able to take advantage of the support offered by her hostesses was as depressing as thinking about how it would have been if she had not been in Hiroshima on that day.

  And the way things worked out for some girls was undercut by the vision of something better they had seen in America. Suzue Hiyama had stayed for quite some time with an elderly Connecticut couple who had what she considered the ideal marriage. Her hostess was a lovely white-haired woman, very elegant, who took great pleasure in doing things for and with her adoring husband. She would change her clothes and pretty-up for him before he came home from work each day; and on weekends she would accompany him when he went trout fishing in upstate streams, even though she had no interest in fishing herself and got carsick on long rides. In subtle, tender ways, full of the kind of restrained emotion that one associated with the Japanese, her husband would let her know how much he appreciated her thoughtfulness and company; Suzue thought it was a beautiful relationship, and she wanted the same for herself when her time came. But a traditional marriage in the East left little time for romance or leisure or companionship. She married a businessman, and in order to get along with his associates and get orders from clients he was obliged to go out in the evenings, while she stayed at home. Their lack of time together became a source of family dispute, but by custom the Company came first, so in the best tradition of Japanese womanhood she settled for the satisfactions found in children.

  Once the initial euphoria passed and the people of Hiroshima had a chance to assess the overall results more objectively, community attitudes toward the Maidens Project also took a cool turn. For one thing, the surgery had not been as effective as most people had expected. Even though Norman Cousins had been pointed in saying the girls’ features would not be perfectly reconstructed, people were still of the opinion that a cosmetic miracle would take place, and the Maidens would come back as if they had never seen the bomb. When it did not happen (they looked much better, but in a number of cases the disfiguring marks were still bad enough to attract attention), there was a general letdown. For another, even judged by their actions after they got back, they did not live up to many people’s expectations. A lot of survivors, including a few of the “other eighteen,” wer
e playing an active role in the movement to link the Hiroshima experience to the wider movement against nuclear weapons. When none of the Maidens showed an interest in political activism, and collectively they did nothing to enlarge the project beyond twenty-four individual experiences, people began to say they must have been spoiled during their year abroad. There was speculation that they had become self-centered, that once the good things other people desired had come to them they had lost their social conscience. Ironically, their new independence of spirit and their self-direction became the basis of a new criticism; not knowing what else to make of this, people accused them of becoming, in a word, “Americanized.” This impression intensified the feeling of some local citizens who had been critical of the enormous effort that was expended for such a small group from the beginning. Then they had called it a publicity stunt designed to win over the people of Hiroshima by showering a vulnerable few with special attention; now they claimed that much more could have been done if the money and resources directed toward the Maidens had been brought to Hiroshima.

  It was not all groundless criticism; nor was it entirely fair. First of all, an effort was made to provide all atomic bomb survivors with the same kind of surgery given the Maidens. After obtaining an estimate of the number of cases that could benefit (hundreds at the least, perhaps thousands, he was told), Norman Cousins had proceeded with a second phase to the Hiroshima Maidens Project, which involved sending a distinguished senior surgeon from the West to Japan to treat the more difficult cases by way of illustration. Several months after escorting the Maidens home, while on a trip to Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa to meet with Dr. Albert Schweitzer, he had heard about a South African plastic surgeon who had reportedly had amazing results repairing the ravages of leprosy. He called on Dr. Jack Penn in his Johannesburg office, and before he left had recruited him to go to Hiroshima.