Hiroshima Maidens

by Rodney Barker

  The second time around I found their attitudes toward the press remained hostile. If anything, they were more cynical and mistrustful than before. I soon learned why. A recent event had aggravated matters: the release of a thin book, hastily written to capitalize on the annual August sixth interest in Hiroshima, that characterized the Hiroshima Maidens as a neurotically preoccupied group, obsessed with their lost youth and stolen beauty. In the writer’s crude estimation (he was otherwise employed as a sportswriter for a Tokyo daily newspaper), they were primarily motivated by an effort to compensate for their psychological inferiority, and reflexively blamed the bomb for all their problems, setbacks, and woes. The evidence he put forth in support of this analysis was based less on his direct interviews, for he admitted that fewer than a third of the living Maidens had agreed to talk with him, than on his personal frustration at not being able to obtain the cooperation of the others. But no matter, there could be no other explanation for their reclusive ways, he had concluded, than that they had reverted to their former insecure selves. Incredibly, in a closing note, he recommended “that some sort of psychotherapy is what these women really need.”

  To the extent that the Maidens have had to put up with gross and oversimplified characterizations, I suppose this could be considered as reflecting another dimension of the bomb. But it is also inexcusable when journalists who say they have come to Hiroshima to learn what nuclear warfare does to the people who live through it, by their coverage end up creating a fallout that in some ways is as harmful to the survivors as the radiation from the bomb itself.

  This time I distinctly sensed a more acute concern about health. On my previous visit I had been continually impressed by how outwardly philosophical the Maidens seemed to be about the delayed effects of radiation. It might have been Oriental fatalism that stopped them from dwelling on events over which they had no control; or perhaps they had drawn comfort from the fact that after Keiko Kawasaki died of statistically related A-bomb causes back in 1959, they were all still alive. Whatever explained it, at that time they were not preoccupied with thoughts about when the atomic bomb would strike them down. The sentiments of most were summed up in the following exchange. Asked by a friend, “Aren’t you concerned that the bomb could kill you at any time?” a Maiden replied, “Do you think that because you weren’t in Hiroshima you are promised a long life?”

  But the curse of an atomic weapon is that once damaged by it one can never be sure he has recovered or escaped the consequences. Even though the Maidens did not consciously indulge their doubts, the fear that the bomb would catch up with them has always been there in an unconscious way, producing a low-grade tension that could rise to the surface at any given time. Indeed, I was told this time that there has never been an end to the anxiety that the slightest irregularity signals an oncoming cancer. Of late, that fear has become more pronounced, due in large part to the hideous secrets of radiation that have come out carcinogenically among aging survivors. Cancer has an incubation period, as the accelerating number of cancer patients admitted to the A-bomb Hospital in Hiroshima, and Michiko Yamaoka, who had a radical mastectomy for breast cancer last year, can attest.

  In addition to those symptoms of radiation, numerous physical aches and pains remind the women of the different ways they were hurt by the bomb. For instance, sporadic numbness in Atsuko Yamamoto’s hands was revealed, under X-rays, to stem from an injury sustained when the blast bounced her along the street like a windblown newspaper. And nerve damage to Yoshie Yanagibashi’s legs and back keeps her on regular medication.

  Of course, it is sometimes difficult to tell who is suffering from A-bomb effects and who from the natural process of aging. And, as if to remind them just how precarious their well-being is, three months before I arrived Suzue Hiyama, who had stayed with my family, died. Her death followed the demise of her husband a year earlier from liver complications, and the premature death of her oldest daughter from a mysterious illness that remains undiagnosed because her superstitious in-laws refused to permit an autopsy. The cause of Suzue’s death, according to the doctors, was cirrhosis of the liver, but those close to the family called it drowning in alcohol to overcome her grief.

  Looking at their wounds today they cannot help but notice the changes that have come with time. There seems to be an unevenness to the way the different skins on their face are aging. Where the natural skin has begun to web with wrinkles, the grafts remain smooth and fair; and as though it is a property of abdominal skin to fatten as one grows older, they have also become puffy. Nor is the quality of transplanted skin as good: It is sensitive to the sun, cuts easily, is quick to infect, and slow to heal. Ironically, over time, their keloids have softened and faded, leading some to think there might have been advantages in later life to leaving things the way they were. But at the same time that the women acknowledge that the very procedures that made them more presentable as younger women have become like another affliction with time, they feel guilty for noticing. It is something they observe on their own and sometimes discuss among one another, but they would not want anyone to get the idea they would go back and change things if they could.

  My reading of the Maidens’ children also changed on this visit. It had been my previous impression that few offspring had any special feeling for what it meant that their mothers were Hiroshima Maidens. In general, they seemed to hold Americans in slightly greater thrall than the average Japanese youth tended to do, and a few dreamed of going to the United States sometimes themselves. But they did not appear to feel they were the beneficiaries of a unique heritage, and in fact, they seemed to be to be singularly lacking in interest or commitment outside their immediate personal concerns.

  After talking with their mothers I better understood why this was so. At the time of their marriages, each had made private vows that, should they ever bear children, they would do everything in their power to shelter them from the hardships and humiliations that had been their lot in life. One of the reasons they shun publicity is out of concern that anything written about them will have repercussions for their children. (The effects of radiation are a mystery that retain something of their inscrutability even as they foster new forms of revelation. The fact that investigations carried out on children conceived by survivors after exposure did not detect statistically verifiable evidence of genetic effects does not give assurance that mutations induced are not of a recessive character and might only manifest themselves in the second, third, or even later generations. The first question a go-between asks when she knows a prospective partner is from Hiroshima is whether the parents were victims of the A-bomb; they are especially concerned about the mother.) Wanting only to foster an untroubled existence, they had regulated their sons’ and daughters’ upbringings in such a way as to distance them from the past and all events surrounding the bomb.

  This had made perfect sense; but in conversations with them five years later — now that most of their children are happily married — I sensed they were beginning to have misgivings about raising them without a historical consciousness. When they look around and see a generation of young people whose central concerns are personal comfort and economic security, who grew up in the prosperous years of postwar Japan and have little sense of the war that came before, it makes them wonder if they have not unwittingly contributed to a dangerously naive mentality. The youth of Japan seem to believe in the battlefield myth that says a man is safe if he crawls in the hole sunk by a previously exploded artillery shell because no two shells will land in exactly the same place. Their faith in the future appears to be based on the belief that since the bomb has already exploded over Japan, it won’t come again. And so, as parents the Maidens think they probably did the right thing, but as survivors they worry that perhaps they should have done more.

  It’s difficult to say what the future holds for the Hiroshima Maidens, because at the same time that they are struggling to resolve this inner conflict, their personal dramas continue to take unexpected
twists. (Though his loyalty to Hiroko is intense and unflagging, life on the island was altogether different than Harry Harris had anticipated. He had put on too much weight to be of help in the orchards. The only friend he made was an old man who fished off the same dock, and even though they seemed to enjoy each other’s company they were unable to carry on a conversation. He could not watch television because it was all in Japanese. Six months after their arrival, Harry said he could not take it anymore, he was losing his voice, he wanted to go back. Now they split their time between the two countries.) It would be a mistake to think the women have entirely overcome their particular tragedies. Granted, the surgery and the spirit of human oneness they received in America helped them deal with the stresses that followed, but that only marginally compensated for the years of rejection and withdrawal that had gone before, and did not offset the reality that they have been maimed for more years of their lives than not. Twice a day, in the morning when they put their make-up on and in the evening when they wipe it off, they are confronted with a sight that leaves them only half at peace. In their imaginations, they each carry an alternative life in comparison.

  Perhaps it really is asking too much from these middle-aged women (the youngest is almost fifty now) to heed the call to become torchbearers. At the moment they are a peculiarly fractious group, divided as much by sisterly bickerings as fundamental differences in outlook. “We are like floating moss,” was the way one Maiden put it. “The tide moves us around. Sometimes we float in a cluster, other times we go our own way.” Considering the ten-year difference in age between the youngest and oldest, and their different situations and personalities, it could not be otherwise.

  And yet, certain individuals have come to terms with the fresh emotional challenge of sharing their accumulated knowledge in experienced detail; and there are those among them who look forward to an occasion that will allow them to set aside their differences and unite behind a common theme or aim. They point out that the Hiroshima Maidens Project already has a distinguished humanitarian legacy: Norman Cousins, working with the same group of American volunteers who organized the Maidens Project and using the money that was left over from it, went on to bring another group of war-scarred women to America for medical treatment (Polish women subjected to purposeless and pseudoscientific medical experiments by Nazi doctors in the Ravensbruck concentration camps); and Dr. Arthur Barsky set up a plastic surgery hospital in South Vietnam during the sixties to treat war-injured children, where he met Dr. Tomin Harada on a similar mission of mercy. They say they have points to make that are worth thinking about; after all, who knows better the imperatives of peace and the folly of fighting than those who learned to love others once thought to be the enemy?

  The time is certainly right. The climate for hibakusha in Japan has changed considerably; once thought to be ungodly, today they enjoy the eminence of holy people who have experienced a prophetic vision. The eighties have seen the rise of a countervailing peace movement; four decades have passed and there have been no more Hiroshimas, but there are fifty thousand more nuclear weapons in existence and the end of the world as we know it is potentially only minutes away. Meanwhile, the number of Maidens is diminishing; there are only twenty-one left.

  Even Helen Yokoyama, an elderly woman now but one of enormous moral strength, has recently emerged from private life to rock the Maidens’ complacency. For years, she had hoped that they would turn of their own accord in their own time to putting their experiences down on paper (for publication, for the historical record, or just for their children); since so few have, and she cannot bear to think that stories so rich in intrinsic human values might end without having been written, she has come forward to make a personal appeal. Indeed, at times I sensed something of a pact between us, as if she hoped that their participation in the process of researching this book would rouse them to do something that shows the spirit of the project lives on.

  They have never liked being called “A-bomb Maidens” or “Hiroshima Maidens.” It was a form of address invented by the press; its associations with the bomb always seemed a little too pointed, and when half of the women married it was no longer appropriate. Often, when they were written about, superficial characteristics that some women appeared to have in common were collected and presented in a way that made it seem they were shared in equal measure. Individual words or deeds were frequently interpreted as representing the group. One woman told me that no matter how troubled she became, suicide was not an option because she knew it would not be accepted as a personal decision, rather it would be reported that one of the Maidens killed herself.

  But while they reject the public identity that has been assigned to them, the women are aware that they form a society of their own. The bond of loyalty they feel for one another, forged in the sharing of uncommon experiences, and the pride that comes from knowing there is no other group like them in the world, led them, at one of their regular get-togethers, to come up with a more artful term that everyone agreed captured the image they have of themselves. Today they do not refer to one another as Hiroshima Maidens, but as members of Satsukikai. Kai is Japanese for “association”; satsuki is the word for “azalea.” It’s the way they view their lives: like a gathering of flowers that bloom in May, the month they arrived in America.

  Afterword 2015

  When The Hiroshima Maidens was published in 1985, I was asked by a journalist about the contemporary relevance of this story.

  “This is a dual anniversary year,” I replied. “It’s been forty years since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, thirty years since the Hiroshima Maidens project took place. Where there have been intentional experiments in human relations that have succeeded in giving the horror of nuclear warfare a human face, while at the same time converting former enemies into friends, we need to celebrate those undertakings, commemorate them… because if we’re going to make it through the next thirty years, we will need to draw on those successes.”

  Well, thirty more years have passed, and the news is both good and not so good.

  The not so good news:

  1. Nine nations are confirmed to possess nuclear weapons now.

  2. It is estimated there are as many as 16,000 nuclear weapons in existence.

  3. The most powerful nuclear bomb ever tested had the explosive power of almost 4,000 Hiroshima bombs, an increase in firepower that is unfathomable.

  4. Some of these weapons come in different calibers now – there are small, tactical nuclear weapons of variable yields designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations, as well as “neutron bombs” meant to maximize ionizing radiation exposure while minimizing blast effects.

  5. In addition to state-sponsored nuclear weapons program, the world also faces a nuclear threat from terrorists trying to buy or steal already assembled, easily portable “suitcase nukes.”

  The good news:

  1. A number of multi-lateral treaties have been established with the aim of preventing nuclear proliferation and testing.

  2. Many countries have voluntarily renounced their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.

  3. They have never been used again since two were dropped on Japan.

  To what do we owe the fact that history has not repeated itself?

  Certainly, in the years since an atomic bomb was first used, wars have been fought, the decision whether to use them again has come up again and again, and the main deterrent to their use has been the recognition that these weapons would in all probability result in the destruction of the very people they were intended to defend. Just one nuclear weapon can annihilate an entire city, kill millions, and jeopardize the natural environment and lives of future generations through its long-term catastrophic effects.

  But there are also those who believe that just as powerful and effective an argument against their use again has been the first-person testimonials of the atomic bomb survivors. The stories of those men, women and children who, in a flash on August 6, 1945, we
re given a glimpse of the end of the world, and came back to tell the rest of us what lies ahead unless we can find a way to get these weapons under control.

  It is a unique response. Rather than expressing grief and anger, or a desire for revenge, the survivors have channeled their emotions toward creating a world in which no people anywhere need suffer their fate. And in this context, the Hiroshima Maidens story fits perfectly. It not only dramatizes the human cost of nuclear warfare, but the value of enacting visions of human harmony.

  When the book was released in the summer of 1985 it was widely read and well-reviewed, and became a significant part of the press coverage surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. Hiroshima has a tremendous power to generate resistance because it inevitably raises the question of whether or not the dropping of an atomic bomb was necessary. But, to the extent that the story of the Maidens was seen as a narrative about traditional American compassion for disaster victims, rather than an expression of American guilt for heralding a new era of atomic warfare, controversy was avoided.

  While there is no way of knowing the way it impacted public thinking about nuclear weapons, one measure would be the whether it provided an inspirational boost to other works on the subject. In the years since it was published, numerous essays and articles have been written that explore the significance of the Maidens project, and cite the book as a primary reference. At least one novel has been written that features a fictional Hiroshima Maiden as a central character (though certain liberties were taken, such as setting the project in the McCarthy era of the early 50s, and limiting the number of Maidens to a single scarred female, fluent in English, who was brought to America by a group that expected her to be a poster child for the ban-the-bomb movement). And, The Hiroshima Maidens was also optioned by Hollywood with a feature film in mind, and a script went through multiple revisions, but ultimately was unable to overcome political concerns. A television movie was produced that was modeled more or less on my personal story – a coming-of-age tale that featured a sheltered, middle-class American boy around 10 years old, tainted by cold war paranoia from bomb drills at school, forced to confront residual wartime prejudice against the Japanese from his friends and neighbors, and ultimately standing up for the women he came to think of and care about as members of an enlarged sense of family. The production was accompanied by a Lesson Plan for family and classroom discussion.