Communities, families, and sole survivors honored their dead and prayed for their souls. In the fall of 1945, Urakami Church held an outdoor Mass for the approximately 8,500 Christian victims of the bomb. “The relatives of the dead people stood in rows holding white crosses, eight thousand crosses,” remembered Nagai Kayano, a young girl who had lost her mother in the bombing. Her father, Dr. Nagai Takashi, a Nagasaki radiologist and devout Catholic, spoke at the ceremony and pronounced his deeply held beliefs that it was God’s providence that carried the bomb to Nagasaki so that Japan’s largest Christian community could sacrifice themselves to end the war. On a smaller scale, on October 9, the two-month anniversary of the bombing, teachers and students at a Catholic girls’ high school held a memorial service in the school yard for the more than two hundred in their school community who had died.
Barrels were placed at intersections in the Urakami Valley for the collection of ashes and bones. A young girl and her siblings “fished” for human bones in the river and buried them under a tree. A mother collected gold buttons from a school uniform similar to her son’s, as well as a fragment of a school cap and some bones from the ruins of his school, and held a simple funeral for him—though whenever she heard footsteps, she longed to turn around and see that he had, in fact, returned home. Whenever Wada passed by a cremation pyre or a newly uncovered body, he placed his hands together and said a silent prayer.
Ruins of Urakami Church, ca. 1947. At center are the remains of the front inner wall and one of the two fallen bell tower domes. (Photograph by Ishida Hisashi/Courtesy of Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum)
A celebratory moment for the city came on November 25, when the Nagasaki Streetcar Company resumed limited service. “I was so happy!” Wada remembered. “Seven cars returned to service, and I drove the fourth. When the streetcars started moving, children and adults were running beside us shouting with excitement.” When fishermen and farmers didn’t have money, they offered Wada fish or vegetables instead. “Everyone was so happy,” Wada said. “At that time, I was so proud of my job. I really felt at peace again.”
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It would take five years for the city of Nagasaki to accomplish the nearly impossible task of counting the number of dead and injured from the atomic bombing. Officials lacked accurate population figures from before the bombing because older adults and young children had been evacuated, soldiers had been conscripted, and there was a lack of documentation for the thousands of Koreans, Chinese, and other Asian workers brought to Japan against their will. Tens of thousands of people, too, had left or returned to the city after the attack. Also, because no one had adequate knowledge of the effects of high-dose radiation exposure, an incalculable number of early radiation deaths may have been attributed to other conditions and not reported as related to the bombing.
Still, after an arduous process to determine figures as reliably as possible, the final numbers were complete. Because thousands died in the months immediately following the bombing, casualty estimates were determined through December 31, 1945:
Number of people killed: 73,884
Number of people injured: 74,909
Number of people (not killed or injured) impacted by death or injury of family members, destruction of their homes and communities, and job loss: 120,820
A new name was coined for the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: hibakusha (atomic bomb–affected people). The term referred to everyone directly affected by the bombings, including those who died in the blast and fires or later from injury or radiation illnesses, those who survived their injuries or radiation illnesses, and those who entered the cities in the weeks after the bombings. It was a word that, like the bombings themselves, would remain an integral part of survivors’ private and public identities for the rest of their lives.
CHAPTER 5
TIME SUSPENDED
In January 1946, eleven U.S. military filmmakers and photographers arrived in Nagasaki. They came as part of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), assessing the effectiveness of the United States’ conventional and nuclear bomb attacks on Japan as a means to support the “future development of the United States armed forces.” In the fall of 1945, over a thousand USSBS military and civilian experts had traveled throughout Japan and its previously occupied territories to review surviving Japanese records, document the destruction from U.S. bombing strikes, and interview thousands of former Japanese military leaders, government officials, and civilians. In a second round of investigations in selected Japanese cities, a small USSBS team came to Nagasaki to further document the city’s destruction.
They entered the city by train from the north, climbing over lush green mountains before descending into the leveled Urakami Valley. Not much had changed in the six months since the bombing. To their left, the Americans saw the vast expanse of atomic destruction and debris. In the distance, they glimpsed the wreckages of Urakami Church and Nagasaki Medical College at the edge of Nagasaki’s eastern mountains. On their right, they passed the crushed Shiroyama Elementary School and the tangled webs of steel and mangled equipment of the Mitsubishi factories along the river. Their train came to a stop at a single shack serving as Nagasaki Station.
For weeks, the camera crew recorded Nagasaki’s material damages. “Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there,” Army Air Forces 2nd Lieutenant Herbert Sussan remembered. “The quietness of it all . . . it was like an enormous graveyard.” Sussan’s director, 1st Lieutenant Daniel McGovern, recalled bone fragments and hundreds of children’s skulls scattered near cremation sites. The camera crew recorded survivors’ physical suffering as they lay infirm in relief stations, hospitals, and crude huts constructed in the ruins. Some hibakusha died on camera during the filming. Others stared blankly, slowly turning their faces and bodies to reveal their whole-body burns and hardened, protruding keloid scars.
On January 31, the USSBS team arrived at the rural Omura National Hospital north of Nagasaki, where approximately four hundred burned and injured survivors languished inside small barracks-like buildings. Entering one of the patients’ rooms, they saw Taniguchi lying on a bed low to the ground. Taniguchi had just turned seventeen, but with his tiny skeletal figure and shorn scalp, he looked much younger.
Now in his sixth month lying prostrate, Taniguchi was coping not only with relentless pain from burns that would not heal, but also with chronic diarrhea, minimal appetite, a weak pulse, and periodic fevers. Bedsores on his chest, left cheek, and right knee festered. His red blood cell count was half the normal level. Hospital staff administered penicillin compresses and boric acid ointment to his back, and gave him blood infusions, injections of vitamin C, vitamin B, and glucose from grapes. “The doctors were clueless about how to treat me,” Taniguchi reflected.
As the crew set up their lights for filming, Taniguchi’s breath was shallow, his pulse raced, and pus oozed from the burns on his back and arms. “I shuddered when the lights were turned on to film him,” Sussan recalled, fearing the pain that the heat of the lights would cause on Taniguchi’s burned flesh. But Taniguchi remembered that the warmth from the lights felt good as he lay there, always cold in his unheated hospital room with only a thin wooden wall to block the bitter winter chill.
The filmmakers captured three minutes of silent color footage of Taniguchi lying naked on the bed while three doctors in white coats ministered to his burns. At the start, the camera focuses on Taniguchi’s back: From shoulders to waist, his raw, bloodred tissue glistens under the lights. The flesh of his emaciated left arm is salmon-colored and translucent. Exposed burns and blisters cover both his buttocks. Using foot-long tweezers, the doctors peel off a thin layer of gauze soaked in blood and pus and gently dab the excreting areas with swabs of cotton. With no skin or scabbing, nothing protects Taniguchi from the torment of even their grazing touch.
The camera shifts to the other side of his body. His face is visible now, proppe
d up by his chin digging into the bed. Taniguchi’s eyes are closed, and for a moment his face is calm. His torso barely expands and contracts with quick, shallow breaths—in-out-pause, in-out-pause. As the doctors place a fresh layer of thin gauze across his back, Taniguchi furrows his brow and bares his teeth in a silent growl of unbearable pain. A second later, his muscles relax and his calm expression returns—until his face twists in pain again.
The frames flutter to a stop as the camera is turned off and the American team moves on. Several months later, all of the reels of the estimated ninety thousand feet of USSBS Pacific Survey film, including the footage of Taniguchi, were locked into trunks and shipped to the United States, where they were classified and withheld from public view for more than twenty-five years.
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For two years after the bombing, hundreds of thousands of people moved into and out of Nagasaki. Civilian families who had been forcibly moved to Manchuria to support Japan’s military efforts came home—many underfed and sick with scabies or tuberculosis—only to find their homes burned and their families dead, injured, or struggling with the effects of whole-body radiation exposure. Thousands of Japanese military personnel and POWs also returned from locations across the Pacific, some carrying rations of rice and other food, to find no surviving relatives.
Thousands left Nagasaki as well, mostly non-Japanese. Forced laborers from Korea, China, Formosa, and other Asian countries were finally repatriated. As the occupation consolidated its operations throughout Japan, U.S. soldiers converged on the port city before boarding ships for home. Having completed Nagasaki’s demilitarization efforts, approximately twenty thousand men from the 2nd Marine Division who had been stationed there had also departed by early 1946, leaving the 10th Marines in Nagasaki to oversee routine surveillance, reconnaissance, and the disposal of Japan’s war supplies.
More hibakusha evacuated, too, often walking for days and weeks in search of a less penurious life in the countryside or on outlying islands. Some found solace away from the devastation and death; for others, living with distant relatives whose lives were still intact was too painful to bear, and many chose to return to Nagasaki, where they were surrounded by survivors who shared their suffering. Homeless hibakusha subsisted in flimsy shacks and slept on earthen floors or tatami mats found in the debris. Fourteen or fifteen people often lived in a single room with no furnishings. Running water was still not available, so survivors hauled springwater from the mountains and collected rainwater to boil and drink. Without toilets, people dug holes in the ground outside their shanties and covered them with wooden boards. Without bathtubs, they heated water in large oil drums and bathed standing up. To battle the winter winds, families wore as many layers of donated clothing and blankets as they could, huddling beneath umbrellas around wood-burning hibachi to protect themselves against the rain, sleet, and snow that fell through their makeshift roofs. In pitch-dark nights, survivors walking through the ruins cut their feet on glass shards, old nails, and slivers of wood and broken tile.
Aging men and women living alone, with no one to depend on or any way to provide for themselves, became known as the orphaned elderly. Uchida Tsukasa, sixteen years old at the time of the bombing, recalled the moment when an older homeless woman suddenly appeared in the doorway of his family’s hut. His mother invited her to stay with them. “One day,” Uchida remembered, “the old woman gathered charcoal from the ruins behind our house and began to make a fire in a clay stove. Looking at it closely, I was astonished to see that the charcoal contained charred fragments of human bones. We were literally living in a graveyard. My mother said that it was some kind of message, and she looked after the old woman until the very end of her life.”
The city’s social services were not yet operational, and many children with no surviving family members were forced to live on the streets. Monks at the Catholic monastery Seibo no Kishi took in more than a hundred orphans, and other organizations, including Dr. Akizuki’s First Urakami Hospital, offered them free medical care. Relief workers sometimes adopted unidentified babies. But many girls with nowhere to go turned to prostitution to survive, and for months and even years, orphaned boys wandered the region alone or in pairs, living in train stations and under bridges, panhandling, stealing, and scouring for food as they were bounced back and forth from one location to the next by railroad authorities and local police who considered them a nuisance.
Woman and child living in the ruins near the edge of the hypocenter area, ca. 1946. They slept beneath the unwalled temporary structure, center, and cooked on an improvised outdoor stove. (U.S. Marine Corps/Courtesy of Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace, Committee for Research of Photographs and Materials of the Atomic Bombing)
Expectant mothers gave birth in the atomic ruins without the help of a doctor or midwife, terrified of the rumors that their babies might die or be born deformed after being exposed to radiation inside their wombs. Death rates were, in fact, high for intrauterine-exposed infants: 43 percent of pregnancies in which the fetus was exposed within a quarter mile from the hypocenter ended in spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, or infant death. Many babies who survived birth were significantly underweight. With only thin rice gruel or other scraps they could find, their mothers, too, struggled to stay alive. An eighteen-year-old woman—three months pregnant when she was exposed just over a half mile from the hypocenter—had subsequently experienced a high fever, vomiting, bleeding gums, purple spots, and numbness in her back and hands. Just as she began to recover at the end of 1945, during her eighth month of pregnancy, she noticed that her baby was no longer growing in her belly. On a cold, snowy day several weeks later, with no water break, she suddenly went into labor and gave birth to a baby boy, his skin severely dry and creased. Some new mothers, unable to produce milk, quickly depleted their limited supplies of rationed milk and begged other mothers to share their breast milk. They did not know it yet, but the survival of their in utero–exposed infants marked the beginning of new lives for their families, with even greater hardships to come as their children’s physical and mental disabilities would unfold.
• • •
Do-oh and Nagano had homes, families, and just enough financial means to survive the immediate postwar crisis. In their own ways, however, both remained trapped by the impact of the bomb on their lives. Do-oh’s father still applied cooking oil and recycled gauze bandages to the gash at the back of her head, the burns on her arms and legs, and the deep lesions from glass fragments that had pierced her body. Each week, her parents, family members, and friends carried her to Dr. Miyajima’s house for the limited medical care he could provide.
Their perseverance paid off. In the spring of 1946, Do-oh’s radiation illness subsided, some of her wounds began to heal, and she was able to stand, walk, go to the bathroom, wash her face, and use chopsticks on her own. But when she moved in certain ways, the glass slivers lodged in her back and arms caused intense pain. Most critically, the burned patches of her face were still raw and inflamed, and her hair would not grow back. Do-oh stayed hidden in her house, too ashamed to allow anyone but her closest family to see her marred face and bald head.
In the village of Obama on the nearby Shimabara Peninsula, Nagano lived with her mother in a tiny one-room structure they had built on the grounds of her elderly great-aunt’s house. Her older brother moved away for a job in another prefecture, and while her father worked in Nagasaki and came home when he could, Nagano worked at a salt factory during the day and helped at home on the evenings and weekends.
She and her mother got by with her own and her father’s meager wages and through her parents’ strategic efforts. At first, her father brought back the food they had stored in the underground bomb shelter next to their former house; later, he hauled back their goemonburo (cast-iron bathtub), which had survived the fires because it had been set in concrete and filled with water. A personal bathtub was a rare treasure in Japan, and Nag
ano’s parents decided to use the public baths and trade their goemonburo for four straw bags of rice and the same amount of barley, giving them sufficient food staples for months. Her mother sold small amounts of the grains to buy fish and sometimes vegetables. Relatives in the area also gave them food, so they always had enough to eat. For safekeeping during the war, Nagano’s mother had given their family’s remaining kimonos to an acquaintance outside of Nagasaki, which she reclaimed and sold to pay for clothing.
“Every day, I watched my mother cry,” Nagano remembered. “But she never said to me, ‘Sei-chan and Kuniko died because you brought them back to Nagasaki.’ If she had said that, I could have told her that I was sorry. I could have told her that I had never imagined an atomic bomb.” But Nagano’s mother never said a word about it. Nagano desperately wanted to approach her but had the impression that her mother wouldn’t accept anything she said. She was further devastated to learn that her mother complained about her to other women in the neighborhood, telling them that Nagano wasn’t a loyal child. “I felt so sad when I heard this,” Nagano said. “It’s like she had told them, ‘Etsuko killed them. Etsuko killed Seiji and Kuniko.’ The neighbors glared at me with very cold eyes. The women told me that I was a terrible child for making my mother cry. It was unbearable for me.”
Nagano wanted to move out and thought maybe she could stay with one of her friends who lived in another prefecture. But her mother strongly opposed the idea and told Nagano that if she left, she would be cutting off her relationship with her parents. “Because she said it like that, I didn’t go,” Nagano recalled. “With things as they were, I felt it was my fate to take care of my parents. I thought that nothing I did could change my destiny, so I gave up and accepted the situation. Looking back, I think that my mother would have been lonely if I had gone. Even though she complained a lot, I think she felt safe when I was there. But the air that flowed between us was incredibly cold.”
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