Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

  • • •

  Both in Nagasaki and across Japan, economic stability did not come for many years, and except for wealthy business barons who had amassed enormous profits during the war, most families faced unrestrained financial distress. Wholesale prices in Japan climbed over 500 percent in 1946, with inexorable increases over the next three years. Extreme hunger and malnutrition were exacerbated by poor harvests, dysfunctional distribution systems, internal corruption, and the postwar termination of food imports from countries Japan had invaded in its quest for resources. Thousands of Japanese starved to death. Even occupation supplies of antibiotics could not curb the many communicable diseases—already prevalent during the war—that ravaged the country. Over 650,000 cases of cholera, smallpox, scarlet fever, epidemic meningitis, polio, and other infectious diseases were reported; of these, nearly 100,000 people died. Every year until 1951, an additional 100,000 people died from tuberculosis. In Nagasaki, one tuberculosis patient remembered being treated only with vitamins and bed rest.

  Fortunate hibakusha like Nagano’s father had been able to keep their jobs at the Mitsubishi Shipyard and other industrial sites still standing after the bombing. Another Mitsubishi plant was transformed to manufacture cast-iron pots, providing jobs for some of the factory’s former employees. Some hibakusha found work as teachers or medical support staff.

  But a huge segment of Nagasaki’s industrial capacity lay in ruins. Two major utility plants and a railway factory had been destroyed, and numerous sites that had produced munitions, steel, electrical machinery, and ships for Mitsubishi’s four major companies were no longer functional. Material and financial assets for innumerable businesses and individuals, as well as records documenting their existence, were completely destroyed. Some businesses beyond the reach of the atomic bomb were able to keep their doors open, but even employers who were less impacted by the bombing found it almost impossible to operate effectively within virtually nonexistent economic, social, communications, and transportation infrastructures.

  Thousands could find only part-time jobs with paltry wages in meat or bread shops or as janitors or day laborers in the limited number of operating factories, government offices, and businesses. Some hibakusha worked without pay in exchange for food, or left Nagasaki to search for jobs elsewhere. Countless more were too weak or too ill to work, and others stayed home to care for critically ill family members. To help provide for his family, Do-oh’s father went into the mountains every day to cut down trees, then hauled the wood back into the city to sell it for small sums. As prices for everyday items continued to soar, few could afford to provide even the most basic needs for themselves and their families. Many wore waraji—thin straw sandals—even in the rain and snow, and one survivor remembered sharing one pair of shoes with her brothers and sisters. In another family, six children who lost both parents and three of their siblings lived off the minimal earnings of their eldest brother, who was only sixteen.

  Wada’s postwar income could not support his sister and grandparents, so they supplemented his income with the savings his father had accrued from his job at a local bank before his death years earlier. Like Nagano’s mother, Wada’s grandparents traded many of their family’s belongings to farmers for rice and vegetables. “Back then, we called it take no seikatsu [a bamboo shoot life]. When you eat bamboo, you have to peel off the outer skins and eat the small shoots. That’s what it was like for us—we had to peel off our clothes and sell our possessions in order to survive. The only ones who weren’t hungry were the unethical people in positions of power and particularly clever people who hoarded food during the war. Regular, ethical people couldn’t do that. We never ate enough to feel full.

  “I was unethical, too,” Wada confessed. “One day when I was working on the train, someone gave me onigiri. I quickly ate half of it. To tell you the truth, I wanted to eat the whole thing. Then I thought about my grandparents—my grandfather was seventy-one and couldn’t work anymore. When I thought about them, I stopped eating and saved the other half. When I brought it home, they were very happy. But I did eat half, which I shouldn’t have done.” On another occasion, Wada stole potatoes from agricultural fields and ate them raw. “I had to eat something,” he said. “There were people who died from hunger because they were honest and couldn’t bring themselves to do these kinds of things. I wasn’t able to do that.”

  Wada quickly credited the United States for the food staples it provided to Nagasaki, part of its effort to prevent both disease and civil unrest in postwar Japan. Additionally, for six years after the war, the Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia (LARA), a coalition of thirteen U.S. relief agencies, shipped food, clothing, and other provisions to Japan. “LARA was like UNESCO or UNICEF today,” Wada explained, referring to the essential food staples LARA distributed to schools and families, including powdered milk, pineapple juice, bread, and canned goods. LARA also provided clothing, combs and brushes, soap, and toothpaste. “They saved a lot of children. It isn’t widely known now that America did this for us. Of course the atomic bombs were wrong,” Wada said, “but at the time, many hibakusha who hated America for dropping the bombs didn’t know that the food they were eating came from America.”

  Still, U.S. support could not eradicate hunger or stabilize the Japanese economy. In 1946 alone, the price of rationed rice tripled, and fish, soy sauce, miso, and bread remained under strict distribution controls. Open-air black markets flourished across the country. Near the Shianbashi Bridge at the entrance to the older part of Nagasaki, throngs of hungry citizens swarmed around tents made of cardboard boxes and wooden-plank floors, where hawkers peddled rice, fish, vegetables, sweet cakes, and hand-rolled cigarettes. They also sold used clothing, occasionally taken from dead bodies, and scrap metal and wood from the wreckage of abandoned homes. Customers with any means at all scraped together the money to pay the vendors’ high prices in order to supplement government rations and help their families survive. Shunned as failures for Japan’s defeat and with no aid from the drained Japanese government, war veterans, many missing limbs, gathered in small groups nearby and begged for money by playing the accordion and singing wartime military songs.

  Hibakusha without homes or jobs staved off hunger by planting vegetables, beans, and peanuts behind their huts and sifting through American soldiers’ garbage for discarded food—scraping the sides of cans for remnants of meat and sipping leftover drops from empty pineapple juice cans. Many families ventured into the mountains to scour for firewood and edible weeds and tried to satiate their hunger by eating wild grass, roots, orange peels, pumpkin leaves, and grasshoppers. One hibakusha remembers her family being so hungry that they ate dog meat.

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  The city’s physical recovery came in small steps. Despite earlier reports that plants and trees would not grow back for seventy years, some vegetation reappeared in the spring of 1946—although abnormalities and malformations were observed for three or four more years. That summer, gas service was restored to almost eight hundred households, and Mitsubishi Shipyard completed construction on the Daiichi Nisshin Maru, its first vessel since the atomic bombing. Rebuilding of the older sections of Nagasaki continued as construction of more rudimentary municipal housing units for hibakusha and veterans began at the periphery of the hypocenter area, each with a small kitchen and toilet. Parishioners cleared away the ruins of Urakami Church, leaving only parts of the facade, and held Mass in a damaged room inside Dr. Akizuki’s First Urakami Hospital. Eventually they built a small wooden temporary chapel next to the damaged southern entrance to the church, but they lacked sufficient funds to build a roof, so services were held beneath the open sky. Nagasaki Medical College began offering classes at Shinkozen and hospitals in the region. Near the center of the city, a new movie theater was built to present Hollywood films.

  Schools across the city slowly began reopening at their original sites, though many children could not attend because of inju
ry, illness, hunger, or the need to care for family members. A quarter mile west of the hypocenter, a limited number of classes resumed in Shiroyama Elementary School’s partially crushed three-story concrete building, where fifty-two mobilized students and teachers had died at the time of the bombing. Classroom walls were still warped and buckled, and one teacher remembered that both faculty and students lost their focus as they gazed through broken windows at the huge sweep of atomic wasteland.

  At Yamazato Elementary School, situated on a bared hillside a half mile north of the hypocenter, weeds sprouted up in the heaps of charred wood, tangled wires, and slabs of smashed concrete. The enormous U-shaped building had been internally gutted, so the classrooms and corridors had no walls to divide them, and rooms in the deep interior of the building had no light. Children who had been evacuated before the bombing had returned to Nagasaki and rejoined their classmates, many of whom still suffered from hair loss, bleeding gums, and chronic weakness. During inclement weather, classes ended early and students walked home already soaked from the rain and wind that had swept through the building.

  Later reconstruction efforts in the Urakami Valley, taken from a balcony of the ruins of the Nagasaki Medical College Hospital, ca. 1948. (Photograph by Tomishige Yasuo/Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images)

  In March 1946, both Yamazato and Shiroyama elementary schools held modest graduation ceremonies for their sixth-grade students, bringing to a symbolic close the first seven months of postbomb life. At Yamazato, fewer than three hundred of sixteen hundred students had survived. Seventy-five students made up the graduating class, sixty-one of whom had directly experienced the bombing. A small vase with a solitary flower decorated the stark room, and the short commemoration ended with the students singing songs of gratitude and farewell, interrupted by the sobbing of both children and teachers. At Shiroyama—which had formerly graduated more than three hundred students every year—only fourteen sixth graders graduated. Thirty students, five teachers, and three parents attended the observances. In his address, the vice principal praised the students for their hard work in overcoming the immense challenges after the atomic bombing, and teachers and students wept as he offered prayers for the souls of their schoolmates, teachers, and relatives who had died in the attack, and good wishes to the graduating students for their futures.

  In July, the United States’ highly publicized tests of its first postwar nuclear bombs took place in a remote region of the South Pacific, a site that would become one of two U.S. testing grounds in the decades to follow. Two weeks later, on the hot summer morning of August 9, 1946, grieving hibakusha gathered in the rubble at the hypocenter to observe the first anniversary of the atomic bombing of their city. Simple ceremonies also took place in the ruins of Nagasaki Medical College, near the destroyed Mitsubishi factories along the river, and at Suwa Shrine near Yoshida’s family home.

  A year after the bombing, tens of thousands of survivors remained severely injured and ill from radiation exposure. Others, like Wada, had significantly recovered. Following his grandmother’s bidding, he had continued to drink her persimmon tea each day. Eventually his gums had stopped bleeding, and he no longer observed blood in his urine. Still, overall weakness caused him to miss work sometimes—and his hair would not grow back. “I was nineteen years old, and I was embarrassed,” he said. At times he thought it might be better to die than live through any more hardships.

  But Wada was not one to give in, a characteristic he attributed to having lost his parents at a young age and feeling responsible for his family’s well-being. Wearing a wool cap his grandmother knitted for him, he sat behind the steering wheel of the streetcar, maneuvering through the city—from Hotarujaya Terminal past the gutted Nagasaki Prefectural Office to the collapsed Nagasaki Station, then north along the river into the barren Urakami corridor. He came to see that compared with that of so many others, his suffering had been minimal. Sometime around the first anniversary of the attack, Wada made up his mind to do everything he could to forget this period of his life and never speak about the atomic bombing again.

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  Under General MacArthur’s leadership, by the end of 1945, U.S. occupation personnel had demobilized the Japanese military, removed promilitary ultranationalists from positions in the Japanese government, abolished Shinto as the state religion and vehicle for nationalistic propaganda, and established a massive American oversight structure to monitor all operations of the Japanese government. In what was perhaps MacArthur’s most controversial occupation policy, Emperor Hirohito was retained as the head of state, contradicting the Allied nations’ “unconditional surrender” terms and countering many U.S. and Allied leaders’ calls for the emperor’s prosecution as a war criminal. MacArthur believed that removing the emperor from his position as the symbol of Japan’s culture and history would destabilize social order, trigger rebellion, and hinder the goals of the occupation, and his insistence on preserving the emperor prevailed. Over the next few years, Hirohito had no choice but to allow occupation leaders to transform his relationship to the Japanese people—from adulated deity who had inspired passionate loyalty during Japan’s holy war to pacifist human figurehead who represented “the symbol of the State and unity of the People.”

  MacArthur’s next step was to realize the United States’ agenda, both visionary and patriarchal, to metamorphose Japan into a new, egalitarian nation. In what historian John Dower called a “revolution from above,” the occupation’s widespread political, economic, and social reforms echoed Japan’s individual and civil rights movements in the 1920s before the right-wing military extremists rose to power. Economic restructuring included the dismantling of the zaibatsu—large industrial and banking conglomerates that had dominated Japan’s economy before and during the war. Land reforms required the minority of large farm owners, who owned 90 percent of Japan’s agricultural acreage, to sell all but a small portion of their holdings to their tenants. New trade union laws gave workers the right to organize, bargain collectively, and strike. Within four years, an estimated 56 percent of Japanese workers were union members.

  Japan’s education system also underwent massive reforms. The “imperial” label was removed from the names of elite universities, and the emperor’s portrait was removed from schools, government offices, and public buildings. Teachers, who only six months earlier had been required to train Japanese children to die for the emperor, were now asked to embrace democratic and pacifist ideologies, and their new curriculum instructed students to reflect on the failure of the Japanese people to think critically about and resist the nationalistic military movement that had ultimately led to Japan’s defeat. Coeducation was instituted in public schools, and new laws provided equal education for women. Newly issued textbooks endorsed Western concepts of individuality, rational thinking, and social equality.

  At the same time, MacArthur and his team practiced secretive and oppressive policies that contradicted the democratic values they claimed to promote. An early example was Japan’s new constitution, which MacArthur presented to the Japanese public in March 1946 as a document brought forth by the will and desire of the Japanese people. In reality, however, members of the occupation’s Government Section had secretly drafted the new constitution over the course of a single week; the will—or even the knowledge—of the Japanese people played no part in Japan’s adoption of its new parliamentary democracy, and Japanese government leaders provided only minor revisions after the fact. In an odd contradiction, the new constitution established many human rights and equalities for the Japanese people, but the country’s social and economic reforms, individual freedoms, and its new democracy itself were, in effect, forced on Japan by an occupying nation.

  Contradicting the new constitution’s guarantee of freedom of expression and explicit wording that “no censorship shall be maintained,” the occupation’s Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) continued to carry out broad media restrictions. Staffed by mor
e than 8,700 American and Japanese personnel in Tokyo and in regional offices in northern and southern Japan, the CCD monitored radio and television broadcasts, films, personal mail, and telephone and telegraph communications. From 1945 to 1949, when it suspended its operations, the department examined an estimated 15 million pages of print media from 16,500 newspapers, 13,000 periodicals and bulletins, and 45,000 books and pamphlets, plus innumerable photographs, political advertisements, and other documents. Banned topics covered not only the more obvious subjects, such as emperor worship and militaristic fervor, but also any direct or perceived criticism of the United States, its allies, or the occupation government, including the physical damages, death tolls, and injuries caused by U.S. firebombings of Japanese cities.

  Across the country, movie theaters could only show films approved by the CCD after stringent review; among other criteria, any challenges to the provisions of the Potsdam Declaration, the terms for Japanese surrender, or the announced objectives of the Allied occupation were forbidden. Documentaries about historical events were required to be “truthful,” as defined by occupation authorities. Other subjects barred from media coverage included “overplaying” starvation across the country; black-market activities; the differences in living standards between occupation forces and Japanese citizens; and fraternization between U.S. servicemen and Japanese women and the biracial children born from these encounters. References to U.S. atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific were highly restricted. The Japanese people were prohibited from traveling overseas or communicating with anyone beyond Japan’s borders, limiting their knowledge of world affairs to occupation-approved reports from U.S. or Allied media sources. As before, no reports about or even allusions to censorship policies were tolerated, so most Japanese knew nothing of those policies’ existence.