Every morning, the doctors and nurses whispered among themselves, amazed that he had survived another day. But in the daze of constant pain, all Taniguchi could think about was dying. He cried every time he heard the instrument cart approaching, and when the nurses removed the gauze from his back, he screamed in pain and begged the nurses to let him die. “Kill me, kill me,” he cried, over and over again. “Please let me die.” Again and again, his family members visited, then gathered at his grandmother’s house on the slopes of Mount Inasa to plan his funeral. “No one thought I would survive,” he said. “I lingered on the verge of death but failed to die. . . . Somehow I was made to live.”
His grandmother stayed home to manage the farm, so Taniguchi’s grandfather stayed at his bedside to support the physicians’ and nurses’ round-the-clock care. They made short entries in his medical record each day. Bedsores desiccated. Body temperature up and down. Low-grade anemia. Top layer of skin beginning to form in certain places, like islands. Weak and small pulse. Bones are visible through bedsore wounds. Secretions slightly increased. Appetite good. Blood in stool, four times. They treated Taniguchi with regular doses of vitamins B and C, cod liver oil, and penicillin ointment, but there was little indication of any significant impact on his condition. Throughout the hot summer of 1946, Taniguchi lay beneath mosquito netting, but flies managed to find their way through the mesh and lay their eggs inside his wounds. Maggots crawled through his flesh, creating an incessant sensation that Taniguchi could not relieve. Three times he fell into a coma. Whenever he was conscious, Taniguchi felt an intense hatred for the war and fierce resentment toward all the parents who had done nothing to try to prevent it. Day after day, he stared at a tall persimmon tree visible outside the window in his room, nostalgic for his childhood and heavy with sadness that he might never feel happy again.
• • •
Yoshida lay faceup in the hospital bed next to Taniguchi. His father and grandmother had both died that year, so Yoshida’s mother and sister took turns staying at his bedside. He was able to see now, but he couldn’t turn onto his side or stomach because of the blackened burns on his face. Over time, the left side of his face and the lower left side of his body began to heal, but the right side of his face remained scabbed and infected. At some point, his burned right ear finally rotted and fell off, leaving only a small hole on the side of his head through which he could still hear.
Doctors performed three skin graft surgeries to the right side of his face. The first procedure came quickly: In early 1946, the surgeon had taken skin from his left thigh and attached it across his right cheek. “We thought it was going to work,” Yoshida recalled, “but ultimately an infection grew beneath the new skin and then the transplanted skin fell off. When the infection healed, the right side of my face scabbed over, as hard as a cast. The same problems happened after the second surgery. I remember feeling like I was going crazy from the pain.”
With only enough skin left for one more surgery, doctors tried again, and this time, his wounds did not become infected, the grafted skin remained attached, and Yoshida’s face gradually healed as much as it could. For the rest of his life, however, he suffered from having no sweat glands on the right side of his face, a problem that particularly affected him during the summer when his face became overheated because he could not perspire to cool it down.
Yoshida Katsuji, age fourteen, before and after skin graft surgery. (Courtesy of Yoshida Naoji)
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Norman Cousins’s impassioned call that “the atomic bomb is in reality a death ray” and a “radiological assault on human tissue” not only reflected survivors’ immediate postbomb hardships, but also foreshadowed a heavy stream of recurring atomic bomb–related diseases and deaths. After tens of thousands of survivors had endured—and in some cases recovered from—the initial effects of radiation exposure, many more became ill and died from radiation-related conditions that developed in the decade after the war. They faced repeated episodes of purple spots on their skin, internal bleeding, fevers, diarrhea, nausea, low blood pressure, hypersensitivity to cold, low blood cell counts, and weight loss due to an inability to hold down food—all indications of atomic bomb disease. Radiation toxicity also caused severe liver, endocrine, blood, and skin diseases; impairments of the central nervous system; premature aging; reproductive disorders leading to full or partial sterility, miscarriages, and stillbirths; gum diseases; vision problems; and ailments such as sharp pains and deep coughing that could not be linked to a specific diagnosis. The living cells in people’s mouths were damaged, causing their teeth to fall out, leaving only rotting bone. Most commonly, survivors experienced violent and unpredictable dizzy spells, fainting, dramatic losses of consciousness, and a profound depletion of energy. From the survivors’ perspective, the atomic bomb had burned their bodies from the inside out.
Although not caused by radiation exposure, thick, rubbery keloid scars developed on many hibakusha with moderate to severe burns on their faces, limbs, and across large areas of their bodies. This ungainly scar tissue—“like molten lava,” one physician remembered—caused intense itching, stinging, and throbbing pain, and when it covered elbows, shoulders, or leg joints, mobility was limited or impossible. Some survivors with keloids on their faces could not open their mouths, constricting their ability to eat. Physicians’ attempts to excise the keloids in order to perform skin grafts were thwarted because the scar tissue often grew back.
Many survivors suffered destabilizing physical and emotional exhaustion from chronic pain, loss, caring for family members with protracted injuries and diseases, and the financial burden of having to borrow money to cover the costs of medical care. Countless hibakusha felt isolated, ashamed of their physical disfigurement or their inability to feed and house their families. The sense of being internally contaminated led to constant fear of what the invisible and deadly radiation was doing inside their bodies.
In these early years, hibakusha also struggled with what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton called “the suddenness and totality of their death saturation.” In Nagasaki, seventy-four thousand people had been killed indiscriminately, equaling nearly 70 percent of everyone living in the central Urakami Valley and over 40 percent of communities in adjacent townships. Guilt plagued many hibakusha who, in order to survive, had left a family member trapped beneath a building or engulfed in flames—or who had not been able to answer their loved ones’ or strangers’ cries for help, or give them a sip of water before they died. For years, identifiable corpses were still found in stairwells or the ruins of a home being cleared away. Though most people relinquished hope of ever finding their missing loved ones, some survivors never stopped searching and listening to daily radio programs dedicated to reuniting missing persons with their families. Some held memorial services without a body. One man who lost his wife and three children in the bombing could not set his eyes on other people’s children without feeling overwhelmed with grief. Every day until the first anniversary of the bombing, he sat in front of his eldest daughter’s ashes and asked himself why he had survived.
In their own ways, two American occupation officials strived to support Nagasaki’s survivors’ psychological recovery. The first, Lieutenant Colonel Victor Delnore, a decorated combat veteran, had taken over as commander of the Nagasaki Military Government Team (NMGT) in the fall of 1946 after the last of the 10th Marines regiment had left. Delnore directed a small administrative team that supervised activities to increase public safety, oversaw the training of Japanese police officers on subjects including democracy and Japan’s new constitution, monitored labor conditions, and tracked the Japanese government and military leaders who had left or been forced out of their positions. Except for several serious crimes against Japanese citizens by U.S. soldiers, the period of civilian occupation under Delnore’s direction passed with relatively minimal conflict between the Japanese and their American conquerors, and the overall relationship
between the NMGT and Nagasaki’s civilian government leaders and officials was both cooperative and respectful.
But Delnore saw his responsibilities as more than administrative. “I had to wake the people up to the fact that life was not over,” he remembered. During his four years in Nagasaki, he frequently visited Shinkozen, where he knelt down to speak with patients at eye level. He attended a special memorial service at which Buddhist monks consecrated the ashes of thousands of unidentified hibakusha. “I was deeply moved,” he later wrote. “Whether it was the strangeness of the ceremony, the numerous mourning womenfolk, or the boxes of the ashes of the 10,000 unclaimed and unidentified victims of the atom bomb that were piled all around the altar, I’ll never know.” Delnore also supported survivors in telling their stories, exemplified by his letter to U.S. censors advocating for the publication of Ishida Masako’s Masako Taorezu: “For us to properly realize the significance of the atomic bomb,” he wrote, “to experience vicariously the feelings that so many thousands of Japanese people experienced, is desirable in these propitious times.” Two years after his arrival, Delnore authorized the first public commemoration in Nagasaki for the third anniversary of the bombing.
Winfield Niblo, the NMGT’s chief education officer, tried to offer hibakusha a sense of hope by introducing American square dancing as a wholesome mode of entertainment for the devastated city. Niblo, a former high school social studies teacher, football coach, and square-dancing caller from Denver, Colorado, had attended a dinner for Japanese athletics teachers from across the city at the home of the chief of physical education for Nagasaki Prefecture. After dinner, the teachers performed traditional Japanese folk dances, and Niblo in turn offered to teach them the Virginia reel. The teachers caught on quickly, and from there the idea took hold to train Japanese athletics instructors in American folk dances and offer classes in Nagasaki’s schools. “Hidari te! [Allemande left!]” callers bellowed. “Swing your lady!”
Eventually, the phenomenon spread throughout Japan and was endorsed by occupation officials as a form of physical education that also promoted Western perceptions of healthy social interactions between men and women. By the early 1950s, the National Folk Dance Training Course had been established in Tokyo, and thousands of Japanese across the country were sashaying and do-si-do-ing to American folk tunes like “Little Brown Jug” and “Oh! Susanna.” The Japanese Ministry of Education later asked Niblo to contribute to a textbook on the subject. “Dancing people are happy people,” he wrote, “and America is happy that this bit of American culture can bring a portion of happiness to Japan.”
• • •
Delnore’s and Niblo’s efforts notwithstanding, survivors’ ways of coping with profound trauma and moving forward in their lives varied for each hibakusha. Some who had lost their entire families reminded themselves that if they didn’t stay alive to look after their family’s graves, no one else would. Some survivors directed their focus each day to their children or to others who were dependent on them as a way not to kill themselves. Others drank excessively to escape their exhaustion, loss, and shame. Obeying their religious tenet forbidding suicide, many Nagasaki Catholics had to find ways, in one survivor’s words, to “just suck it up” and keep going.
But in the first years after the bombing, many hibakusha reached a point where they could no longer endure and saw no other option but to end their lives. In the woods behind Omura National Hospital, a young woman with severe facial burns hanged herself. A man caring for his younger brother at the Shinkozen temporary relief hospital jumped from a high window to his death. A young husband and father, too ill to work, tried repeatedly to hang himself, and when his despairing wife called the police, he pleaded, “Let me die! I can’t stand the agony of my life anymore!” A twenty-year-old girl who couldn’t work because of crippling injuries to her legs tried to overdose on medication three times. A young boy, taunted in elementary school for the keloid scars on his feet and legs, swallowed poison, but his mother found him before he died. Another mother suffering burns over half her body and tormented over the loss of four sons threw herself from an upper-story window of the former Nagasaki Medical College Hospital. Even as late as 1952, a young man, despairing over the suicide of his best friend and his own inability to get a job because of his disfigurement, climbed a hill overlooking the city, cut his wrists, and lay down to die; he survived only because the sleeve of his shirt slowed the blood flow. In 1955, a nineteen-year-old girl who ten years earlier had lost her mother on the day of the bombing and had herself been afflicted with poor health ever since, walked to the railroad tracks, placed her sandals and umbrella next to the rails, and threw herself in front of a moving train.
Nagano experienced anguish and guilt so overpowering that she repeatedly considered ending her own life. “Really, there weren’t any good days with my mother,” she said, “and whenever I asked myself why my sister and brother had died, my sadness was so intense, it felt like someone had scraped out the inside of my chest. But no matter how sorry I felt, they didn’t come back.” She heard that her grandparents, too, blamed her, and when they died, the intensity of her guilt kept her from attending their funerals. She felt it would be better if she died, thinking suicide could be a way to apologize to her parents. “But if I died,” she remembered, “I realized there would be no one to take care of my parents when they got older. When I thought about that, I realized that dying wasn’t an option, either.”
Do-oh, too, came close to killing herself. Like countless other young women who were disfigured and sick with persistent radiation-related symptoms, she remained secreted inside her house, tormented by the scars on her face and her loss of hair. Her face broke out as if toxins were being released from her body. “It itched a lot, and fluid came out of the pimples,” Do-oh remembered. “It smelled awful, like rotten fish.” She constantly stared at her face in the mirror, trying to find even the smallest improvement. But there was little change. Instead of hair, soft raggedy fuzz grew on her scalp, so thin and transparent that she looked almost bald, but even that would fall out—then grow in and fall out again. She had almost no understanding of what had happened to her or why she wasn’t getting better. “My mother cried as she washed my face and head,” Do-oh recalled. “She felt sorry for me and made a black scarf—black to look more like hair. I spent my adolescence with my head wrapped in a scarf.” When guests came to their house, Do-oh hid behind a sliding door and wished she could die. Alone in her room, she quietly fumed. Why me? Why do I have to stay so ugly—I didn’t do anything! “I still had a lot of dreams then,” she remembered. “I wanted things to go back to how they’d been before.”
One day when Do-oh was alone in her house, she found a pink-colored bump the size of her thumb on the top of her head. “I was so tired from this long period of recuperation, and I felt so desperate, that it didn’t matter anymore what happened to me,” she recalled. “If I was going to have this kind of life, it didn’t matter if I died.” She picked up a pair of sewing scissors and cut the bump off her head. Blood poured from her scalp. When her family came home, they found her with a bloody towel wrapped around her head. Her parents reprimanded her harshly. “My mother cried,” Do-oh remembered. “She said she wished she had been injured instead of me so I wouldn’t have to suffer. She took the scissors and knives from the kitchen and hid them.”
When Do-oh heard that the two friends she had escaped with on the day of the bomb had died, she began questioning why she had been allowed to live—particularly with such a “pitiful face.” “I wondered what God wanted me to do with my life,” she said. “That was my question. What had God given me this life for?”
• • •
Hibakusha who managed to live could only search for ways to endure the traumas they could not forget. Many schools held regular ceremonies to mourn the deaths of teachers and students who died on the day of the bombing and in the years that followed. Teachers at Shiroyama Elementary School h
eld memorial services for their colleagues who had died instantly while weeding the vegetable gardens, as well as for the unidentified victims whose ashes they had buried on the school grounds. City and prefectural government officials worked with Mitsubishi to collect data on hibakusha who had died in the company’s factories. The staff of Junshin Girls’ High School compiled a complete list of the 214 teenage girls who had died in the blast or afterward from injuries and radiation-related illnesses. Later, the school disinterred and cremated the bodies of those students who had been buried in the public cemetery at Togitsu and gave a portion of the ashes to the girls’ families, then buried the remaining ashes beneath a memorial built on the school grounds.
Personal commemorations often took place out of the reach of occupation censors. Even in the crudest of huts within the atomic wasteland, families managed to display the urns containing the ashes—or the presumed ashes—of their family members and pray every day for the repose of their souls. Hayashi Tsue, the mother of a girl who died at Shiroyama Elementary School on the day of the bombing, planted young cherry trees in the playground of the school in memory of her daughter and all the victims she had seen during her harrowing search for her child in the days after the attack. No saplings were available anywhere in the city, so a gardener transported them from another prefecture northeast of the city. As the trees grew, every spring Hayashi quietly observed the beauty of the trees, consoling herself by imagining that her daughter’s soul had transformed into their blossoms.
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