In the privacy of their classrooms, Nagasaki teachers guided their students in writing about their postbomb lives, and under the direction of Dr. Nagai, their essays were later published in a collection called Living Beneath the Atomic Cloud. Tsujimoto Fujio, a fourth grader at Yamazato Elementary School who lost his parents and siblings in the attack, wrote about living with his sixty-year-old grandmother in a shanty constructed where his house used to be. Every morning, his grandmother attended Mass, then went to the banks of the Urakami River to search for shells, which she sold to help pay for their food. She was always holding her rosary, he wrote, always praying. She would tell him that all was fine, that everything was the will of God.
But Tsujimoto did not feel as hopeful as his grandmother. He longed for his former life, when his grandmother ran a food shop, his father was a well digger, and the family had plenty of money. “Please give me that life back . . . please,” he begged in his essay. “I want my mother. I want my father. I want my brother. I want my sisters. . . .”
His mother had been cremated in young Tsujimoto’s school yard. As he ran and played with his friends there, sometimes a sudden memory of that day filled him with longing, and when his schoolmates walked across the area where his mother’s body had lain atop the funeral pyre and burned, he felt anger rise up in his body.
“I go to [that] spot . . . ,” he wrote, “and touch the ground with my fingers. When you dig into the ground with a bamboo stick, flakes of black ash come out. If I stare at these, I can see my mother’s face with my mind’s eye.”
CHAPTER 6
EMERGENCE
As years passed and Nagasaki’s days and nights became further distanced from the detonation that forever split its history, hibakusha who had survived the chilling first years after the bombing pushed forward to reconstruct their city, their lives, and their identities. Contrast and contradiction defined everyday life. In the late 1940s, rationed food was more available than before, but still there was not enough. Some hibakusha found jobs to help stabilize a subsistence income for their families, even as unemployment and inflation continued to rise. Newly constructed housing provided shelter for some, but as late as 1950, less than 5 percent of survivors’ housing applications could be met, and thousands still lived in shacks with dirt floors, surrounded by atomic ash and debris. Most startling, just as survivors were finally healing from their injuries, illnesses, and burns, new radiation-related illnesses began to appear, some of them fatal. For many, survival remained tenuous, and long-term planning was nearly impossible. With tremendous will, the help of their families and communities, and as much strength as their physical and emotional health would allow, the people of Nagasaki inched their way through their postnuclear existence, trying to regain some semblance of a recognizable world.
In late 1946, Taniguchi was able to move his lower legs. Still lying on his stomach, he bent his legs at the knee and moved them in random directions to stretch and strengthen his knee joints. Doctors continued to use gauze soaked in liquid penicillin to treat his back and left arm. Scabs finally began to harden over small sections of these areas, and skin formed along the edges of his burns. The scorched patches of skin on his buttocks were nearly restored, and his blood cell counts had stabilized.
One day in early 1947, surrounded by his medical team, Taniguchi twisted his legs to the edge of his bed, lifted his torso, and sat up for the first time in seventeen months. Everyone applauded, thrilled that this moment—which none of them could have imagined even a year earlier—had actually come.
Taniguchi had never seen his burned back, and as he allowed himself to believe that he might recover, he decided to take a look. While he lay facedown, doctors brought in a large mirror to his bedside and held it at an angle near his head. Taniguchi lifted his chin and held it up for a brief moment, glancing into the mirror to see his back, arms, and legs covered with infected scar tissue and barely scabbed flesh. Overwhelmed with disappointment, he lowered his head to the bed. Everyone had told him that his wounds were getting better, and before that moment, he had visualized improvement far greater than what he saw.
Soon, Taniguchi was able to stand up for the first time since the bombing. Dizziness overcame him at first, and sharp pain coursed through his feet. After resting, he stood again—and with immense resolve and the aid of bamboo crutches, he took his first steps. “I had never been happier than on that day,” he remembered. “I felt at that moment that I was resurrected.”
• • •
The left side of Yoshida’s face and body also healed significantly, and at last he, too, was able to walk. On his release date in January 1947, sixteen months after the bombing, hospital staff drove him to the Omura train station. When he walked into the small waiting room, Yoshida heard people gasp and whisper about his face; then the room went completely silent. Everyone stared. During his entire stay at the hospital, Yoshida had avoided catching even a glimpse of his own reflection, so while he and other patients had become accustomed to each other’s burns and scars, he was totally unprepared for how people outside the hospital would react to his face. Yoshida lowered his head and walked to the corner of the room, where he crouched down, crying.
He hoped he would be left alone on the train, but at each stop, people stared as they got off and on. Keeping his head bowed, Yoshida wept as the train passed through one rural village after another, then over the mountains into Nagasaki. Maybe the people in the city will be accustomed to seeing faces like mine, he thought. But in Nagasaki, too, people gasped. “When I think back,” he said, “I can’t believe I went back to Nagasaki with that face.”
For the next two years, Yoshida lived with his mother and four siblings. His mother helped him fill the gaps in his memory—of the day of the bombing, his unconscious months at home, and his first weeks at Omura Naval Hospital. He learned that each of the six friends he was with at the time of the bombing had died.
Twice a week, Yoshida went to a neighborhood clinic where a doctor applied ointment to the grafted skin on his face. In between visits, however, the salve hardened beneath the bandages, like a cast. “Every time I went back,” he remembered, “the doctor told me to look out the window—and then he tore off the bandage. Blood poured out. It was excruciating.” His injuries prevented him from opening his mouth more than a tiny degree, making it difficult to eat. Yoshida also suffered unyielding pain in his side; he later discovered that at the time of the bombing, he had broken two ribs that had never been reset. Further, the scar tissue on his legs prohibited him from sitting cross-legged or in seiza—the formal Japanese way of kneeling and sitting back on the soles of one’s feet, required for many occasions. The tissue beneath the skin of his right hand had been destroyed, and the skin that had healed over the wounds was so tight and dry that it split open every winter. His fingers were curled up almost in a fist, frozen in the position they were in at the moment of the atomic blast. In an attempt to straighten his fingers, Yoshida’s doctor instructed him to fill a bucket with sand, turn his hand palm up, wedge the bucket handle between his curled fingers and palm, and then allow the weight of the bucket to pull the handle down and force his fingers to straighten. “Itaaaaaaaaai [it hurt],” he recalled, wincing. “It felt like my hand would break.”
More than any other challenge, however, fifteen-year-old Yoshida’s profound fear of people staring at his facial scars and disfigurement kept him hidden inside his house. He would not leave even to bathe at the public baths with his family, so his mother placed a metal washtub outside their house, out of sight of the neighbors, permitting her son to bathe in private. Even at home, a woman from the local neighborhood association stopped by to visit and gawked at his blackened face and the scars that covered his neck. Mortified, Yoshida told his mother he would rather die than live with injuries that evoked such horrible responses from people.
It was the need for a haircut that finally compelled Yoshida to leave his house. “By that
time, my hair had gotten bosa-bosa [long and messy],” he remembered. But Yoshida was terrified to walk even the fifty yards from his house to the barbershop, so his mother asked the barber to come to their house on his day off to cut her son’s hair. The barber offered instead that Yoshida could come to his shop early one morning before it opened.
As the barber cut Yoshida’s hair, he asked Yoshida what had happened to him. Yoshida had just begun to tell his story when he was interrupted. “Oops!” The barber gasped. Yoshida looked up and was petrified to see in the mirror that a customer had walked into the shop. The man didn’t see him, and for a moment Yoshida thought he was safe. He peeked into the mirror again, and this time the customer was staring at him. “Our eyes met in the mirror,” Yoshida said. “The man looked away immediately. I don’t know why, but at that moment I became very sad. Then I panicked. My haircut was almost done, but I couldn’t wait.” Yoshida raced out of the shop in tears. That night, the barber went to his house to finish cutting his hair, but Yoshida’s shame could not be allayed, and for many months he again refused to leave his house.
• • •
On March 20, 1949—three years and seven months after the atomic bombing—Taniguchi was finally released from Omura National Hospital. Though he still struggled with persistent fevers, nausea, diarrhea, generalized weakness, and infections in his wounds, he had learned how to walk freely without assistance. Doctors had performed two surgeries to try to increase the mobility of his left elbow and the extension of his arm, but neither procedure was successful, so his elbow remained permanently bent, and he could not raise his arm above shoulder level. As his release date approached, Taniguchi felt extremely anxious—about his injuries that had not fully healed, about his ability to go back to work, and about how people would react when they saw his scars. “These thoughts filled me with sorrow and hatred toward war,” he remembered. “Night after night before leaving the hospital, I went outside the ward and cried.”
He was twenty years old and over a foot taller than when he had entered the hospital in 1945. On the day of his release, Taniguchi put on a borrowed blue suit, tied up his few personal items in a furoshiki, thanked his doctors and nurses, and bowed good-bye to hospital staff who gathered to wish him well. Like Yoshida, Taniguchi took the train from Omura, but because his injuries were mostly hidden, he did not suffer people’s stares. Arriving at Nagasaki Station, Taniguchi walked to the ferry that took him across the bay to the base of Mount Inasa, and from there he climbed the steep slope to his grandparents’ house, where they greeted him with a special meal of raw fish, soybeans, rice, and sake.
Within two weeks, he was welcomed back to work at the post office by supervisors and workers who had also survived the bombing. Taniguchi’s new job was to deliver telegrams across the city, riding through Nagasaki on a new red bicycle. After an eight-hour workday, he ascended the mountain to his grandparents’ house, where he collapsed with exhaustion.
As Taniguchi crisscrossed the city on his bike, he saw signs of Nagasaki’s renewal. Telephone service was restored to prewar levels, and some retail shops in the city’s older districts and in front of Nagasaki Station had reopened. Streetcars now moved north of the main station into the leveled atomic plain and beyond. With gradually increasing support from the national government, hundreds of public housing units now stood in the scorched fields bordering the hypocenter area. Administrators, teachers, students, and parents had rebuilt their local schools and furnished them with desks, chairs, cabinets, shoe racks, and bookshelves that, one teacher recalled, “gave off the fragrance of new wood.” Donated tree saplings grew outside Yamazato Elementary School, where young students, many of them orphaned by the bomb, had carried away pieces of broken concrete and debris to plant vegetable and flower gardens. Every morning and evening, church bells sounded across the city.
The city held lotteries for new housing units, giving priority to hibakusha whose houses had burned down. Nagano’s father had gone to every drawing until he finally won a single room in a four-unit row house on Heiwa Doori (Peace Street), built on top of a burned field in Shiroyama-machi. In 1948, Nagano and her parents finally returned to Nagasaki to their new 157-square-foot room, which included a tiny kitchen with an earthen floor and a wood-burning stove. Like most other people in the city, they walked to the public baths to bathe.
The year 1949 was a turning point for Nagasaki’s recovery. Although the economy had not yet stabilized, skyrocketing inflation was finally subdued, and food shortages had eased. The National Diet—Japan’s legislature—passed the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law and the Nagasaki International Culture City Construction Law, legislation that proclaimed new public images for each city and provided additional funding for their rebuilding projects. Under strict occupation supervision, Nagasaki’s docks were again open to foreign trade. That year, Victor Delnore left his post as Nagasaki Military Government Team director, leaving a minimal occupation presence in the city—part of General MacArthur’s “progressive relaxation of controls” toward the eventual goal of full Japanese self-government. Most of the occupation’s censorship policies ended, allowing publishers to gradually release popular literature and medical journals relating to the atomic bombings. Ishida Masako’s and Nagai Takashi’s books were published; Nagai’s Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of Nagasaki) sold 110,000 copies in the first six months.
As the largest Christian community in the nation, Nagasaki was briefly propelled into world view when it hosted the massive opening celebration honoring Spanish missionary Saint Francis Xavier’s arrival in Japan four hundred years earlier. To prepare for the ceremonies, the city underwent major beautification efforts. Nagasaki Station was restored, a main thoroughfare was widened, and a new park was built on a hill just east of the station where twenty-six Christian martyrs had been executed in 1597.
When Catholics and media representatives from across the nation and the world converged in the city on May 29, 1949, Nagasaki experienced the largest influx of outside visitors since rescue and research teams had arrived immediately after the bombing. Starting at Oura Church in the south, three priests led a procession of children’s choirs, a brass ensemble, several hundred nuns, and thousands of Japanese Catholics clutching rosaries in their hands. Tens of thousands more lined the streets and attended services led by Vatican representatives on the hill of the twenty-six martyrs and in the ruins of Urakami Church. When the ceremonies came to a close and international press coverage ended, Nagasaki and its citizens returned to relative obscurity and their tenacious efforts to endure and rebuild.
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For many of the estimated ten thousand Catholic hibakusha in Nagasaki, physician and spiritual leader Nagai Takashi offered a message of destiny and sacrifice that fulfilled their existential confusion and gave spiritual significance to the devastation of their city, the loss of their loved ones, and their survival. Before the bombing, Nagai was already ill with leukemia from his years of radiological work, and in the spring of 1946, he had collapsed near Nagasaki Station and was restricted to bed rest thereafter. On a hillside overlooking the hypocenter area, members of the Urakami congregation used corrugated tin siding to construct a forty-three-square-foot hut for Dr. Nagai and his two young children. He named his tiny residence Nyokodo—an abbreviated term for “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself House.”
Nagai continued to interpret the Nagasaki bombing as a baptism—a means by which Japan and the world could purge itself of its sins and begin anew—and an act of providence, for which the people must give thanks for being chosen for such a high purpose. Carrying forward the city’s nearly four-hundred-year history of Christian martyrdom, Nagai believed that the Urakami Valley was sacrificed for the peace that came to the world after Japan surrendered. He praised Catholic hibakusha for being faithful martyrs for God. “And as we walk in hunger and thirst, ridiculed, penalized, scourged, pouring with sweat and covered with blood,” he wrote in The Bells of Nag
asaki, “let us remember how Jesus Christ carried His cross to the hill of Calvary. He will give us courage.” Nagai also publicly condemned the war and denounced Japan for its military aggression. “It is not the atomic bomb that gouged this huge hole in the Urakami basin,” he wrote in a later book. “We dug it ourselves to the rhythm of military marches. . . . Who turned the beautiful city of Nagasaki into a heap of ashes? . . . We did. . . . It is we the people who busily made warships and torpedoes.” He saw the atomic bombings as “anti-war vaccinations” and prayed that the Nagasaki bombing would serve as the last act of war in human history.
Confined to his bed, Dr. Nagai wrote fifteen books and numerous articles, becoming the best-known hibakusha writer during the occupation. He donated much of his proceeds to plant trees in Nagasaki, built a private library for impoverished hibakusha children, and supported the rebuilding of the city and Urakami Church. People across Japan hailed him as “the saint of Nagasaki” and considered him an unparalleled spiritual teacher. He received a commendation from the prime minister, was paid a rare visit by the emperor, and was named a national hero by the Japanese government for his contributions to Japan’s postwar restoration and healing. The Vatican sent two papal messengers to Nagai’s bedside, one of whom carried a gift of a rosary from Pope Pius XII. In 1950, The Bells of Nagasaki was made into a feature film—but only after occupation officials required filmmakers to eliminate all visual images of the atomic bombing except for two: a distant view of the atomic cloud rising above the city and a scene in which Dr. Nagai finds his wife’s rosary in the ruins of their home. After a national release, the film’s beloved title song became an unofficial theme song for Nagasaki. Although the Catholics in Nagasaki were a small percentage of the population, Nagai’s writings strongly influenced the Japanese public’s characterization that Nagasaki’s response to the atomic bombing was prayerful and even passive—different from the national perception that Hiroshima survivors were activists willing to express public outrage.
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