This study also recorded the health and development of children who were exposed to radiation in utero and survived. One by one, mothers accompanied their five- and six-year-old sons and daughters to the ABCC’s clinic and recounted vivid memories of the bombing, the deaths of their family members, and their children’s premature and difficult births. They told ABCC staff about their confusion and anxiety over their babies’ physical and mental development and the discrimination and bullying their children had experienced—particularly after reaching school age, when their differences came into greater public view.
Dr. Yamazaki and his staff examined these children and diagnosed microcephaly, cardiac disease, incontinence, and severe mental and developmental disabilities, but they remained guarded in ascribing the children’s disorders to radiation exposure until their studies could definitively document cause and effect. Yamazaki recalled that even five years after the bombing, many mothers knew little about the potential effects of radiation on their children and had also been told by their family doctors that their children’s physical and mental challenges were “most likely caused by the malnutrition, trauma, and stress related to the bombing.” Years later, when they realized that radiation from the bomb may have caused their children’s conditions, they demanded to know why they hadn’t been told earlier. One mother, scared for her young son, said, “To think that the bomb reached into my womb and hurt him leaves me bitter.”
By the 1960s, long after Dr. Yamazaki had left, the in utero study cohort in Nagasaki and Hiroshima grew to 3,600 children, including their control groups. As these children grew older, the ABCC’s outcomes confirmed radiation exposure as the cause of most of the children’s health conditions, including high incidences of microcephaly and neurological impairments. The studies revealed the particular vulnerabilities of timing as it related to in utero radiation exposure. Children who had been exposed at eight to fifteen weeks after conception demonstrated significantly greater risk of developmental disabilities because fetal brain cells are more susceptible to radiation damage in this stage of pregnancy. In a Nagasaki substudy published in 1972, eight of nine children (89 percent) exposed before the eighteenth week of pregnancy were diagnosed with microcephaly—compared to two of nine children (22 percent) exposed to the same levels of radiation later in their gestational development. The ABCC periodically observed the children in this cohort through age nineteen and beyond. As young adults, these hibakusha continued to demonstrate reduced height, weight, and head and chest circumferences in addition to mental disabilities and decreased scores on intelligence tests compared with control groups.
Dr. Yamazaki’s second major study searched for potential genetic effects on children conceived after the bombing, critical to understanding the generational impact of radiation exposure. Begun in Hiroshima before Yamazaki’s arrival in Japan, the first step of this study had been to identify newborns whose parents were hibakusha. To do so, the ABCC had linked its study to Japan’s postwar food-rationing system, which provided extra rations to women in the last twenty weeks of pregnancy; that is, when expectant mothers arrived at city offices to enroll in the rationing program, they were directed to register their pregnancies with the ABCC. This arrangement was so successful that over 90 percent of women at least five months pregnant signed up for the ABCC study.
During the pregnancy enrollment process, the ABCC was able to collect personal information and medical data on the mother, father, and baby without providing information about the potential genetic risks from radiation exposure that the ABCC believed might exist for these children. In a questionnaire and in on-the-spot interviews at the time of registration, for example, each woman was asked to provide details of her reproductive history, including abortions, stillbirths, and miscarriages, as well as the baby’s due date and the name of the midwife who would attend the delivery. The ABCC also asked for information on both the mother’s and her husband’s atomic bomb experiences, including location, potential shielding, and symptoms of radiation illness they may have endured. How this information would be used—including the fact that the families’ data would go to the United States for military evaluation—was not revealed. Instead, each woman received a pamphlet that described the ABCC’s postbirth examination and stressed that mothers would be able to know their babies’ “true physical condition” and at the same time make “an important contribution to medical science.”
In what ABCC historian M. Susan Lindee calls “the largest epidemiological project of its kind up to that time,” over the six years from 1948 to 1954, the first phase of this genetics study comprised nearly seventy-seven thousand infants conceived after the atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In order to examine infants immediately after their birth, the ABCC established strong relationships with Nagasaki’s approximately 125 midwives and paid them to report each birth they attended, including a bonus for immediate notification of newborns with potential medical problems. Upon news of a birth, the ABCC sent a Japanese pediatrician and a nurse to the family’s home, where, with the midwife’s support, they conducted a physical exam of the baby and asked a series of questions relating to specific problems during late pregnancy and birth, including prematurity, birth defects, or neonatal death. When they left, the ABCC staff gave the mother a bar of mild face soap to use on the infant.
Between five hundred and eight hundred babies were examined in Nagasaki each month under Yamazaki’s supervision—an average of twenty-one per day. Within the first year of life, about 20 percent of the babies in the study were also selected randomly for follow-up examinations at the ABCC’s clinic to check for cardiac problems and developmental delays that might not have been evident immediately after birth. The enormous amounts of data from these examinations were carefully collected, verified, and transferred to punch cards for processing.
Mothers and fathers may have appreciated that their babies received a comprehensive medical examination and at least initial diagnoses of any serious health conditions, but Dr. Yamazaki observed that the ABCC’s home visits and follow-up examinations also stirred confusion and deep concern for the parents. “There was nothing any of us could do to alleviate the fear generated by our research,” he remembered. “The routine examination of each newborn child brought home to many families for the first time the fact that the survivors were still at risk. We had no answers with which to reassure them.” When Yamazaki returned to the United States in 1951, he understood the urgent need for further research in order to fully comprehend both the short- and long-term impacts of instant, whole-body radiation on the human body. “Some consequences,” he wrote, “might not be known until we had completed careful observations of the survivors over their entire lifetimes.”
• • •
To meet the need for in-depth knowledge of radiation’s long-term impact on hibakusha, the ABCC designed and implemented numerous additional studies, many of which continue today. Outcomes of these studies—which would not be published for many years—revealed, in most cases, direct correlations between the levels of radiation exposure hibakusha received and the severity of their illnesses and risk levels for cancer throughout their lives. The ABCC’s Life Span Study, established in 1958, has explored cancer occurrences throughout participants’ lives and documented their causes of death in order to evaluate excess cancer risk compared with nonexposed people. Ultimately, the study’s cohort increased to 120,000 subjects from both cities, and substudies have explored the effects of radiation on the immune system, gene analysis, and the underlying biological effects of radiation exposure that cause human illness and death. For survivors who were children at the time of the bombings, already statistically smaller in weight and stature, outcomes showed a higher risk than other adults for nearly every illness studied. In addition to the in utero study population, the ABCC has continued its lifelong investigation of potential genetic effects on children conceived and born after the bombings to one or both parents who were surv
ivors. Studies have shown no observable effects on these children to date, but scientists will not draw conclusions until after they have studied these adults as they age.
All of this research has been possible because of the participation of tens of thousands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima survivors. Despite their political, cultural, and deeply personal concerns about the agency’s methods, they have chosen to take part in the ABCC’s studies for numerous reasons, including the provision of free medical exams and diagnoses even without medical care, a sense of admiration for the American facilities and scientific methodologies, and, over time, improved relationships between the ABCC and Japanese academic and medical institutions. Wada joined the ABCC’s Life Span Study as a way to support important medical advancements. Others found some meaning in their survival through their contribution to scientific knowledge of radiation exposure, which they hoped could help abolish nuclear weapons development throughout the world.
Like Do-oh, however, many hibakusha remained adamantly opposed to the ABCC. After her first and only visit to the ABCC clinic, Do-oh decided never to go again, choosing to forgo potential diagnoses or postmortem analyses of her conditions rather than offer her body, and her suffering, to U.S. data collection. For the next twenty years, the ABCC called and sent letters asking how she was, but she never responded. Only years later did she speak to her family about her reasons. “I refused to cooperate because of the way I was treated,” she explained. “I felt like an object being kept alive for research—and my pride wouldn’t allow this to happen.” She was also troubled by the agonizing and unbearable fear that her participation might in some way contribute to the development of an even more powerful nuclear weapon.
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The ten-year state of war between Japan and the Allied nations that was declared after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor formally came to an end in September 1951, when representatives of Japan, the United States, and forty-six other Allied nations assembled in San Francisco to sign the Treaty of Peace with Japan. When the peace treaty went into effect in April 1952, the United States’ occupation of Japan drew to a close. In Nagasaki, over three thousand people gathered at Urakami Church for a special High Mass to commemorate this historic transition for their nation.
Japan was barely recognizable as the country whose relentless military aggression had ended only seven years earlier. The nation’s new constitution prohibited the government from arming itself except for purposes of self-defense. Seven Class A Japanese war criminals had been executed at the conclusion of the international Tokyo War Crimes Trials in 1948, including General Tojo Hideki, Japan’s prime minister who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. Almost 6,000 lower-level war criminals were also indicted, out of whom 920 were executed and more than 3,000 were given prison terms. As a means to preserve stability in postwar Japan, occupation authorities had exculpated the emperor of all responsibility for the war, but the emperor was no longer a divine leader, and the people of Japan were no longer his subjects. Many Japanese, including hibakusha, disavowed their nation’s militaristic past and their own former indoctrination as the world’s superior race. They were now citizens of a democratic state, free from direct military control for the first time in two decades.
After more than six years of nearly total disconnection from the world, Japan now had access to international news, and both Japanese citizens and foreign visitors could freely travel into and out of the country. The national economy was growing, and in many parts of the country, food and clothing were now accessible and affordable. The Japanese flag with its symbol of the rising sun again flew over the country. As it reclaimed its sovereignty, Japan entered a new stage in its history as a Westernized capitalist nation.
The occupation had ended, but few U.S. troops left Japan. Because Japan’s new constitution mandated a perpetual state of disarmament, Japan and the United States signed a second agreement by which the United States became Japan’s official military guardian. In exchange, the United States was allowed to maintain bases in Japan during and after the 1950–1953 Korean War, thereby keeping a large military presence in the Far East to monitor and suppress, if needed, Communist expansion by the Soviet Union, China, and Korea. In an ironic twist of history, Japan’s national protection now lay solely in the hands of the U.S. military.
All censorship restrictions were now lifted, allowing non-ABCC Japanese scientists, research institutes, and governmental agencies to finally publish their studies on postbomb damages and medical conditions. The most significant scientific studies released after the occupation were the summary report (1951) and the sixteen-hundred-page full report (1953) of the Science Council of Japan’s Special Committee on the Investigation of Atomic Bomb Casualties. For the first time, Japanese scientific and medical communities gained access to the detailed 1945 surveys, studies, and analyses conducted by Japanese physicists, engineers, and physicians. For hibakusha, however, any potential help these long-awaited reports may have provided had long expired.
Further, the Japanese public finally learned more about the damages, death, and suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombings and in the years that followed. Between 1952 and 1955, more than sixty articles and books were published on the atomic bombings. They included striking images of the atomic aftermath that Japanese photographers and filmmakers had illegally concealed during the occupation—eliminating any vague impressions the Japanese people may have had about the bombings and bringing them face-to-face with the terrorizing realities of the nuclear attacks. Yamahata Yosuke published Atomized Nagasaki, a selection of his photographs taken the day after the bombing. The Japanese Red Cross Society held an exhibit of atomic bomb materials at its headquarters in Tokyo. A Japanese media company released two Nippon Eiga-sha newsreels taken by filmmakers in the fall of 1945. A special edition of Asahi Graph, a Life magazine–style journal, was published on the seventh anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, devoting almost its entire issue to information about the development of the bombs, including graphic images of mangled buildings and burned and irradiated hibakusha in both cities. The edition sold out immediately and required four additional printings, for a total of seven hundred thousand issues read by millions in Japan and throughout the world. This coverage, along with other atomic bomb–related books and publications released during the same period, elicited compassion for hibakusha by Japanese across the country and gave birth to a sense of collective national trauma relating to the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
In the United States, too, more information on the bombings was released. In the early 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission published Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs, a six-volume report comprising the studies conducted collaboratively by Japanese and American physicians in the months following the bombings, including acute radiation effects on thousands of survivors. Few people beyond the AEC and related agencies had access to these findings, however—even Dr. Yamazaki did not see them until 1956. After seven years of knowing almost nothing about the bombings, the American public finally gained a better, albeit still limited, grasp of the bombs’ impact when Life magazine published photographs of hibakusha in its September 1952 issue. The seven-page feature story included ten of Yamahata’s photographs, one of which revealed images of bodies that had been hurled from a streetcar into a ditch at the time of impact. The Nagasaki section of the story also included writer Higashi Jun’s recollection of stepping on a scorched body in the predawn light and hearing a voice calling out to him for help.
The release of these images in the United States was historic, but in Tokyo, Dr. Shiotsuki Masao was outraged at the ignorance and utter foolishness of the U.S. media and the obliviousness of the American people regarding both their safety in the event of a nuclear attack and the medical support they would receive in its aftermath. “The other day while leafing through a popular U.S. magazine,” Shiotsuki wrote in 1952, “I came across a picture of a patient lying on a bed under clean white sheet
s being injected with some sort of fluid while a doctor and nurse in spotless uniforms stood by.” Under the headline, “Medical Attention Given to Victims of the Atom Bomb,” Shiotsuki remembered, the article described how “the finest medical facilities” were well prepared to provide care for bomb victims. “What kind of impractical, theoretical nonsense is this?” he railed. “Where in such a devastated city could one find a bed with such a soft downy mattress, such a healthy doctor ready and able to work, such a kindhearted and beautiful nurse? Where would medicine, bandages, or even a single sterilized needle be left preserved in good condition?”
The photo itself and Shiotsuki’s response to it illuminated the fact that even with John Hersey’s Hiroshima and the Life story depicting horrific devastation and death, U.S. policies of censorship and denial had succeeded in keeping Americans uninformed of the unimaginable power of atomic bombs and the ghastly consequences of whole-body exposure to high levels of radiation. In the meantime, the USSR had broken the United States’ monopoly on nuclear weapons, and as the Cold War was escalating between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States pushed for international control of atomic energy to ensure its use by other countries for peaceful purposes only—while simultaneously appropriating $3 billion to increase its capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Production and testing of atomic bombs burgeoned worldwide: By the end of 1955, the United States had stockpiled 3,057 nuclear weapons and tested 66, the Soviet Union had built 200 weapons and tested 24, and Britain had developed 10 nuclear warheads and tested 3. On average, these weapons were forty-eight times more powerful than the bomb used on Nagasaki.
Even after stories of hibakusha suffering emerged in the United States, President Truman never publicly acknowledged the human impact of whole-body, large-dose radiation exposure or expressed regret for using the atomic bombs on civilians. He came close, however, at a November 30, 1950, press conference, when he took a question about the possibility of using a nuclear weapon in Korea to end the deadly international conflict there. “There has always been active consideration of its use,” Truman responded. “I don’t want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.”
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