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“In the blink of an eye,” one Nagasaki survivor wrote, “a decade had passed.” The city and its people had outlived the long war; an atomic bomb; instantaneous and continuous losses of family, friends, and community; lack of adequate food and basic needs; isolation and censorship during the U.S. occupation; and years of severe medical conditions resulting from injury and radiation exposure. By 1955, the city’s postwar economy had grown, in large part due to contracts from the United States for Mitsubishi and other companies to produce ships, military supplies, and other products for the Korean War, played out just 168 miles from Nagasaki across the Tsushima and Korea straits. Increased numbers of nonvictims had moved into Nagasaki, returning the city’s population to prebomb levels.
In the older parts of the city less impacted by the bomb, commerce and daily life had somewhat normalized. Three movie houses exclusively showed Hollywood films, particularly Westerns and adventure movies. Even in the Urakami Valley, rows and rows of relief housing lined newly paved streets, and shops were now open to serve their local communities. The rebuilt and newly named Nagasaki University School of Medicine and its affiliated hospital had finally opened on their former sites. The hospital’s state-of-the-art medical equipment and care allowed the temporary hospital at Shinkozen Elementary School to close at last. Streetcars operated through most of the city. Hunger and deprivation had eased, and most people no longer scoured for food to survive.
But hibakusha still closed their eyes and remembered people’s skin peeling off, their whispered cries for help, the bodies of the dead burning atop cremation pyres that filled the city with the stench of death. While most remained alone and silent in their grief, some formed small groups to honor Nagasaki’s deceased and ensure their future remembrance. At the municipal level, the Nagasaki City Atomic Bomb Records Preservation Committee gathered artifacts and information as the first step toward the opening of an atomic bomb museum, and the annual commemorations of the atomic bombing in Nagasaki were unified into a single ceremony entitled the Memorial Service for the Atomic Bomb Victims and Ceremony to Pray for Peace. Every year since 1954, Nagasaki’s mayor has read a “peace declaration” on behalf of the city.
Nagasaki harbor and environs, after the bombing (1945) and after reconstruction (1954). In the foreground is the Nishinaka-machi Catholic Church, and in the upper right across the bay is the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard. In the top photo, at center left, is Shinkozen Elementary School. In the lower photo, the large building at center left is Nagasaki City Hall. (Photographs by Ogawa Torahiko/Courtesy of Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum)
At the hypocenter site, the small cylindrical marker posted in the rubble in 1945 was replaced by a tall wooden pillar rising from a large mound of dirt, framed from behind by young trees. Down the side of the post, large, hand-painted kanji identified the marker as the hypocenter. Visitors could sit on a bench in front of the monument; to one side stood a large wooden sign in Japanese and English detailing the atomic bomb damages.
Nagano, her mother, and her older brother built a small family gravesite near the hypocenter where they placed Seiji’s, Kuniko’s, and her father’s ashes. Wada found purpose in beginning to plan a monument for the twelve mobilized students and more than a hundred streetcar drivers and conductors who died in the bombing—“to comfort the souls,” he said. To that end, he and his friends made a list of everyone who had died and where they had lived. If anyone in their families had survived, Wada tracked down their current addresses and visited them on weekends when he wasn’t working. “I went as far as Osaka, Kansai, and Okinawa to ask them how they were doing after they had lost their daughters and sons.” About a third of the families turned him away, unwilling to talk about the atomic bomb and the loss of their loved one. Others, however, invited Wada into their homes and asked him to tell them anything he knew about their son or daughter on the day of the bombing. It took Wada more than ten years to complete all the visits and organize the detailed notes he kept on each conversation.
The people of Nagasaki commemorated the tenth anniversary of the atomic bombing with new memorials, dedications, and acts of remembrance. The new six-story Nagasaki International Culture Hall opened on the hillside five hundred feet above the hypocenter, and its entire fifth floor became a small museum displaying materials and personal items relating to the bombing. More than 220,000 visitors saw the exhibit that year. The Nagasaki Peace Statue was dedicated at one end of a large area of elevated land just north of the hypocenter—though some hibakusha objected to this use of donated funds, believing the money could have been better spent on survivors’ medical care. Created by Kitamura Seibo, a renowned sculptor and Nagasaki native, the thirty-two-foot-high statue situated atop a thirteen-foot-high stone base is a seated man facing the hypocenter. His raised right arm points toward the sky where the atomic bomb exploded, his left arm extends horizontally to symbolize peace, and his eyes are closed to symbolize prayer for those who died.
On the morning of August 9, large crowds assembled in front of the Peace Statue for the city’s formal commemoration ceremony. The mayor of Nagasaki and other dignitaries appealed for remembrance and peace, offering flowers at the base of the memorial. A plane flew overhead, releasing flowers to remember the dead. A group of hibakusha orphans stood in front of the Peace Statue, and at 11:02 a.m.—the moment the atomic bomb had exploded a decade earlier—each child released a dove into the sky. That night, fireworks lit up the sky as a procession of children carrying paper lanterns moved toward the Urakami River. They attached the lanterns to thin wooden boards, placed them in small boats, and used string to pull the boats down the river like a train, creating a trail of flickering light.
At a time when much of the city’s destruction had disappeared from public view, visual evidence of the bombing lingered silently in the night. On the knoll above the hypocenter near the new Peace Statue, the stone foundation of Urakami Prison protruded aboveground to outline the shape of each demolished building. Damaged stone pillars of the former Urakami Church stood upright in the far northeastern corner of the Urakami Valley. In the hills just south of the hypocenter, a single-legged torii archway balanced eerily at the top of a stone staircase, ten years after one of its immense cement support columns was blown away, still directing people to the intimate, tree-covered Sanno Shrine.
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At the periphery of her city’s recovery and remembrance, Do-oh emerged from hiding. Year after year, she had sat alone in her room, asking herself over and over again what she should do with the life she had been given. Eight years after the bombing, she finally knew that it was time to transcend her atomic bomb experience and somehow create a new life for herself.
But while her injuries had healed and the immediate pain of the glass shards embedded in her body had eased, Do-oh’s hair had still not grown back. Desperate to overcome her shame and reclaim her life, she wore the black kerchief her mother had made for her and stepped outside her house. Like Yoshida, she stayed close to home at first, taking short walks only in her immediate neighborhood. Later she heard that people called her “the girl with the triangle cloth.”
Do-oh’s father decided that she should go to dressmaking school so she could eventually support herself and have a good life. The commute to the school required Do-oh to venture farther from home. One day on her way home, she saw a fatigued, middle-aged woman sitting on a straw mat on the ground with a young child strapped to her back. “Could you give me something?” the woman begged. “Anything is fine.”
Do-oh dropped some coins into her box and was overwhelmed by the sad and lonely sound they made. What kind of life had this woman had? she wondered. Did she lose her husband in the war or the atomic bomb? On her way home, she imagined what it would be like to live like this woman and was awakened to the crucial necessity of her own independence. She quickly found a part-time job as a kitchen worker making takoyaki—grilled dumplings with octopus. S
ome months later, she was hired as a Nagasaki representative for a cosmetics company.
For the first time since before the bombing, Do-oh felt alive again and began envisioning a future for herself. She decided that she wanted to live an authentic and full life—for herself and for her friends who had died. Reconnecting to her love of fashion, Do-oh focused her vision on cosmetics as a way to help young hibakusha women whose faces were scarred and burned.
She wanted to push herself and test her potential. She wanted to leave her hometown and move to a bigger city. Making a rare choice for a single Japanese woman, Do-oh requested a transfer to her company’s head office in Tokyo—“the place for fashion,” she said, “the place for anything.” Her application was accepted, but Do-oh’s parents adamantly objected to her leaving. “Your body is injured,” they said. “At some point, you might become ill again. We can easily foresee your experiencing hardships there.” Do-oh was furious, and in another act of social defiance, she told her parents that she was going to Tokyo despite their wishes. Before she left, she rented a room in Nagasaki to practice living on her own, and she worked at the cosmetics company’s local shop and took odd jobs to save money. In 1955, her hair finally grew back enough for her to remove the black kerchief from her head.
She was free. On the day of her departure, Do-oh, now twenty-six, wrapped her clothes in two furoshiki, said good-bye to her family, and boarded a train for Tokyo. The trip took a day and a half. Her goal was to try to use the life she had been given. “I felt like I’d already died once, so if it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t have lost anything.” From inside the slow, coal-burning train, Do-oh watched the city, her childhood, and her atomic bomb experiences disappear in the distance. “Going to Tokyo was the true starting line of my life,” she said. “I bet against myself that I would win.”
CHAPTER 7
AFTERLIFE
Twenty-one-year-old Mizuta Hisako had studied hard to complete her training as a Nagasaki tour bus guide—and out of a pool of twenty applicants, she was thrilled to be one of only seven to be hired. Japan’s economic boom of the late 1950s had begun to propel the nation out of its postwar collapse, and in Nagasaki, increased foreign trade and the thriving shipbuilding industry had helped the local economy surge. International hotels and restaurants crowded the downtown area, many with signage in both Japanese and English. Television towers rose high above Mount Inasa, and simple eight- and nine-story apartment and office buildings dotted the cityscape. In winter, remembered one of the ABCC’s leading geneticists, William J. Schull, “Nagasaki’s major shopping area rang with the sounds of Christmas carols, and images of Santa and his elfin helpers were to be found in both of the department stores.”
As Nagasaki emerged as a modern metropolis, tourists began to discover the city. At Nagasaki Peace Park, just north of the hypocenter area, peace monuments donated by nations throughout the world began arriving and were placed around the park’s perimeter, and visitors were often greeted by a brass band. Near the giant Peace Statue, survivors who otherwise could not work due to paralysis, crippling injuries, or illness operated the popular “hibakusha store,” selling atomic bomb souvenirs, handmade Mother Mary dolls, Japanese noodles, and drinks.
Hisako’s uniform was ready, and she was just about to start her new job when one of her superiors at the city transportation office approached her. He suggested that she meet a man named Wada who worked for the same agency in the streetcar division. He had also approached Wada. “Mr. Wada,” the man had said, “Mizuta-san is a nice girl. Why don’t you marry her?” Hisako told the man that she was working and had no desire to get married yet, but he insisted that she at least allow the introduction.
In Japan, marriage and children were societal expectations, key milestones in a young man’s or woman’s successful transition to adulthood. Most marriages were arranged through omiai—formal interviews between the potential bride and groom, often accompanied by their parents. These meetings were arranged by an older relative, a senior employee at work, or an elder in the families’ social networks who could vouch for both parties and praise their virtues as good marital candidates. Families accepted or rejected prospective marriage partners based on various criteria, including social standing, appearance, economic stability, health, and the ability to bear healthy children.
Hibakusha—even those with economic and social status and with no visible injuries or illness—were routinely rejected as marriage partners because of widespread fears about radiation-related illnesses and possible genetic effects on children. “A lot of rumors circulated back then that hibakusha were carriers of serious diseases,” Wada recalled, “or that if two survivors got married, they would have disabled children.” Consequently, countless survivors hid their survivor status prior to marriage; some also made sure their spouses never found out. One woman kept her past a secret over the course of her entire marriage, destroying government notices related to her hibakusha status as soon as they arrived in the mail. Another was forced to abort her child and leave her marriage when her husband and his family discovered she was a hibakusha.
Wada and Hisako knew each other’s faces, but they had barely spoken before they met at a Chinese restaurant. Neither spoke of their identities as hibakusha. Since 1946, Wada had never spoken to anyone about his atomic bomb experiences, and he did not want to risk doing so now; at age thirty, he wanted to find a wife and marry quickly so that his grandparents could know their great-grandchildren.
Hisako balked at the potential arrangement. She didn’t have anything against Wada, but it was customary for young women to stop working after they married, and Hisako wasn’t ready to quit her new job before she’d even started. Her aunt, however, insisted that she accept Wada and marry him. “Women need to marry someone at some point anyway,” she told Hisako, implying that it was best for a woman to marry when asked. The aunt had cared for Hisako’s family after the bombing, so her words carried particular weight. “Since it was my aunt’s order,” Hisako explained, “I had to do it.”
Wada Koichi, age thirty, on his wedding day in 1957, wearing a traditional male wedding kimono. (Courtesy of Wada Koichi)
Although they might have guessed, it was only after their wedding that Wada and Hisako learned for certain that each was a hibakusha. The third of five children, Hisako had been a third grader at Zenza Elementary School in 1945. Her father was away at war. In one of the conventional bombing attacks on Nagasaki, her mother and older brother had been seriously injured, and the entire family had moved from their Urakami Valley home to her aunt’s house on the outskirts of the city. A week later, the atomic blast destroyed Hisako’s home. She had been at school only a mile from the hypocenter but was protected inside a bomb shelter. Her older sister, however, had been walking toward the city and suffered whole-body burns. For ten days, Hisako and her family lived in a bomb shelter and cared for her sister, who was wrapped in cotton gauze bandages, before leaving Nagasaki to live with relatives in northern Kyushu. When her father came home from the war in September, the family returned to Nagasaki to rebuild, but they were so poor that for a long time their house had no roof.
After Wada and Hisako’s wedding in 1957, Hisako got pregnant immediately—“a honeymoon baby,” she called her first child. By this time, hibakusha were terrified by widespread rumors and media coverage about potential genetic effects and infant malformation caused by parental exposure to radiation. No matter how explicitly the ABCC tried to reassure survivors that their radiation exposure would have no measurable genetic effects on their children, young married couples and their families never stopped worrying. When Hisako went to her first prenatal doctor’s visit, a staff member told her that because she and Wada were hibakusha, it would be better that they didn’t have children. The misinformed doctor warned them that there was some medical probability that their baby would be deformed. “These words,” Wada remembered, “stabbed at my wife’s heart.”
They turned to a different doctor—a physician at Nagasaki University Hospital who conducted research on the medical effects of the atomic bomb. Although he did not deny his colleague’s comments, the second doctor reassured them that even if their children were born with medical problems, they would be able to take care of them and raise them well. Grateful but still worried, Wada and Hisako waited for their baby’s birth and were immensely relieved when their daughter was born without any of the rumored conditions. Two more healthy daughters followed over the next few years.
Wada and Hisako, along with Wada’s aging, authoritarian grandmother, moved into a new house at the base of a hill in a northwest Urakami Valley neighborhood. Wada drove a streetcar for several years, then worked in his company’s administrative office, where, over time, he was promoted to manager, section chief, then department chief. He spent many weekends planning the details of a memorial for his lost colleagues.
But he rarely spoke about the atomic bomb. “When you talk about it, it brings back memories,” he said. “I didn’t talk about it even to my children.”
“I’m sure they knew,” Hisako added, “although we didn’t tell them directly.”
“It’s not just that I didn’t talk about the bombing,” Wada explained. “I did not want to talk about it. I didn’t talk about it because I didn’t want to.”
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