Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

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  By the time of Wada’s wedding, Nagano had already been married for seven years. She had begun thinking about marriage in 1949 after she turned twenty, but every time she brought a man she liked home to meet her mother, her mother rejected him. “She intensely opposed anyone I dated,” Nagano recalled. “Eventually I learned that she would never accept someone I liked.” Under the strain of unrelenting guilt, Nagano thought she should do whatever her mother said, regardless of her own feelings. What her mother wanted was for Nagano to marry a cousin who was also a hibakusha.

  “He was my cousin by adoption, not by blood,” Nagano explained. “My mother told me I should marry him because we felt sorry for him since he had lost his family in the bombing. I really didn’t want to, and I rebelled—I left home and went to a friend’s house in Isahaya and stayed there overnight without telling my mother where I was. There were no cell phones back then, or even any telephones, and my mother went to all my friends’ houses and searched for me all night long.” When Nagano returned home and realized how much her mother had worried, she decided never to do anything like that again.

  Nagano married her cousin in 1950. She was twenty-one. Despite having no romantic feelings toward her husband, she persuaded herself to find a way to like him because she knew they would have children. After their wedding, Nagano’s new husband moved into Nagano and her mother’s tiny residence in Shiroyama-machi, originally built as relief housing. Nagano’s mother now owned the unit after the city transferred ownership of these dwellings to the hibakusha occupying them. Eventually, Nagano and her husband moved to their own single-room, 150-square-foot accommodation on the same street.

  Nagano stopped working after she married. Her first child, a son, was born in 1951, and over the next ten years she gave birth to two daughters as well. “We were fortunate,” she said, “that all three of them were fine.” As rumors persisted about serious health issues for children of hibakusha, however, Nagano took her children for frequent medical checkups and was hypervigilant to every cold, fever, or other illness they experienced. To accommodate their growing family, Nagano and her husband added rooms to the bottom floor of their house and built a second level. They lived there for eighteen years until their son took his college entrance exams.

  For nearly their entire married lives, Nagano and her husband never spoke about what they had suffered. “It was too overwhelming,” she explained. “We didn’t want to talk about it because if we did, we would start to cry.” In 1972, after twenty-two years of marriage, her husband finally broke his silence. At Nagano’s older brother’s isshuki—the ceremony commemorating the first anniversary of his death—her husband told Nagano that on the morning of the bombing, his father had finished his night shift at the Mitsubishi Ohashi weapons factory and returned to their home—across the street from Shiroyama Elementary School and a third of a mile from the hypocenter. He had eaten breakfast and rested with his wife and younger son. That morning, Nagano’s husband was working inside the Mitsubishi torpedo factory where his father had worked the night before—the same factory where Do-oh was at the time of the bombing. Out of twenty-six laborers in his area, he was the only one to survive, possibly because he had crawled under a desk.

  “My husband told me that he found the ashes of his father, mother, and younger brother lined up on the floor of their house where they were sleeping,” Nagano remembered. He never found his sister’s remains because he didn’t know where she was in the city when she died. After he told Nagano his story, the two never spoke about the bombing again. Like countless other hibakusha, they lived a split life: On the outside, they worked, got married, and had children. On the inside, their self-imposed silence helped contain their grief, guilt, and devastating memories of the bombing. Living this divided life allowed them to move on.

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  Taniguchi could not accept the duality of his life as a hibakusha. He was a good-looking, hardworking young man, but beneath whatever clothes he wore, the physical scars from the bombing caused him constant pain, and his anger—toward both Japan and the United States—brewed just beneath the surface of his silence. In the early 1950s, as Taniguchi tried to create a normal life, he found himself at the edge of a nascent activist movement that would give him a way to integrate his atomic bomb experiences into his everyday life.

  He started gently, talking with his friends at work about his memories of the bombing, his three-and-a-half-year hospitalization, and his current medical conditions. Still, Taniguchi always kept his injuries hidden from their sight. Even in the hot summer, he wore long-sleeved shirts to cover the scars on his arms, and a shirt when he went swimming in the sea—not only to protect his damaged skin from the sun, but also to avoid unwanted stares. “I didn’t want people to see my scars,” he remembered. “I didn’t want them to gawk at me with weird expressions on their faces.”

  One day, however, at a company-sponsored swimming outing, a younger coworker urged Taniguchi to take off his shirt—not to worry about what people thought because everyone there already knew about his burns. In an early moment of public activism, Taniguchi decided to remove his shirt and allow his peers and their families to see the raised, reddened scars covering his back and arms, and the long, deep indentations in his misshapen chest. “I felt a little embarrassed, so I covered myself a bit with a towel. I was hoping people would understand why my body was like this. I wanted them to know about the war and the atomic bomb.”

  Taniguchi could not have known how quickly his desire for public awareness would be granted: Within a year, the United States would test the world’s first deliverable hydrogen bomb—an event that would ignite international outrage, give birth to Japan’s first nationwide campaign for the elimination of nuclear weapons, and bring national attention to the haunting realities of high-dose radiation exposure on hibakusha.

  The nuclear test took place just before dawn on March 1, 1954, at the United States’ Pacific Proving Grounds, located at the northern edge of the Marshall Islands, a 750,000-square-mile region in the South Pacific dotted with more than 1,200 tiny islands with a total combined landmass of only 70 square miles. The hydrogen bomb exploded on Bikini Atoll, a narrow, 3-square-mile crescent-shaped series of minute coral islands around a large lagoon. The bomb’s force equaled fifteen million tons of TNT—almost seven hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

  The blast instantly gouged a crater in the island a mile wide and two hundred feet deep. All vegetation on the atoll was destroyed. Within seconds, a fireball nearly 3 miles across rose 8 miles above the ocean, filled with tons of extracted sand, crushed coral, and water. Within ten minutes, the mushroom cloud’s diameter spanned 65 miles. U.S. forces had cleared a 60,000-square-mile danger zone around the test site, and residents of Bikini Atoll had already been evacuated years earlier for a 1946 U.S. nuclear test there. The bomb’s blast, however, was twice as powerful as scientists had anticipated, and along with an unpredicted shift in wind direction, radioactive fallout ultimately spread more than 7,000 square miles outside the danger zone. Two hundred and thirty-nine islanders, including children, elderly adults, and pregnant mothers, were exposed to radiation on four atolls more than eighty miles east of Bikini. Many developed symptoms of radiation illness. Twenty-eight American meteorological staff were also exposed as they observed the test from an island 155 miles east of the blast.

  For Japan, the impact of what nonproliferation advocates call “the worst radiological disaster in the United States’ testing history” began on March 14, when a Japanese fishing vessel called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) pulled into its home port at Yaizu, 90 miles south of Tokyo. Two weeks earlier, on the morning of the hydrogen bomb test, the boat had been trawling for tuna about a hundred miles east of Bikini Atoll, outside the authorized exclusion zone. Most of the twenty-three-man crew were on deck and saw the bomb’s flash, followed by a huge explosion. Afraid of what they couldn�
�t understand, they quickly reeled in their nets to escape the area. Within three hours, a white radioactive powder—what the Japanese later called shi no hai (ashes of death)—began falling from the sky. Within two hours, the white ash covered the boat and the men on board. The deck, they remembered, was covered “thickly enough to show footprints.”

  When the Lucky Dragon arrived at Yaizu after a two-week, 2,500-mile journey, all twenty-three crew members were severely ill with radiation-related symptoms. Two were in such serious condition that they were taken immediately to Tokyo University Hospital, while the other twenty-one were first hospitalized in Yaizu, then transferred to Tokyo. Japan was outraged at the victimization of their citizens by a third U.S. nuclear weapon and infuriated that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) denied Japan’s request for details about the weapon tested there and the nature of radiation released—information Japanese scientists felt was critical for treating the victims. Contradicting years of refusal to provide medical care to survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both the ABCC and the AEC offered to treat the Lucky Dragon victims. Japanese scientists, however, rejected the offer, not wanting the fishermen to become subjects of another postbomb U.S. military study. American officials were allowed only limited examinations of the victims. Over the next months, many of the Lucky Dragon fishermen developed jaundice and other liver disorders, which doctors suspected but could not definitively link to the men’s radiation exposure.

  The Lucky Dragon’s tuna load tested positive for contamination, and although it was destroyed, a radiation panic spread throughout the country. For the first time, Japanese people outside of Nagasaki and Hiroshima feared the human effects of radiation toxicity that had haunted hibakusha for nine years. As weeks passed, other fish coming from the South Pacific—contaminated or not—were deemed too risky to consume and were discarded. Fears intensified when higher-than-normal levels of radiation were detected in ground and rain samples at various locations across Japan, presumed to have been caused by some combination of the Bikini test and five other U.S. hydrogen bomb tests conducted in the Marshall Islands within the next two months. In September, the national scare heightened further when the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator, Kuboyama Aikichi, died from infectious hepatitis believed to have resulted from blood transfusions he received to treat his radiation exposure.

  The remaining Lucky Dragon crew members were released from Tokyo hospitals in 1955. Public alarm faded, and examinations of tuna and fishing boats ceased. By that time, anti-American sentiments and citizen opposition to nuclear weapons and testing had escalated into a full-scale national movement. Polls showed that over 75 percent of Japanese people opposed all nuclear weapons testing “under any circumstances.” The National Diet adopted resolutions for international control of atomic energy and the abolition of nuclear weapons, and the governing bodies of nearly every city and rural community in the country passed local antinuclear resolutions. Government and private science councils were established to further study the human and environmental effects of radiation exposure and explore potential methods for reducing atomic bomb injuries in the future. A group of housewives in Tokyo began a neighborhood signature drive that quickly developed into a national nonpartisan coalition of school and youth groups, medical associations, trade unions, and businesses that held rallies across the country and gathered thirty-two million signatures—approximately one-third of Japan’s population at the time—for a petition against hydrogen bombs.

  Stirred by these impassioned protests and Japan’s new pacifist identity, the city of Hiroshima organized the First World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in 1955 to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the atomic bombings. After an opening-night event that drew 30,000 people to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, approximately 1,900 people—including 54 citizen delegates from other nations—participated in the conference inside Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall. Due to seating limitations, another 1,100 conference participants listened to the speeches through loudspeakers outside the building.

  For the first time since the August 1945 bombings, a national spotlight shone on the conditions of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some hibakusha did not appreciate that it had taken ten years and the irradiation of Japanese fishermen in the South Pacific for their country to turn its attention on them. Others, however—exhausted after dealing with persistent illnesses, discrimination, arduous care of sick family members, and the slow and silent struggle to rebuild their lives—welcomed the opportunity to be seen, at least briefly, and to be included in a national movement to ban nuclear weapons. A small number of hibakusha from both cities used this national stage to tell their personal stories and fervently appeal for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

  Momentum swelled, leading to the Second World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Nagasaki in 1956. “It was a powerful and determined movement,” recalled Hirose Masahito, a high school teacher who served on the Nagasaki conference’s steering committee. “Shop owners donated their money, goods, and services for the conference,” another hibakusha remembered. Women’s groups led the White Rose Campaign, making cloth roses, selling them for a small sum, and donating the proceeds to the conference. Throughout the city, people pinned roses to their shirts and blouses. “Ban the Bomb” signs could be seen at every turn.

  On August 9, 1956, the Nagasaki conference convened in the gymnasium of East Nagasaki Senior High School, the largest venue in the city. Three thousand people participated, including thirty-seven representatives of other nations and international organizations. One of the most celebrated moments came when twenty-seven-year-old Watanabe Chieko, paralyzed in the bombing by a falling steel beam that crushed her spine, was carried to the podium by her mother. Held in her mother’s arms, Watanabe appealed for hibakusha to transcend their suffering and shame to fight for the abolition of atomic and hydrogen bombs. “I called up my anger toward the atomic bomb,” she remembered, “anger which had been bottled up inside me for eleven years. I was filled with joy, and all the distorted thoughts, the emptiness and despair hidden inside me were gone.” Conference participants applauded vigorously, many of them in tears. For the first time, Watanabe reflected, “I discovered a purpose in my life.”

  Survivors and citizen activists from across Japan also gathered during the conference to establish local and national antinuclear and hibakusha support groups, including the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations (Nihon Hidankyo), Japan’s first unified national hibakusha membership organization. In its founding declaration, Nihon Hidankyo proclaimed: “Now, eleven long years after the atomic bombing . . . we who were not killed at that moment are finally rising up. . . . Until now, we have remained silent, hidden our faces, and remained separate from one another. But now, no longer able to keep our silence, we join hands at this conference in order to take action.” Members set visionary goals to support bans on nuclear weapons, advocate for national health care support, and establish vocational training, educational programs, and financial support programs for hibakusha living throughout Japan.

  National press coverage of the conference allowed the Japanese people to finally hear the voices of Nagasaki hibakusha, and international conference participants spread the word abroad about survivors and their conditions. A Japanese antinuclear activist expressed his shock over the many adversities hibakusha had endured for more than ten years without government support. An American pastor who had attended the event told conference organizer Hirose Masahito that he had thought that everyone in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had died from burns and radiation exposure—so he was surprised to find out that hibakusha even existed.

  Revelations like these emboldened small numbers of survivors in the newly born hibakusha movement to speak out and let their stories be heard. Like Watanabe, they felt a new and transcendent purpose for their lives: From now on, they would share their memories as a means to help people affected by the bombs and to fight for the total
elimination of nuclear weapons. Yamaguchi Senji was one of these early activists. Fourteen years old at the time of the bombing, Yamaguchi was digging a ditch outside the Mitsubishi Ohashi weapons factory and sustained extensive burns across the right side of his arms, chest, neck, and face. When the city of Nagano invited hibakusha representatives to speak to local antinuclear activists, Yamaguchi stood at a lectern inside the city library. In front of a standing-room-only crowd, he told his story in public for the first time. “There was dead silence as I spoke,” he remembered. “Everyone listened attentively to my story. . . . Sometimes I heard people sobbing.” Overcome with emotion that people finally understood what he had suffered for so long in silence, Yamaguchi began crying, too—then he spontaneously took off his shirt to fully expose the keloid scars spread across his upper body.

  Taniguchi’s work schedule had prevented him from attending the Nagasaki conference, but buoyed by accounts of young hibakusha speaking out, he, too, decided to venture beyond his friends at work and tell his story to people he didn’t know. His first public speaking engagement was at the invitation of the Japan Telecommunication Workers’ Union, an experience that inspired him to speak again whenever he could. During this period in his life, he continued to suffer intense pain and fatigue. At one particularly desperate moment, when Taniguchi contemplated ending his life, a critical shift in his perspective occurred. He sensed a significance to his survival even as it came with great suffering. “At that moment,” he remembered, “I realized that I must live on behalf of those who died unwillingly.”

  Taniguchi joined a small group of young men, including Yamaguchi and later Yoshida, who had begun gathering informally in the early 1950s to share their experiences. All of them had been children or teenagers at the time of the bombing and had suffered severe injuries, burns, radiation-related illness, and loss of family members. The group provided the support and camaraderie the men needed to speak at a deeply personal level about their medical conditions, ongoing physical pain, discrimination, and jobs. They shared with one another bits of information they heard from their individual doctors about how radiation exposure was affecting their bodies. A similar group of young hibakusha women, including Watanabe, had also been meeting to discuss their postbomb challenges. Together they knit and made zoka (artificial flowers) as a way for their physically disabled members to earn money from home.