Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

  The two groups merged in 1956 to become the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Youth Association. As nonnuclear nations across the globe raced to produce their first nuclear weapons, and as the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain tested increasingly more powerful weapons aboveground, in the oceans, and hundreds of miles above the earth, this small group of survivors forged deep friendships and determined that they had no choice but to stand up individually and collectively to inform all who would listen about the horrendous realities of nuclear weapons. Taniguchi’s commitment to this group and the larger antinuclear movement grew. “Unless we bomb victims ourselves tell what really happened,” he thought, “how can others know the suffering engendered by war and the horrors of the atomic bomb? It is our responsibility to gather our courage and bear witness to what we experienced.”

  Taniguchi Sumiteru and Yoshida Katsuji at a meeting with Hiroshima activists, ca. 1961. (Courtesy of Yoshida Naoji)

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  As his political awareness intensified, Taniguchi turned twenty-six and began thinking about marriage. His grandmother, too, now ill and confined to bed, was anxious to see him married and well cared for before she died. For Taniguchi, however, the same hibakusha identity that empowered him as an activist minimized his chances for marriage, especially because of his extensive injuries and scars.

  Taniguchi’s grandfather prepared a list of prospects. One by one, his family and marriage brokers told the truth about his hibakusha status and injuries to prospective wives and their families. Taniguchi was rejected again and again. Some women were kind in their refusals; others were harsh. “How can you imagine that I would marry someone with your injuries?” they said. “You can’t even look forward to a long life!” Taniguchi was disheartened. Unbeknownst to him, his family decided to minimize his conditions in their next discussion with a potential wife.

  Taniguchi’s aunt (surname Osa), had a friend with an unmarried daughter named Eiko, whom Osa was convinced would be a fine and caring wife for her nephew. In her midtwenties, Eiko lived in the small fishing village of Togitsu, north of Nagasaki. When she was a child, her father had taken their family to live in Japanese-occupied Korea. Her two older brothers were killed in action in the Pacific War, and as a teenager Eiko had contributed to Japan’s war efforts by repairing soldiers’ uniforms. After the war, she and her family returned to Togitsu and were stunned to see the extent of Nagasaki’s destruction. Eiko finished school and helped farm her family’s quarter-acre plot, which provided them food and a small income.

  Osa paid a visit to Eiko’s farm, where she promoted Taniguchi’s strengths. She told Eiko and her mother that the scars on Taniguchi’s arms and legs were barely visible and that he had undergone restorative surgery on his face to repair scar tissue. She did not mention that his facial scars had been caused by long-term bedsores, that his arm was permanently injured, or that his back was a large mass of scar tissue and his chest was covered with deep indentations. To follow up on her visit, Osa took Taniguchi to the small restaurant where Eiko worked part-time as a cook. They first observed Eiko in the kitchen without making their presence known, then Osa called Eiko to their table to meet her nephew. To Eiko, the fully dressed Taniguchi looked no different from any other man. In time, she declined the proposal without giving a reason. Osa was persistent, however, and finally persuaded Eiko to change her mind.

  Taniguchi and Eiko were married on March 19, 1956, at his grandparents’ house, where they met each other’s families for the first time; Taniguchi’s father, older brother, and sister had traveled from Osaka for the occasion. After the ceremony, Taniguchi and Eiko drove together to City Hall to register their marriage, then returned to the house where Taniguchi’s friends joined them for a celebration. From her bedside that night, Taniguchi’s grandmother thanked Eiko for marrying her grandson and taking good care of him. Her words piqued Eiko’s curiosity because they echoed similar statements of concern and gratitude she had heard from Taniguchi’s family and friends throughout the day.

  Taniguchi had suspected that Eiko had not been told about the burns on his back, and his anxiety grew as the time she would learn the truth drew closer. The couple spent their first night at his grandmother’s house, where they slept in separate beds. The next day, however, they traveled by bus to a rural mountain inn in Unzen, about thirty-five miles east of Nagasaki, for a short honeymoon. That evening in the Japanese ofuro (bath), Taniguchi and Eiko sat on stools opposite each other to wash their bodies before entering the deep tub to soak. Taniguchi quietly asked Eiko to wash his back. Then he turned around. “She had thought that I was like other people,” he said. From behind him, Eiko began to weep, and she didn’t stop crying through most of the night and the following day. Taniguchi was afraid that she would leave him.

  On the morning of the third day, the two departed for home. Taniguchi’s family was waiting anxiously, doubting that he and Eiko would return as a couple. To everyone’s amazement, however, Eiko stayed with her new husband, putting aside her initial anger at his aunt for holding back the truth of his injuries. She later told Taniguchi that she had realized that if she left, he would have no one else to take care of him.

  His grandmother died less than two weeks later. Taniguchi and his grandfather wheeled her tiny body on a cart to the city crematorium, and later the family carried her urn to a Buddhist temple in Nagayo, just north over the mountains from Nagasaki, to store her ashes at their family’s gravesite. Taniguchi and Eiko lived with his grandfather in the house in which Taniguchi was raised. The damaged tissue across his back remained a source of constant pain.

  Within three years, he and Eiko became parents to a son and a daughter. Taniguchi continued to tell his story in public, but he never spoke with his children about the bombing and how he survived. As was typical in Japanese family life, though, he often bathed with his young children, so at an early age they, like their mother, became accustomed to his patchy, scar-covered back and arms, and the deep hollows in his chest.

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  Potential marriage partners were right to worry about survivors’ long-term health conditions. Even ten years after the bombings, hibakusha were experiencing excessive occurrences of numerous medical conditions, including blood, cardiovascular, liver, and endocrinological disorders; low blood cell counts; severe anemia; thyroid disorders; internal organ damage; cataracts; and premature aging. Many survivors suffered multiple illnesses at the same time. Countless others experienced a generalized, unexplainable malaise—later nicknamed bura-bura (aimless) disease—with symptoms including overall poor health, constant fatigue, and, according to survivors’ physicians, “insufficient mental energy to carry on their work.”

  Cancer rates rose again. Childhood leukemia rates had peaked between 1950 and 1953, but since then, adult leukemia cases had increased beyond normal levels, a situation that would not change for decades. By 1955, other cancers had also begun to occur at rates far higher than for non-hibakusha. Thyroid cancer incidences rose in the 1960s, and within the next five years, stomach and lung cancer rates escalated. Incidences of liver, colon, bladder, ovary, and skin cancers, among others, also increased. Women exposed within three-quarters of a mile from the hypocenter were 3.3 times more likely to develop breast cancer than the general population; those who had been exposed as children were at highest risk. Without a reliable means to assess their own risk, survivors remained constantly watchful of every physical symptom they developed, dreading the insidious effects that the bomb’s invisible and omnipresent radiation might inflict on their bodies.

  Riding the swell of antinuclear protests and world conferences, hibakusha activists turned to this critical issue of the atomic bombings’ unique and ongoing medical effects. Most of their conditions were not covered by Japan’s national health insurance plan. Further, a clause in the San Francisco Peace Treaty barred Japan from suing the United States for damages. Taniguchi, Yamaguchi, and others began a long and
contentious fight for domestic health care laws to provide financial support for hibakusha medical expenses.

  They had no shortage of data to support their petitions. Tens of thousands had died from their injuries and radiation exposure after the official fatality count for the end of 1945. Thousands more remained ill. In the late 1950s and 1960s, physicians and scientists at the rebuilt Nagasaki University School of Medicine and other local and national institutions had continued comprehensive studies of many hibakusha medical conditions. The city of Nagasaki established a municipal tumor registry to store thousands of radiation-related specimens from surviving and deceased hibakusha for ongoing research. Between 1959 and 1967, Dr. Shirabe alone authored or coauthored six studies on the characteristics and treatment of thermal burn scars, thyroid and breast tumors, thyroid cancers, and keloid scars. The ABCC in both cities amassed immense quantities of hibakusha medical data from its population-based studies. Combined, the Japanese and ABCC studies clearly demonstrated a correlation between survivors’ estimated radiation dosages and their risk for various cancers—conclusions that would be confirmed by decades of continued studies. Verifying what survivors already knew, the data provided evidence of the overwhelming need for ongoing, specialized hibakusha medical care.

  At the local level, the city of Nagasaki coordinated with the Japanese Red Cross Society to construct the 81-bed Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Hospital, which began operations in 1958 with specialized departments including internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, gynecology, and ophthalmology. In its first seven years of operation, the hospital served 2,646 inpatient and 41,858 outpatient survivors; by 1977, it had expanded to 360 beds. Other facilities, too, opened to provide hibakusha medical support as well as job training, housing, and senior care.

  Still, medical facilities and social service organizations had not yet caught up with the continuing health risks of whole-body radiation exposure—and even if they had, most hibakusha could not have afforded the care they required. To address these concerns, as early as 1952, groups of Nagasaki citizens had established hibakusha support groups and initiated widespread fund-raising campaigns to provide physical checkups and treatment at no cost or for a prorated fee for survivors experiencing financial hardship. The mayors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima also sent a petition to the National Diet appealing for medical care for survivors. In response, the Japanese government allocated modest funds from its 1954–1956 budgets to various medical institutions to cover hibakusha surveys, medical research, and publication of study outcomes.

  In 1956, Nagasaki’s small group of activists, including Taniguchi and Yamaguchi, established the city’s largest peer-run hibakusha organization, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council (Hisaikyo). In addition to advocating for the elimination of nuclear weapons, Hisaikyo members fought for recognition of hibakusha medical conditions, national aid to cover their health care costs, and services to support survivors’ self-reliance. A similar organization was founded in Hiroshima. Survivor activists in both cities went door-to-door to collect donations for hibakusha health care relief and traveled to Tokyo to meet with Diet members and the prime minister to tell their stories and impress on them the need for a universal hibakusha health care law. “At last, an organization to voice our demands had been created,” Yamaguchi remembered. “We proposed that since the Japanese government started the war, it should take responsibility for the victims of the bombings. That’s what we wanted.”

  Their first victory came within a year. In 1957, the Japanese government passed the Atomic Bomb Victims Medical Care Law, providing funding for semiannual medical examinations for officially designated hibakusha—defined as anyone who had been within city limits at the time of the bombings, those in areas where black rain fell, children affected by in utero radiation exposure, and rescue workers and others who came into the city within the first two weeks. The law also provided treatment for a few sanctioned radiation-related illnesses such as leukemia.

  But the government’s stringent requirements for official hibakusha designation were discouraging to many hibakusha. In addition to a written application, survivors were required to submit either a certified statement by a public official or a photograph proving their specific location at the time of the bombing—both of which were immensely difficult to obtain. Alternatively, but equally challenging, applicants could submit written certification from two different people “excluding blood relatives to the third degree” swearing to their location at the time of the bomb. If no other proof was available, survivors were allowed, under oath, to submit written statements of their locations at the time of the bombing—but they still needed to find someone “who actually met the applicant somewhere in the city, or saw him or her at a relief station inside or outside the city, or fled with him or her to a safer place immediately after the bombing” and was willing to testify in writing to these facts. Despite these daunting requirements, by the end of the first year, 200,984 Nagasaki and Hiroshima hibakusha were issued a passport-size techo, a booklet that identified them as eligible for benefits. “One little handbook,” Yamaguchi remembered. “But how much suffering we had had to go through before we could get it. . . . I gripped that A-Bomb Victims Health Book firmly in my hand.”

  For Taniguchi and others, however, Japan’s early hibakusha health care law was profoundly inadequate, leaving thousands without support. Even after completing the problematic application process, hibakusha had to request consideration for claims relating to a condition on the government’s list of sanctioned diseases. Their personal accounts and backup documentation—including medical records and estimated radiation doses (if available)—were reviewed by a government panel of experts who applied a strict formula to determine the “probability of causation” that radiation was the likely cause of their conditions. Few were approved. Activists contended that many more diseases than authorized by the medical care law could be linked to radiation exposure, including psychological conditions and an overall weakening of the body from damage to the blood, bone marrow, or organ tissues that caused secondary diseases and disorders. Delayed recuperation from disease or illness also resulted in increased medical costs and loss of wages.

  Government officials resisted activists’ efforts to expand benefits, fearing potentially huge expenditures to cover hibakusha medical care and potential implications of Japan’s war responsibility. Hibakusha activists also believed that Japan evaded increasing survivors’ benefits in order to avoid alienating the United States as a key economic and military ally. All Japanese citizens should endure the sacrifices of the war equally, officials argued, and the provision of compensation to hibakusha for conditions other than those directly proved to be radiation-related would require similar compensation to victims of incendiary bombings across the nation. These assertions contradicted the government’s own 1965 survey of techo holders, which statistically confirmed higher occurrence rates for hibakusha medical conditions and disabilities compared with victims of traditional bombings. Families with a member suffering an atomic bomb–related physical disability incurred medical costs 3.5 times higher than the national average.

  Four key issues complicated the government’s deliberations to increase hibakusha health care benefits. The first was the need to determine accurate radiation doses for survivors in order to define parameters for eligibility and show that any current or future health conditions were the likely result of radiation exposure. Technologies to accurately measure radiation doses in the human body, however, did not exist; instead, U.S. and Japanese scientists developed tentative dosimetry systems to estimate what an individual survivor’s radiation dose might have been. For the first system, introduced in 1957, scientists used complex calculations from the ABCC—in consultation with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and data from the Nevada atomic bomb test site—to analyze survivors’ locations and distances from the hypocenter at the time of the blast, their positions relative to neighboring structures, and the direction th
ey were facing. For those who had been indoors at the time of the bombings, scientists evaluated the size and location of the houses or buildings they had been in, their orientation to the hypocenter, and the individual’s distance from any windows. Based on further studies, an updated measurement tool was introduced in 1965.

  These dosimetry systems were far from perfect in determining individual hibakusha radiation doses. Rather than being able to rely on controlled experiments, scientists had to use information provided by survivors’ memories twelve years after experiencing an extreme traumatic event. Dosage assessments for survivors who had been in locations outside the scope of the ABCC’s various studies could not be determined. Even with the best estimates available, scientists could not assess how each organ in each individual survivor may have been affected differently, the degree to which high levels of radiation attenuated over time within the body, or when or what kind of long-term effects would appear for any single individual. “Consequently,” Taniguchi explained, “there are no complete conclusions about the side effects from the atomic bomb. No matter what anyone says, I don’t know if sometime in the future my body will develop symptoms linked to my exposure to radiation.”

  Another challenge to the government’s determination of eligibility for benefits related to residual radiation exposure—a possibility for Nagasaki residents who had been in Nishiyama-machi, where black rain fell, or who had entered the hypocenter area in the hours and days after the bombing to carry corpses, assist with medical relief, or search for family members. Studies in Nishiyama-machi, for example, showed residents’ leukocyte levels were higher than normal, and at least two cases of leukemia were documented by 1970. No further adverse medical effects appeared after the mid-1970s, but some researchers remain cautious, believing that such effects could still surface at a future time. Innumerable adults and children who had come into the city after the bombing had reported immediate symptoms, including high fevers, diarrhea, and hair loss, similar to hibakusha who had been in the city at the time of the blasts—and countless experienced various medical conditions in the months and years that followed—including tumors, liver disorders, miscarriages, various cancers, and other illnesses with no identifiable causes. Many died at early ages from conditions their families attributed to radiation exposure.