Scientific studies have been unable to provide firm estimates of these survivors’ residual radiation absorption because calculations require the evaluation of many complex factors that are difficult to accurately assess based solely on a survivor’s memory—including the person’s age, date of entry, length of time spent near the hypocenter, and the nature of their activities. Recent studies, however, indicate potential “significant exposure” for those in the hypocenter area within a week’s time, findings that scientists are working to replicate and verify. Even without scientific proof of their radiation exposure, activists were able to negotiate agreement from the Japanese government to increase health care coverage for people who entered areas within 1.25 miles of the hypocenter of either city within two weeks of the bombings. The United States maintains its early postwar assessment that induced radioactivity near the hypocenters was minimal and did not cause harm.
The third complicating factor in the government’s ability to address survivors’ health care demands related to hibakusha living overseas. This included both Japanese and Korean, Chinese, and other non-Japanese hibakusha who had returned to their home nations or immigrated to other countries, all of whom had suffered from cancers and illnesses at the same rate as hibakusha in Japan. From the early years of the health care law, Japanese hibakusha living abroad were eligible for benefits, but only if they came back to Japan for treatment. In far greater numbers, thousands of foreign nationals who had survived the bombings and returned home after the war did not become eligible for health care support until 1978—and even then they were required to travel to Japan for treatments covered by the law, an impossible endeavor for all but a few. Hibakusha in East Asia often lived—and died—in impoverished rural areas totally isolated from doctors with any knowledge of the atomic bomb or its radiation effects. Many were discriminated against for their visible injuries, lack of skill in their native languages, or for being perceived as “pro-Japanese” by virtue of their having lived in Japan during the war. Their suffering was often ignored because their compatriots approved of the atomic bombings as events that had led to their liberation from Japanese rule. Some Korean hibakusha returned to Japan illegally to seek medical care or to search for two witnesses to support their eligibility for health care coverage, only to be deported without consideration of their atomic bomb–related conditions. Hibakusha activists in other nations, including the United States, worked for years with advocates in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to address, with incremental success, their atomic bomb–related medical needs.
Finally, the Japanese government had to determine health care eligibility for the tens of thousands of foreign (primarily Korean) hibakusha who had remained in Japan after the war. After years of wartime abuses followed by the atomic bombings, these hibakusha faced widespread anti-Korean sentiment in Japan and were legally barred from Japanese citizenship—even those who had fought for Japan during the war or had been born in Japan after their parents were forcefully relocated there. Like other hibakusha, they experienced employment and marriage discrimination. A 1965 treaty between South Korea and Japan barred Korean hibakusha from pressing for reparations against the Japanese government. Many became destitute due to their high medical costs and the absence of extended families to turn to for support. In the words of Kim Masako, a Korean survivor who was twenty-four years old at the time of the bombing, “It is not good we have two home countries.”
Korean hibakusha organized in 1967 to fight for recognition, medical care, and compensation. After eleven years of petitions and court battles, Japan amended its hibakusha health care law to allow foreign-born survivors living in Japan to apply for the same health care benefits as Japanese survivors. By this time, however, hospital records and other required documentation from the 1940s were impossible to obtain. The new law also required that at least one of their witnesses be Japanese, a further barrier for Korean hibakusha because in 1945 most Koreans had lived and worked separately from the mainstream communities in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Ryong Pak Su, one of an estimated ten thousand to twelve thousand Korean survivors of the Nagasaki bombing, explained, “All my neighbors died of the bomb. How could you bring them? Bring a ghost?”
• • •
Exasperated but undeterred, Taniguchi, Yamaguchi, and a small number of other young Japanese and foreign hibakusha activists continued to file petitions and lawsuits, lead sit-ins, meet with parliament members, and conduct nationwide campaigns to solicit citizen support for comprehensive surveys on hibakusha medical and economic conditions. Even as they struggled with their own medical challenges, they fought for complete health care support for all hibakusha—no matter what their nationality, health status, or distance from the hypocenter. They believed that full health care coverage and monetary compensation would signify the Japanese government’s resounding acknowledgment of the terrifying, invisible, and long-term realities of atomic bombs. They often linked their health care efforts with their fight to eradicate nuclear weapons within their lifetimes. In a speech at a 1980 rally, Yamaguchi declared, “Our demand for the immediate enactment of a law for relief of all Hibakusha is not only a Hibakusha demand, but also the demand of all people in Japan, and of the whole world, for ‘No More Hibakusha!’”
Over time, their activism resulted in multiple expansions of health care coverage to include previously denied hibakusha. Microcephaly was officially recognized as an atomic bomb–related disease, and later, compensation was granted to support microcephalic survivors’ nonmedical living expenses. The distance from the hypocenter was increased for special cases based on physical examinations. New diseases were approved for coverage, and limited support was provided for nursing care, burials, and health maintenance and living allowances for survivors with particularly severe radiation-related illnesses. Still, both within and beyond Japan’s borders, government support came too late for many survivors, including those who died before their cancers or other illnesses were designated as radiation-related conditions, and those who found it impossible to find two people to verify their location at the time of the bombing. Many survivors—in some cases even those with cancer—never applied out of continuing fear that self-identifying as hibakusha would result in discrimination for themselves or their children.
For his part, Taniguchi spent his days off from work helping hibakusha understand the law, assemble the required documentation, and complete their applications for health care handbooks. He did this even though he didn’t need coverage for himself. His now-privatized company, Dendenkousha (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation), provided medical benefits to employees who were injured while working at the time of the bombing. To receive his company benefits, however, Taniguchi had to prove that his injuries had resulted from the bomb, so he returned to Omura National Hospital to try to find his medical records. After a long search with the help of hospital staff, Taniguchi entered a storage area and found a single file containing his records—more than forty pages of notes by his Omura doctors and nurses, all in German (the language used in Japan at the time for medical terminology). Each entry detailed his medical condition, test results, and treatments. Scattered line drawings of his body showed the locations of his burns and the holes in his chest.
Taniguchi’s was the only hibakusha medical record there. Rumors had circulated that other hibakusha records had been burned or relocated somewhere in Japan, but no one could say for sure what had actually happened to them. Taniguchi is convinced that the U.S. government took them either to the ABCC or back to the United States, and that his record was left behind only because he had still been in the hospital at the time. Taniguchi took photographs of his wounds, attached them to a photocopy of his Oˉmura medical record, and submitted them to Dendenkousha. He was approved for benefits, which meant that all of his examinations, surgeries, and treatment for atomic bomb–related injuries and illnesses were paid for by his company until his retirement.
Taniguchi was fortunate
to have coverage, because his medical needs persisted, requiring regular trips to the hospital for blood tests and multiple surgeries. In 1960, doctors extracted an intensely painful skin cancer growth on his back, and for a while his pain diminished. A year later, at the invitation of East Germany, he traveled to Berlin for surgery on his left elbow to increase mobility of his arm. While he was there, Taniguchi spoke publicly about his experiences and showed his audience a collection of postbomb photographs. After three months, he was diagnosed with a chronic blood disorder and surgery was deemed impossible. Taniguchi returned home, his condition unchanged.
A new, much tougher and larger growth appeared on his back in 1965, and Taniguchi began losing strength. “It always felt like I was lying on a soft futon that had a rock in it,” he remembered. “It was so hard that when a surgical knife was put to it, it dulled the blade to the point that it couldn’t cut anymore.” After numerous surgeries, the tumor was finally removed, but Taniguchi was unable to sustain his job delivering telegrams, so he was transferred to an office job within the company. Every summer, he felt a constant dull pain in his back, “a terrible heaviness,” he said. Every winter he was perpetually cold because his body could not retain warmth. He remained extremely thin because he could eat only small amounts of food; anything more triggered a painful whole-body sensation—the feeling that the thin, tight skin covering his wounds was going to split open.
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When Do-oh left Nagasaki in 1956, she had willed herself a new life, far removed from her home, her family, and her city’s nuclear devastation. In order to succeed, the twenty-six-year-old chose to conceal her hibakusha status. She was again in hiding, but this time, Do-oh drew on her sense of purpose to construct a new and powerful identity that allowed her to overcome, at least in part, the harsh memories of her adolescence.
After a thirty-six-hour train trip, Do-oh had arrived in Tokyo and proceeded to a tiny, two-hundred-square-foot apartment with no kitchen that her company, Utena, had located for her. She purchased a rice cooker, a bowl, and chopsticks—and to store her food, she carried home two apple crates from a neighborhood vendor. Her apartment was close enough to Utena’s offices that she could walk to work—and on her first day, Do-oh had passed through the company’s large main gate, straightened her posture, and directed herself to her assigned division of six hundred low-level workers. She felt she had to work twice as hard as others to overcome her handicap. “Then I could be like other people,” she thought. “I worked like crazy. . . . I asked them to give me all the work no one else wanted to do.”
At home, Do-oh made her own clothing—sophisticated and chic. She wrote letters to her family, and once a year, she made the long trip home to see them. Her father often teased her, saying that he’d always wished she had been a boy—meaning, perhaps, that she had a strong personality and he would have liked to banter with her about things he wouldn’t otherwise have talked about with women. When he died in 1961, Do-oh paused beside his coffin. “I felt that life is very fragile,” she recalled. “People are born alone and die alone.”
She returned to Tokyo and continued to take on hard tasks, living out an internal crusade to demonstrate what she could achieve. Her efforts were rewarded with promotions. When she was transferred into the public relations department, Do-oh’s campaign region included nearly all of the main island of Honshu north of Tokyo, requiring that she travel by train and bus to villages so remote that she was surprised any cosmetics store would even exist there.
Every August, national media coverage of atomic bomb commemorations that often focused on hibakusha disabilities and radiation-related diseases reinforced Do-oh’s vow of secrecy about her past. She always wore long sleeves in public to hide her scarred arms. To avoid any questions about her health, she tried never to miss work, even when she was ill—a choice that resulted in her collapsing from exhaustion and high fever nearly every New Year holiday. Sometimes she wanted to give up. “When I wavered in my determination to succeed, or when I had a hard time,” she remembered, “I reproached myself for this weakness. . . . I could not afford to spoil myself. These were battles against myself. I felt no regret afterwards because they helped me cultivate courage.”
Do-oh was in her midthirties—well past a Japanese woman’s typical marriageable age—when she was invited in 1965 to meet a potential husband, a man who worked for a stock market company. Until then, she had turned away from the idea of marriage, but at that moment, she was feeling tired and uneasy about her future. She agreed to the meeting.
At first glance, Do-oh liked how the man looked. He made a strong initial impression. He asked her where she was from.
“Nagasaki,” she answered, knowing what his next question would be.
“Did you experience the bomb?”
Do-oh paused. She did not want to marry someone by lying. “Yes,” she answered, “hibaku shimashita [I experienced the bomb].”
A tension rose between them, and Do-oh sensed that this man did not want to marry a hibakusha. To preempt what she anticipated as his rejection, Do-oh turned down further discussions with him and quietly resolved never to marry. As she grew older, she reflected on the unconscious influences that guided her to this significant decision: She had feared having a deformed child, she explained—and at a very personal level, her haunting memories, sense of interior contamination, and pressing guilt for stepping over people’s bodies in the Mitsubishi factory had diminished her sense of confidence with people outside of work.
Letting go of the possibility of marriage and children, Do-oh adjusted to what she called her “good life.” She worked long hours—and in a workplace filled with beautiful women, she established a strong personal image of elegance and style. She searched for her own life mission that could fill the void of never becoming a mother and found renewed purpose in striving to fulfill her maximum potential. “If I was a flower that couldn’t bloom,” she thought, “then at least I wanted to bloom in my mind. At least I wanted to have a brilliant mind.”
Do-oh Mineko, age sixty-four, ca. 1994. (Courtesy of Okada Ikuyo)
After seventeen years at Utena, in 1973, forty-three-year-old Do-oh became the first woman executive in the company’s sixty-year history—a remarkable feat by any account, but particularly in a culture of male dominance in which only an estimated 8 percent of the entire female workforce in Japan held professional or managerial positions. Within the huge Japanese cosmetics industry, there were only three women executives: one at Shiseido, one at Kanebo, and Do-oh at Utena. The story of her promotion appeared in national newspapers and magazines, and she was interviewed for television newscasts. In her new position directing a staff of 350 and supervising the training of new employees, Do-oh was able to purchase a small house in an area beyond central Tokyo, near a station that allowed her to take a limited express train to and from work each day. “It was my small castle,” she remembered, “proof of my life and the results of my efforts. . . . I was thankful for this reward.”
In private, Do-oh composed haiku and tanka, developing a practice of reflection that allowed her to dwell on the world around her with a sense of wonder. One evening, on her way home from a business meeting in Hokkaido, she peered out the window of the plane. The sky was dull and overcast—“a field of black clouds,” Do-oh called it. When she looked up, however, the sky above her was clear and blue, with scattered white clouds tinged with red and orange as they reflected the setting sun. “It was so beautiful that I cried,” she remembered. “That glorious world moved me.” Although she did not believe in God, she imagined that perhaps there did exist “a refuge or heaven beyond my view.” In that moment, Do-oh relaxed, temporarily, from the constant strain of proving herself to the world.
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By the early 1960s, many of the Urakami Valley’s obvious signs of atomic destruction had faded. The mountains to the east and west that were stripped of vegetation and houses nearly twenty ye
ars earlier were green and lush, with new residences scattered all around. Students filled the restored classrooms at Shiroyama and Yamazato elementary schools, and new, wider roads accommodated increased automobile traffic. Hypocenter Park was enlarged and lined with Japanese cedars, and in one corner stood the last remaining sections of the crushed brick wall and original bell tower of Urakami Church. Against the protests of Catholic and other hibakusha organizations that sought to preserve the church ruins as a symbol of the destroyed city, Nagasaki officials had ordered the wreckage to be torn down. In its place northeast of the hypocenter stood a new reinforced concrete church with two ninety-five-foot-high bell towers—sixteen feet higher than the former structure—paid for by donations from Japanese and U.S. Catholic groups. In 1962, the church was consecrated as a cathedral and became the seat of the bishop for the Archdiocese of Nagasaki—although due to a shortage of funds, the cathedral’s stained-glass windows were not yet installed, and the walls and ceilings remained unfinished.
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