Unlike those of his city, Yoshida’s visible atomic bomb injuries did not fade with time. He had undergone multiple surgeries on his mouth intended to increase his ability to eat, but he still could not open it wide enough for anything but tiny pieces of food. He had held buckets of sand for thirteen years to straighten his curled fingers, but his hands still cramped frequently and he couldn’t control his fingers curling back into fists. The flesh on the tops of his hands bulged and cracked each winter, causing extreme pain. His facial disfigurement elicited constant stares.
After years of anguish and constant reminders of his hibakusha identity, in the early 1960s, Yoshida made a choice to be happy. He realized that no matter how much he worried and fretted, he could never erase the experience of nuclear war or get back the face and body he used to have. “I resolved to make the best of the situation,” he explained. Turning away from the deep sense of gloom that had pervaded his thoughts since the bombing, he began identifying positive aspects to his life, starting with the many people who had helped him over the years even as they, too, had suffered.
Every morning, Yoshida applied medical ointment to the transplanted skin on his face and headed to work at the wholesale food company. Over time, he began stepping out of the safety of the warehouse and visiting small shops to take their orders. He played on his company’s early morning baseball team and gained a reputation as a fast runner and a strong hitter; at one point—even with the limitations of his swing because of his rib injuries—Yoshida had the highest batting average on the team. At his company’s family sports days, he ran three-legged races with his coworkers. In early acts of public activism, he served as secretary-general of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Youth Association and was one of thirty-seven hibakusha who contributed to its testimony collection, Mou, iya da! [We’ve Had Enough!]. People thought of him as very akarui (bright).
Yoshida Katsuji, age thirty-one, ca. early 1960s. (Courtesy of Yoshida Naoji)
Yoshida gradually became comfortable talking with everyone around him, and he was known for his congeniality and lifelong friendships. He was stubborn, judgmental, and bossy—he hated arrogance, unions, and hibakusha who talked about their political views—and his vocal criticism of others often challenged or embarrassed his family and friends. But at parties, he drank beer and sake and entertained people with bad puns and imitations of famous singers. Photographs show a dapper young man looking straight into the camera—very cool—and in a radical change from earlier years when girls had cried at the sight of him, Yoshida became extremely popular among many young women, none of whom seemed at all concerned by his scarred face and black ear patch.
Even with his great popularity, Yoshida’s disfigurement impeded his chances to marry. When he was thirty, his mother made a call on his behalf to a distant village outside of Nagasaki to discuss his possible marriage to her sister-in-law’s daughter, Sachiko. Yoshida was delighted, especially because Sachiko had already seen a photo of him, so he knew that she wouldn’t be shocked when they met. They went on one date—to a movie—but Yoshida had already made up his mind: “I asked her if she wanted to marry me and she said she would. I was pretty lucky!”
Yoshida Katsuji, with Sachiko, wedding photo, 1962. (Courtesy of Yoshida Naoji)
They married in 1962. In their early years together, they lived with Yoshida’s mother, who often criticized Sachiko, causing strain in their marriage because Yoshida often took his mother’s side—perhaps out of filial loyalty, and also because he felt he owed his mother his life.
In the months and years that followed, Yoshida and Sachiko spoke only once about his experiences on the day of the bombing. Many years later, she told him that though they had been sleeping in the same bed every night, in those early days of their marriage she hadn’t been able to look at his face because of his injuries. “I cried,” Yoshida remembered. “I had a face that my own wife couldn’t look at.” Eventually, though, he learned to shrug it off. “No matter what I do, even if I cry or scream, my face won’t get better,” he said. “And compared to back then, I think I became a really good-looking guy! I think whoever tries to laugh at himself first will win the game. Yes. That’s why I’m always smiling.”
When his two sons, Naoji and Tomoji, were young, Yoshida spent as much time as he could with them, playing catch, going swimming, and taking them everywhere he went on his days off. Contrary to the choices of many hibakusha parents, he told his sons about his atomic bomb experiences as soon as he thought they were old enough to understand. Over and over, he taught them not to hide from the truth if anyone asked what had happened to him.
But the boys didn’t oblige. Every time they brought friends home, one child or another would look at Yoshida and blurt out, “Your father has a black face!”—and Naoji and Tomoji would fall silent.
“My sons didn’t say anything,” Yoshida said. “So I would explain to the children what had happened to me. I showed them a photograph of myself from elementary school, before I was injured, to help them understand.”
One day at Tomoji’s school, everything changed. During a break in the all-school sports day, the children in Tomoji’s class were sitting with their parents in a circle on the ground eating lunch together, when some of the children began staring at Yoshida. One boy called out to Tomoji, “Tomo-chan! Your father has an awful face, huh!”
Oh, my God! Yoshida thought. It would have been better if I hadn’t come!
But this time, Tomoji spoke up for his father. “My daddy was hurt by the atomic bomb,” he told his friend. “It’s nothing scary!”
“I felt so grateful to my son,” Yoshida recalled, recounting every detail of that day and every word his son uttered on his behalf.
“I was saved,” he said. “I was saved by my son’s words.”
CHAPTER 8
AGAINST FORGETTING
Forty-one-year-old Taniguchi was glancing through the pages of a summer 1970 Asahi Graph when suddenly he stopped and fixated on a two-page color photograph of himself from 1946. This was the magazine’s special edition commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the atomic bombings, and there he was, lying facedown on a bed inside Omura National Hospital, his back and arms raw and infected, his shorn head resting against crumpled bedsheets, and the lower half of his face darkened in shadow. He leaned in closer to read the tiny print of the photo’s caption. It described where the boy in the photo had been at the time of the bombing and informed readers that despite the severity of his injuries, he had not only survived but was also now married with two children. Visceral anguish coursed through Taniguchi’s body. For months, he could not shake the impact of seeing that amplified photo or the memories it brought back of unrelenting pain every moment of every day for more than three years.
Remarkably, this and other color photos featured in Asahi Graph’s 1970 special edition were the first color photographs of postbomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki ever seen in Japan. Asahi Graph had gained access to them as the result of one of several rigorous new campaigns by a small number of hibakusha activists to reclaim postbomb film footage, photographs, autopsy specimens, and medical records still held in the United States. Over the next two decades, as the Showa era came to a close and the twentieth century neared its end, the number of Nagasaki hibakusha who began writing their stories and speaking about their experiences surged. At the same time, a new battle erupted in the United States over how the atomic bombings would be remembered and how—or if—the experiences of hibakusha would become part of the United States’ historical narrative. It was during this time that Wada, Yoshida, Do-oh, and Nagano would find their public voices and begin speaking out.
____
In their first act of reclaiming their histories, hibakusha activists petitioned the United States for the return of black-and-white 35 mm film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. These films—nineteen reels shot and edited by Japanese filmmakers—had be
en shipped to the United States and warehoused at military facilities for more than twenty years. After numerous Japanese appeals to the United Nations, the National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. ambassador to Japan, in 1967, the United States finally sent copies of the footage back to Japan.
The earliest moving images of the aftermath of the atomic bombings had at last come home. Ten of the nineteen reels of edited film (approximately eighty-five minutes in total) contained grainy but powerful footage of Nagasaki in late 1945 and early 1946, including twisted steel girders of collapsed factories, bent smokestacks, the ruins of Urakami Church, and demolished bridges, schools, and homes. Human death, injury, and radiation-related illness were only hinted at in images of human skulls and bones in the ruins, adults and young children lying on mats inside Shinkozen Elementary School being treated for burns across their bodies and faces, a woman with the patterns of her kimono fabric burned into the skin on her shoulders and back.
Much of the reclaimed footage aired on Japanese television in 1968, but prior to the broadcast, the Japanese government removed all evidence of human suffering. Officials claimed to have made this choice out of respect for the survivors and their families, but outraged activists believed the cuts were made to minimize the potential negative impact on Japan’s economic and military relationship with the United States. In either case, this erasure of graphic images triggered memories of postwar censorship and sparked demands for the film to be rebroadcast in its entirety. The government refused, even after the twelve surviving hibakusha whose images appeared in the film gave written permission for their images to be aired.
Ironically, black-and-white footage showing human suffering was seen in the United States before it finally aired in Japan. Erik Barnouw, a film professor at Columbia University, had heard about the controversy from a Japanese colleague and decided to obtain a copy of the original silent footage from the National Archives. He was so moved by what he saw and distressed at the secrecy and censorship surrounding the film that he produced a sixteen-minute English-language documentary titled Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945. The film premiered in early 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, followed by a national broadcast on public television in August and airings in Canada and Europe. Later that year, Japanese public television bought the rights and aired the film in Japan, eliciting a huge public response—though Watanabe Chieko noted that “without the sounds of screaming voices,” the terror of the bombing was greatly diminished.
As far as the Japanese knew, all U.S.-held postbomb footage was now back in Japan, including the short clips of color footage from which Asahi Graph created the still photographs of Taniguchi and others for its twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Eight years later, however, Taniguchi’s photo and a series of serendipitous events led to the discovery of an additional ninety thousand feet of USSBS color footage of postbomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A group of Japanese antinuclear activists led by Iwakura Tsutomu had spent years amassing thousands of photographs of the postbomb cities from individuals and collections across Japan, and in 1978, they selected several hundred for publication in Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction. The first color photo to appear in the book was an image of Taniguchi’s burned back, again enlarged and spread across two pages. Later that year, Iwakura and his group mounted a selection of the book’s photos, including Taniguchi’s, and took them to New York City for an outdoor exhibit several blocks from the United Nations headquarters. American passersby frequently admonished the Japanese team to “remember Pearl Harbor.” Former lieutenant Herbert Sussan, who had filmed Taniguchi in 1945 as part of the USSBS team, saw the exhibit. Astounded to set eyes on the photograph of young Taniguchi at Omura National Hospital, Sussan quickly turned to Iwakura—and as he told the story of his connection to the photo, Sussan unwittingly revealed the existence of the full USSBS color footage.
The original film was now declassified and stored at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, and Iwakura’s team was able to obtain permission to purchase a copy. Due to the film’s length, however, the cost was exorbitant, so they returned to Japan and launched a nationwide fund-raising campaign. After an estimated three hundred thousand individual Japanese donors contributed small amounts totaling over $100,000, the team was able to purchase the film. In 1981, thirty-six years after the bombings, eighty-one reels of postwar color footage taken by American USSBS filmmakers were shipped back to Japan. At least eighteen reels included color footage of postbomb Nagasaki, far more intense and evocative than their black-and-white counterparts.
• • •
Another emotional controversy for hibakusha activists was the United States’ postwar seizure and control of hibakusha autopsy specimens. It was commonly known by Japanese scientists that both in the fall of 1945 and for more than twenty years after 1948, U.S. researchers and ABCC scientists had surgically removed the body parts of deceased adults, children, infants, and miscarried fetuses. The specimens had been stored in five-gallon jars of formaldehyde solution or cut into smaller segments for preservation in blocks of paraffin wax. These, along with postmortem records, photographs, and diseased tissue slides, had been shipped to the United States, where they were cataloged and warehoused in an atomic bomb–proof archive outside Washington, D.C., for sole use by the U.S. military.
Impassioned negotiations for their return took place in two parts: Starting in the early 1960s, activists campaigned for the return of ABCC specimens that had been collected and shipped to the United States after 1948. The ABCC quickly ordered the repatriation of these materials to quell negative public relations generated by the controversy and also to alleviate the agency’s ongoing budget pressures by eliminating the need to store the materials in the United States. By 1969, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology had dispatched fifty-six shipments containing a total of twenty-two thousand specimens, including whole or partial brains, hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, eyes, and other organs. In Nagasaki, the specimens were stored at Nagasaki University School of Medicine.
Claiming they were still classified materials, the United States refused to return the other collection of body parts and specimens, amassed in the fall of 1945 by U.S. and Japanese teams studying the effects of the atomic bombings. These specimens became a bargaining tool in an early 1970s negotiation between Japan and the United States that provided for their repatriation in exchange for Japan taking over majority leadership of and greater financial responsibility for the ABCC. The final agreement, overseen by Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei and U.S. president Richard Nixon, allowed both nations to achieve their goals: For the United States, the ABCC became a new private, nonprofit foundation under Japanese law, renamed the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF). Equally funded by both countries, the RERF carried forward all studies initiated by the ABCC. In turn, the Japanese won the right to elect a Japanese physician as the first chairman of the RERF’s new binational board, and Japanese scientists would now share in the design and implementation of the agency’s research. Twenty-eight years after the bombing, Japan had gained significant control of the medical research conducted on survivors’ bodies, allowing the RERF the opportunity to shed much of its negative reputation among survivors. Once the agreement was finalized in 1973, all remaining hibakusha body parts held in the United States were sent back to Japan. Combined with the earlier shipments, a total of more than forty-five thousand pathology specimens, slides, medical reports, and related photographs were repatriated to the cities where the men, women, and children from whom they were seized had died. For hibakusha, this meant that the body parts and records of their deceased family members were finally where they belonged.
• • •
In 1970—the same year Taniguchi’s photo appeared in Asahi Graph—forty-one-year-old Uchida Tsukasa walked through Hypocenter Park, now hidden from the main thoroughfare by a row of trees. A short distance away was the site of
his childhood home, where Uchida’s father and three siblings had been incinerated in the nuclear blast. Uchida was sixteen then; after the war, he and his mother had lived in the ashes and rubble of their former home, where he had collected shards of burned roof tiles and kept them in a box that he still had twenty-five years later.
Uchida stood in front of the hypocenter memorial, haunted by the invisibility of his former life. The hard-fought repatriation of postbomb film footage, color photographs, and hibakusha body parts provided critical documentation of the bomb’s physical destruction and internal decimation to people’s bodies. But what about his neighborhood—Matsuyama-machi—in the heart of the Urakami Valley, directly below the bomb’s blast point? What about the estimated three hundred households and 1,865 people here who had been in their homes and workplaces, approximately 90 percent of whom died? Who were they, what kinds of lives had they led, and who would memorialize them and the parts of the city that had been instantly annihilated when the bomb detonated in the sky above them?
Fueled by persistent sadness and outrage, Uchida launched a “restoration” project that called on survivors’ memories to re-create the former layout of Matsuyama-machi and collect data on the people who had died. It was Uchida’s hope that instead of disappearing “into the darkness of history,” each individual adult and child could be known and remembered. His plan captured the community’s attention, and within months, the Association for the Restoration of the Atomic-Bombed Matsuyama-machi Neighborhood was formally organized. Chaired by Uchida and supported by Dr. Akizuki, Dr. Shirabe, and others, the group set out to create a map of every street, building, family, and individual who had lived in the area prior to the bombing.
Nagasaki Page 28