Neighborhood members scoured cemeteries and examined gravestones to record the names of those who died on the day of the bombing and immediately after. Teams of volunteers interviewed or sent out letters to every survivor they knew and every survivor those survivors knew, asking them to draw detailed maps of their former streets, list the names and causes of deaths of their family members, and document everything they knew about the fates of anyone else in the area. With the support of local and national media coverage, responses poured in from thousands of survivors and family members of deceased hibakusha in Nagasaki and across the nation. Uchida and his colleagues collected and cross-checked the data. One house, family, shop, and ration station at a time, they filled in a comprehensive map of Matsuyama-machi, rendering back into historical existence the immediate hypocenter area and nearly all of the people who had lived and worked there.
The project quickly expanded to include all neighborhoods within two kilometers (1.25 miles) of the hypocenter—and in 1971, the city of Nagasaki established a municipal office to promote and oversee survey activities throughout the Urakami Valley. Dr. Akizuki cofounded the Yamazato-machi Recollection Committee where his hospital stood, an area particularly difficult to document because of the Korean laborers and medical school students who had lived in temporary housing there. Despite added challenges, including destroyed school registrations and employment records and a lack of accurate data on certain buildings and families, by 1975, the average completion rate for each neighborhood was 88 percent. In total, nearly ten thousand households were added to the prebomb maps, and 37,512 men, women, and children who had lived in them were reliably verified. Dr. Shirabe, now retired, helped collect, edit, and publish final reports on several of the neighborhoods’ efforts. Fukahori Yoshitoshi, a medical administrator at Dr. Akizuki’s St. Francis Hospital, collected families’ personal photos of their pre- and postbomb neighborhoods to be included in the public records. By the project’s conclusion in 1976, Uchida and his teams had fulfilled a strong sense of duty to both the deceased and the living by restoring the memory of their neighborhoods. Uchida fervently hoped that the efforts of so many people would help clarify “the true extent of the atomic bomb experience.”
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While the mapping project was under way, Dr. Akizuki came to believe that the hibakusha reclamation movement would remain unfinished until as many survivors as possible shared their individual stories and people throughout the world were able to grasp the human experience of nuclear war. He had already written significant segments of his own story, prompted by a visit in 1961 from a Japanese novelist who asked Akizuki what the bombing had been like. “Sixteen years after the bombing,” Akizuki remembered, “this was the first time someone had asked me about the details of my experience.” Instead of showing the writer his notes on the bombing and its aftermath, Akizuki described what it was like to be an atomic bomb physician who remained physically and mentally depleted—“like a living fossil who can’t forget the past . . . who had never been able to mentally recover from witnessing hell.”
From that day forward, Akizuki felt responsible for writing about his experiences and the people who died at his hospital and neighboring districts. Due to poor health and his daily work as a physician and hospital director, it took him three years to complete his first memoir, Nagasaki genbaku ki: Hibaku ishi no shogen [The Nagasaki Bombing: A Surviving Doctor’s Testimony], detailing the first two months of his postbomb life.
But Akizuki knew that this book and those by other hibakusha told only a tiny portion of what had happened on the day of the bombing and in the years that followed. Standing at a window of St. Francis Hospital, he would stare out at the Urakami Valley and see what he described as “a double image”—the rebuilt, modernized quadrant of his city, overlaid by images of blackened bodies scattered everywhere. So many people had died. No one knew their stories. As time and Japan’s economic advances erased all signs of the war, hibakusha stories were disappearing—forgotten as if they didn’t matter. By this time, most people in Japan spoke about the atomic bomb only around the anniversaries of the bombings—a phenomenon one hibakusha likened to goldfish sellers who by tradition peddled their fish only during the summer. Many Japanese misperceived the effects of the atomic bombings to be no different from conventional bombings. At a 1968 atomic bomb exhibit in Tokyo, Dr. Akizuki was further dismayed when he observed that Hiroshima had become such a singular symbol of the atomic bombings that few people were familiar with Nagasaki’s story. Compared with the numerous books about Hiroshima, not one about Nagasaki was displayed. Back home, his wife, Sugako, remembered him repeatedly saying, “It’s not good. It’s not good.”
To generate an expanded written record of the Nagasaki hibakusha experience, Akizuki and several of his colleagues established the Nagasaki Testimonial Society in 1969. By this time, many hibakusha had felt discouraged and left Japan’s antinuclear movement due to political infighting between activist groups that had split over ideological differences as Japan’s political parties had aligned themselves with Soviet or U.S. interests. Other hibakusha had withdrawn from the movement because they felt some groups were manipulating their experiences for political gain. In his desire to create a new organization with a united and inclusive stance, Dr. Akizuki invited all hibakusha to tell their stories, regardless of their political affiliations or engagement with the antinuclear movement. Akizuki envisioned that the collective voices of a hundred thousand survivors could lead to the worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons, and he entreated Nagasaki survivors to “speak out about the realities of being a hibakusha” on behalf of all humanity.
Hundreds of hibakusha responded to his initial call. They scribed their memories to honor their loved ones, articulate their fears about their own futures, promote their hopes for peace, or simply because they were aging and wanted the next generation to know the truths that only they could tell. Some revealed their hibakusha status for the first time in order to augment the government’s incomplete surveys of survivors’ conditions. Others wrote as a personal protest against Japan’s reluctance, as a U.S. ally, to condemn the atomic bombings. For others, writing their stories was a way to counteract a gradual renewal of militaristic nationalism in Japan, exemplified by incidents of textbook censorship that minimized information or images of the negative impact of war, including the horrors of the atomic bombings. Akizuki’s colleague Yamada Kan, an outspoken critic of Dr. Nagai—whom he called the “uninvited representative” of the Nagasaki survivor community—supported the testimony movement in part to collect enough non-Catholic survivors’ stories to outweigh Nagai’s pervasive message that Nagasaki hibakusha were spiritual martyrs.
In 1969, as the Vietnam War raged in Southeast Asia, the Nagasaki Testimonial Society published its first annual volume of Nagasaki no shogen [Testimonies of Nagasaki]. For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the bombing the following year, the journal featured Taniguchi’s color photo on its cover. By 1971, Testimonies of Nagasaki had more than tripled in size. Sugako often prepared dinner for Akizuki and the editorial team as they worked late into the night at the Akizukis’ home. Over a thousand radio and television broadcasts of hibakusha stories followed, as did numerous other testimony collections, including those by members of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Youth Association, Nagasaki hibakusha teachers’ associations, and the Nagasaki Women’s Society. Local factory workers circulated their own journals of testimonies, and Nagasaki poets published the magazine Hobo [Scorched People].
To further the reclamation of hibakusha materials still held in the United States, the physically weak Akizuki and his wife joined a small team of Hiroshima and Nagasaki officials traveling to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to search for USSBS and other U.S. postwar records on the atomic bombings. After ten days, the group carried home photocopies of the documents they had located; after translating them into Japanese, they were able to read the contents of some of the detaile
d USSBS reports for the first time and learn how the United States had documented the effects of its air attacks on Japan. Disturbed by the reports’ cold, technical details of U.S. incendiary and atomic bomb strategies and their dearth of information relating to human suffering, Dr. Akizuki deepened his commitment to the testimony movement to support a more complete historical record. Over the next decade, the Nagasaki Testimonial Society published ten volumes of Testimonies of Nagasaki, including personal narratives by Korean survivors and former Allied prisoners of war. Akizuki published his second book, Shi no doshinen [Concentric Circles of Death], as well as a third memoir in 1975. With the support of numerous individuals and organizations, the Nagasaki Testimonial Society had succeeded in creating a comprehensive written record of survivors’ experiences. This, Dr. Akizuki felt, was why God had allowed him to live.
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Akizuki’s passionate yearning for visibility and greater public understanding was a reflection of how invisible hibakusha still remained in the public eye, both domestically and overseas. Behind the veil of Japan’s economic recovery, many hibakusha in the 1970s still lived in poverty and experienced multiple debilitating medical conditions. More than 10 percent of all survivors were unemployed, a rate 70 percent higher than non-hibakusha. Those with low or no incomes led particularly precarious lives, especially those who were ill and elderly survivors who lived alone and struggled to feed and bathe themselves. In utero–exposed children were now thirty years old; those with milder symptoms worked at odd jobs, but those unable to function independently lived in mental institutions, separated from their families. Thyroid, breast, and lung cancer rates had peaked, but stomach and colon cancer rates for hibakusha remained high, as did leukemia, with reported cases of multiple deaths within the same family. Unexplained illnesses or deaths of hibakusha and their children kept many hibakusha on edge about long-term radiation effects. Those with visible injuries and scars were often turned away from public baths. For younger survivors now in their forties, junior and senior high school class reunions were sad reminders of how many more friends died each year.
Hibakusha pressed forward with little psychological support; Japanese psychologists and social workers were not yet experienced in the diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, and hibakusha health care benefits did not cover the atomic bombings’ psychological effects. Many survivors still flinched at a sudden flash of light or when they heard the sounds of fireworks, sirens, or airplanes flying overhead. Others experienced recurring nightmares that triggered memories of the nuclear attack and its aftermath. One woman clung to the memory of her husband by keeping the blood- and oil-stained gloves he had worn at the time of the bombing on the family altar in her home. Aging parents of in utero–exposed children, often impoverished and struggling with their own illnesses, feared for their children’s futures. In the words of one father, “I can’t close my eyes as long as this child is alive.”
But Japan was now a Westernized nation with enviable economic growth, intent on leaving its past behind. Even after Nagasaki’s successful reclamation and testimony movements, and even after the city produced a documentary film using the returned black-and-white footage and over 1.2 million people visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum in 1975 alone, survivors’ current conditions remained at best at the periphery of public awareness. In other countries as well, few people appreciated the long-term consequences of the atomic bombings. A group of foreign mayors visiting Nagasaki for the thirtieth anniversary ceremonies revealed their lack of understanding when they visited a photo exhibition about the bombing: Stunned by the images before them, some of them asked the exhibition curators if the photographs were real.
In the United States, both ignorance of the effects of the bombings and celebration of the bombs’ use remained common—and nuclear weapons, now far more powerful than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were generally perceived as an inevitable reality. Civil defense campaigns taught that with a combination of community preparedness and individual integrity, nuclear attacks were survivable—a message unsupported by hibakusha narratives, which were rarely heard. In 1976, a U.S. group called the Confederate Air Force (CAF) performed an air show in Texas before an audience of more than forty thousand people. In the finale, a tribute to those who brought the Pacific War to its close, Paul Tibbets—the lead pilot of the Hiroshima mission—flew a B-29 overhead. As the narrator’s voice over loudspeakers proclaimed that the bomb had ended “some of the darkest days of America’s history,” a device detonated on the ground beneath the plane to generate a rising mushroom cloud. When news of the air show reached Japan, both hibakusha leaders and the Japanese government vehemently protested. U.S. officials formally apologized to Japan, and the CAF canceled this portion of the show at future sites. Neither U.S. newspaper accounts of the controversy nor Tibbets himself acknowledged that the simulated bombing omitted the mass destruction and grotesque deaths and injuries suffered by the men, women, and children beneath the atomic clouds.
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Against this backdrop of inadvertent ignorance and intentional minimization, hibakusha activists pushed to find new ways to awaken the world to the true impact of nuclear weapons. Locally, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum expanded its outreach education programs, and the city published a comprehensive, five-volume Nagasaki genbaku sensaishi [Records of the Nagasaki Atomic Bombing and Wartime Damage], a detailed narrative of the immediate destruction, deaths, injuries, and long-term effects of survivors in their city. With the support of the Science Council of Japan and consultants including doctors Akizuki and Shirabe, a team of thirty-four Japanese scientists and scholars collaborated to create the meticulously researched 504-page Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, including hundreds of figures, photographs, and tables. Published in 1981 in Tokyo, New York, and London, copies of the English edition were sent to the heads of state of every nuclear-armed country as well as to the secretary-general and executive members of the United Nations, representatives from each UN member nation, and leading health and antinuclear organizations around the world. Taniguchi, Yamaguchi, and other representatives of local and national hibakusha organizations spoke out across Japan for the abolition of nuclear weapons. They also published numerous essays and articles, were interviewed by the foreign press, and appeared in documentary films about the bombings. Taniguchi often took off his shirt to reveal his present-day scars, providing images that filmmakers juxtaposed with photographs and footage of his back in the first months after the bombing.
Activists pressed to magnify their antinuclear influence internationally. In 1977, more than four hundred Japanese and over seventy delegates from approximately twenty countries gathered in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo to unify and focus their efforts in advance of the first UN Special Session on Disarmament. One of their key strategies was to effectively illuminate the “irrationality” of atomic bomb development with survivors’ personal stories, scientific evidence on how the bombs destroyed human life, and statements of support by political and military leaders throughout the world. They also drafted a resolution to make the word hibakusha an internationally recognized term. Taniguchi and hibakusha activist Watanabe Chieko flew to Geneva in 1978 to address the International NGO Conference on Disarmament—“the first time,” Watanabe remembered, “that atomic bomb survivors had spoken in person on the international political stage.” Later that year, five hundred members of the Japanese delegation flew to New York to formally petition the United Nations to lead the world in the abolition of nuclear weapons. The delegation’s spirits were buoyed when they read the UN’s official post-session declaration, which echoed their deepest wishes for international understanding of the dangers of nuclear weapons and appealed for their total elimination.
Despite his chronic medical problems—or perhaps because of them—Taniguchi always showed up wherever he was needed in the fight to abolish nuclear weapons an
d expand hibakusha health care eligibility and benefits. He had multiple surgeries on his back to cut out reappearing tumors, some of them precancerous, and to remove scar tissue in the middle of his spine in order to graft new skin in its place. Doctors recommended a complete replacement of the skin on his back, but Taniguchi hesitated, unsure he could survive such a radical procedure. “Scientific knowledge has progressed enough to develop highly sophisticated missiles,” he reflected with some bitterness, “but there is no cure for my illness.”
Between medical procedures, he traveled to antinuclear conferences across the world, chain-smoking his way to universities, churches, and local forums throughout Western Europe and in Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, China, and Korea. In North America, he traveled to Canada and nine U.S. cities, including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.—often appearing at numerous events in a single city. “Nuclear weapons do not protect mankind from danger,” Taniguchi told his audiences, rarely making eye contact. “They can never safely coexist with humans.” He acknowledged Japan’s wartime aggressions and the absence of his nation’s apology for initiating the war, then—with subdued but detectable anger—he condemned the atomic bombings as scientific experiments on tens of thousands of innocent people in residential areas for which Americans had not shown remorse. Taniguchi had long realized the power of his most famous photograph to communicate the impact of nuclear war, and despite his aversion to looking at it and reliving the suffering it held for him, he had the photo printed on his business cards, and he frequently projected it onto a screen above him or held an enlarged copy mounted on poster board as he spoke. “I am not a guinea pig,” he insisted. “You who have seen my body, don’t turn your face away. I want you to look again.”
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