Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

  Taniguchi did not deceive himself about the practical, large-scale impact of his efforts. Throughout the world, he faced constant reminders of how little—if anything—people knew about the atomic bombings and survivors’ ongoing conditions and how erroneous their limited knowledge often was. Despite numerous complex international treaties that limited certain kinds of nuclear tests and weapons development, reduced stockpiles, and defined the world’s nuclear weapons states as the United States, the Soviet Union, China, France, and the United Kingdom, Cold War tensions persisted. In the 1970s alone, 550 nuclear tests were conducted worldwide, and nuclear stockpiles increased by nearly 40 percent, heightening the threat of nuclear war, if only by the sheer number of weapons that existed. By 1981, the world’s stockpiles totaled 56,035 weapons, 98 percent of which belonged to the United States and the Soviet Union. Every time a nuclear weapons test occurred somewhere in the world, survivors in Nagasaki felt a rush of chilling memories mixed with anger and despair. “Clever and foolish people have not changed at all since that August 9,” Dr. Akizuki remarked, disparaging the countries who conducted these tests. “What is sad is that they are still making the same mistake more than a quarter of a century later.” What kept Taniguchi going, despite constant pain and the discouraging realities of nuclear weapons development, was his sense of responsibility to all those whose voices, unlike his, that had been silenced—“hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to say what I’m saying, but who died without being able to.”

  Taniguchi Sumiteru, age fifty-five, at an antinuclear protest, ca. 1984. (Photograph by Kurosaki Haruo)

  • • •

  Pope John Paul II’s 1981 visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki raised international awareness of the two cities and invigorated Japan’s antinuclear movement. “War is the work of man,” the pope declared in Hiroshima, countering Dr. Nagai’s view that atomic bombs were acts of God. Men who wage war “can also successfully make peace.” At Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral, the pope ordained fifteen priests, including two Americans, and in an open-air stadium near the hypocenter, he conducted a public Mass for forty-five thousand people in the falling snow. He also spoke at Martyrs’ Hill, where twenty-six Christians were executed in 1597. During his visit to the Megumi no Oka (Hill of Grace) Nagasaki A-Bomb Home, a nursing home facility for atomic bomb survivors, many elderly survivors who had never spoken about their experiences began telling their stories. The pope challenged the status quo among nuclear powers by calling on them to take responsibility for their role in the threat of nuclear annihilation, and he encouraged Japan’s Catholic hierarchy to engage more actively in peace efforts. Although many Catholic hibakusha still hesitated to speak out, for others, the pope’s message transformed their visions of themselves from sacrificial lambs quietly suffering the will of God to potential contributors to the cause of global peace. For these men and women, speaking out became a realization of God’s wishes.

  Inspired and bolstered by the pope’s words, Akizuki and his wife traveled to the United States again in 1982, with a Japanese delegation carrying a second petition to the United Nations. The petition, signed by 28,862,935 Japanese citizens, demanded that the United Nations heighten the priority of international antinuclear measures and tell the world the truth about the destruction and human suffering caused by nuclear weapons. In a preliminary meeting with UN officials prior to the General Assembly, Akizuki spoke in nervous English to communicate his antinuclear message. He and the Japanese contingent then led an estimated 750,000 peaceful antinuclear protesters from forty nations in a march through midtown Manhattan, culminating in a massive Central Park event featuring speeches by U.S. and international disarmament leaders and performances by Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, James Taylor, and Linda Ronstadt.

  Yamaguchi had fallen sick and was unable to participate in the rally. The following day at the United Nations, however, he stood on the podium before more than sixty heads of state, foreign ministers, and delegation leaders, and gave what he felt was the speech of his lifetime. “What I wanted to do in my speech was to reproduce the horror of August 9th,” he recalled. “I wanted everybody to understand the hell we lived. That was all I was thinking of.” He held up a photograph of his keloid-scarred face. He asked listeners to look at it closely. He pleaded for the United Nations to lead the antinuclear effort to preserve the human race. “As long as I continue to live I will keep on appealing!” he boomed. “No more Hiroshima! No more Nagasaki! No more war! No more hibakusha!”

  Yamaguchi Senji appealing for action on behalf of Nagasaki hibakusha at an anti-nuclear-weapons demonstration, 1978. (Photograph by Kurosaki Haruo)

  ____

  “When you talk about it,” Wada would say, “it brings back memories. I couldn’t see the usefulness of speaking about what happened.” It was a sentiment in some part shared by Do-oh, Nagano, and Yoshida. Having raised their children, retired, and mourned the death of parents, grandparents, and siblings, the four of them would find deeply personal reasons to break their silence. In the 1980s and 1990s, their choices to become visible and speak out, and the sense of meaning and purpose that ensued, came to represent a rebirth of sorts—the beginning of a third life.

  Wada decided to speak out in 1983, when he held his first grandchild in his arms. “I saw her little clenched fists, and I suddenly remembered the tiny baby I’d seen two days after the bombing, lying burned and blackened on the ground along the streetcar tracks. That baby’s fists were clenched in the same way. If an atomic bombing happened now, I thought, my granddaughter would end up like that baby. I had to start talking about it so that people don’t use such a bomb again.”

  Wada sought out Dr. Akizuki, who, at sixty-seven, was retired as director of St. Francis Hospital in 1983 and had joined forces with Nagasaki’s mayor to found and direct the new and visionary Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace (NFPP). Established as a joint private and municipal organization, the NFPP’s many antinuclear projects include a hibakusha speakers’ bureau. Beyond survivors’ written testimonies, Akizuki believed that their oral testimonies could powerfully communicate the impact of the bomb to the people of Nagasaki, Japan, and the world as a means to achieve their common goal: the abolition of nuclear weapons and the protection of future life on earth.

  The NFPP’s first cohort of speakers included Taniguchi and Uchida Tsukasa, the leader of the Urakami Valley mapping project. After Wada’s meeting with Dr. Akizuki, he joined them. When he told his atomic bomb stories to schoolchildren, he tried to always begin by joking with them to help them laugh and relax. Gradually, he would begin speaking about the war and the atomic bombing. “I suffered less hardship than others,” he explained, “so instead of talking about my personal experiences, I connect my stories to the photos the children have seen in the museum—and I insert jokes and puns when I see their faces are getting too serious. I do everything I can so the children will think about what is needed now for us not to repeat this horrible event.”

  Wada retired in 1987 after forty-three years with the Nagasaki Streetcar Company. He and Hisako built a home in the northwestern hills of the Urakami Valley, and Wada finally realized his dream to build a memorial to the fallen streetcar drivers and conductors. He and his colleagues from work solicited support from the streetcar company and many individuals, and the city gave its permission to use a small spot of land in Hypocenter Park. Wada helped oversee the memorial’s design and construction using stones from a bombed-out station platform and actual sharin (wheels) from Nagasaki’s wartime streetcars. “When I stand here,” Wada said in front of the memorial, “I remember those times and cannot laugh or smile.”

  Wada Koichi, age eighty, at the Nagasaki Streetcar Company Memorial, 2007. The plaque at right tells the story of the more than 110 boys and girls who died in their teens and early twenties, recalling that one female conductor was only twelve years old at the time of the bombing. (Courtesy of Wada Koichi) />
  • • •

  In 1985, Yoshida was forced to retire early from the wholesale food company when he became ill with pancreatitis. His supervisor hadn’t wanted him to leave permanently, so after a ninety-day hospitalization, Yoshida proudly returned to his company on two occasions to help the staff accurately determine gross and net prices of their products. His semiretirement took an abrupt turn when his wife, Sachiko, developed breast cancer that metastasized to her bones. After completion of her cancer treatments, she contracted pneumonia in the hospital and wasn’t expected to survive. At her request, Yoshida brought Sachiko home, where he fed, bathed, and cared for her every day. “We thought she would be all right because she had the cancer removed,” he said. “I wanted to take her to Hokkaido. I told her I would take her there when she got better. But we were too optimistic. She never got better and died six months later. She was fifty-one.” Overwhelmed with grief, Yoshida nearly fainted at Sachiko’s funeral. Previously, he had rarely gone to his family gravesite; after her death, he went often.

  Yoshida had known Taniguchi and Yamaguchi from the 1950s, when he was a part of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Youth Association. Though he had admired them as pioneers in speaking publicly, he—like Wada—had remained silent. “I was shy to be in front of people, especially women. Everyone looked at me like this”—he grimaced—“I didn’t like it.” One day, however, Yamaguchi approached Yoshida to ask if he could take his place at a talk he was scheduled to give to junior high school students visiting Nagasaki. Yoshida agreed—but when he arrived at the site and saw all the students staring at him, he immediately regretted it. Unraveled by the students’ fear of making eye contact with him and what he thought was their revulsion, Yoshida stood before them and told his story. Some students began crying, and when Yoshida looked up at them, he nearly burst into tears himself. Afterward, many of the children expressed their appreciation to him. Yoshida, however, was so shaken by the experience that he returned, momentarily, to silence.

  But not for long. In his ongoing process of accepting his disfigurement, Yoshida again came to terms with the fact that he could not change what had happened to him or how he looked—and he decided no longer to let his shyness get in the way of speaking out for peace. In 1989, he joined the NFPP.

  “This is what I say to children,” he explained. “‘Have you ever looked up heiwa [peace] in the dictionary?’ They never have! They’ve never looked it up because we don’t need to know what peace is during peacetime. ‘Let’s look it up together,’ I say to them. ‘Our greatest enemy is carelessness. We need to pay attention to peace.’”

  Yoshida Katsuji, age seventy-four, speaking to children at Ikeshima Elementary School, 2005. (Courtesy of Yoshida Naoji)

  • • •

  “What will you do after your retirement?” Do-oh’s friend asked her in Tokyo, concerned that Do-oh, unlike most Japanese women, had no children to rely on as she got older. As usual, Do-oh saw things differently. “You are pessimistic about my life because you are seeing things in an ordinary pattern,” she told her friend. “I have no regrets about my life. With a lot of effort and strong will, I’ve acted on my beliefs every step of the way. I did not trouble others and I took care of myself. I am very proud of myself.”

  After thirty years of arduous work and achievement, fifty-five-year-old Do-oh retired from Utena and decided to take a break and rest for a while. But instead of feeling happy, she felt lonely, “like I was being pushed to the far corner of society.” She worried that a radiation-related disease might be lying dormant in her body, ready to appear as she got weaker with age. Her sister suggested that she come back to live in Nagasaki, but Do-oh was hesitant. “Nagasaki was where I was allowed to live,” she remembered, “but Tokyo is where I lived.”

  Still, Do-oh found herself walking alone through the stimulating streets of Shinjuku among “crowds of blank and silent people” she didn’t know. One day on the train, a woman standing isolated and lonely mirrored Do-oh’s fears for her own future. It was then that she decided to move back to Nagasaki while she still had strength.

  She prepared to sell her house in Tokyo and began designing her future home in Nagasaki with a Japanese-style room for her aging mother that looked out over a yard. Her plans were interrupted, however, when her mother became ill and was hospitalized. Do-oh rushed to Nagasaki, where she helped care for her mother and encouraged her with the vision of their new life together. On a cold December day, Do-oh noticed a rainbow outside the window—a rare sighting in winter—and propped up her mother to see it. “It’s very beautiful,” her mother replied, speaking her last words before she died the next day.

  Returning to Tokyo, Do-oh felt “empty, as if I had my heart taken away.” Remembering her mother’s appreciative and supportive letters, Do-oh was tormented with guilt for doing so little for her mother during her life except to send money and gifts from Tokyo. Depleted of energy, she would leave her house and walk aimlessly through the streets. “I tried to listen to the faint voice of reason telling me to pull myself together, but I could not control my pain.”

  Do-oh returned to Nagasaki in 1989, one year too late to fulfill her dream of living with her mother. Of her parents and six siblings, only she and her younger sister were still alive. Do-oh built her new house and set up her family’s Buddhist altar in the room she’d planned for her mother. Whenever she left the house, she spoke out loud to her mother’s photo on the altar, saying that she was leaving and asking her to watch over the house while she was gone. Although her mother couldn’t answer, Do-oh’s sadness was lifted by her mother’s image smiling back at her.

  Unlike the barely recovering city she had left thirty years earlier, Nagasaki was now modern, even prosperous. Most hibakusha still remained quiet about their experiences, but in ways Do-oh could have never imagined in 1955, the number of hibakusha activist organizations and the amount of support for survivors’ social, economic, and medical needs made it possible for her to reconsider her own silence. A hibakusha consultation center at the Nagasaki University School of Medicine offered medical examinations and counseling to more than sixty thousand survivors each year. The city regularly hosted antinuclear, peace, and atomic bomb–related medical conferences and symposia. A national controversy had ignited in 1988 when Nagasaki’s outspoken mayor, Motoshima Hitoshi, broke a cultural taboo and publicly held Emperor Hirohito accountable for his role in the war. Right-wing militarists working to rearm Japan were irate, and in 1990, one of them attempted to assassinate Motoshima by shooting him in the back. The mayor survived, and crowds in Nagasaki rose up in protest over the violence against him.

  In another news-grabbing event, Nagasaki hibakusha were outraged in 1989 when a U.S. warship docked at their port. For decades, people across Japan had vehemently protested the arrival of U.S. ships believed but not proven to be carrying nuclear weapons—which would have breached Japan’s policies not to possess, produce, or allow nuclear weapons into the country. Protesters’ suspicions about past ships had been confirmed earlier that year when newly uncovered reports revealed that in 1965, the USS Ticonderoga had lost a plane, its pilot, and a hydrogen bomb when the plane accidentally rolled off the ship en route to a Japanese port where it later docked. Consequently, when the USS Rodney M. Davis entered Nagasaki Bay purportedly carrying nuclear weapons, activists including Yamaguchi gathered in Peace Park holding photographs of their deceased family members and panoramic photos of the city after the bombing. When the ship’s captain and some of his crew arrived to present a wreath before the giant Peace Statue, Yamaguchi felt his body shaking and experienced traumatic flashbacks of the bombing. After the captain laid the wreath at the base of the statue and left, a reporter accidentally knocked the wreath to the ground. Yamaguchi and other hibakusha spontaneously raced over to it and began trampling on it. The incident made national headlines, and Mayor Motoshima—who had refused to escort the ship’s captain to the memorial—offi
cially apologized to the U.S. ambassador to Japan for the protesters’ actions. The ambassador reportedly adhered to U.S. policy by neither confirming nor denying the existence of nuclear weapons on the warship.

  Do-oh marveled at the survivors who so unabashedly revealed themselves in public—and for the first time in her adult life, she felt free to disclose her hibakusha identity. An escalation of nerve pain from the glass shards still embedded in her body motivated her to action: Do-oh enrolled in a five-week community class at Nagasaki University called “The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb and Its Influences.” Side by side with sixty other adult students, she finally learned about the immense power and the human effects of the atomic bomb.

  For Do-oh, it was Matsuzoe Hiroshi, a former classmate and longtime member of the NFPP, who encouraged her to speak out and tell her story. Unbeknownst to Do-oh, Matsuzoe had been at Dr. Miyajima’s house on the night of the bombing when Do-oh’s parents carried her into the yard. Years later, Matsuzoe—by then a famous Nagasaki artist and sculptor—painted a watercolor of that scene: In the foreground, dozens of people are sitting or lying on the ground, their bodies blistered and bleeding. A mother nurses her infant son. Another cradles a lifeless toddler in her arms. Young Matsuzoe himself appears in the painting, standing injured next to an adult who seems to be comforting him. On the veranda, Do-oh is lying facedown on a table surrounded by six adults. Wearing a white lab coat, Dr. Miyajima is treating the injuries at the back of her head. Do-oh’s parents are standing at the other end of the table, their arms outstretched to hold down her legs and feet as she thrashes in pain. Matsuzoe called it a jigokue (a picture of hell).