Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

  He never imagined that Do-oh had survived. One day in 1985, Matsuzoe was reading the newspaper when he came upon an article about Do-oh and her rise to executive leadership in Tokyo. Thrilled and in disbelief, Matsuzoe wrote to Do-oh, describing his memories of that night. He enclosed a photocopy of the painting.

  For Do-oh, reading Matsuzoe’s letter and seeing his artwork stirred deep memories of the bombing and years of physical anguish and hiding—and she felt an immediate sense of reconnection with a friend she hadn’t seen in forty years. They reunited in Nagasaki, and when Matsuzoe learned about Do-oh’s professional experience speaking in front of large audiences, he persuaded her to join the NFPP and begin speaking about her atomic bomb survival.

  In 1994, five years after she had returned to Nagasaki, doctors diagnosed Do-oh with breast cancer. That year, a new cumulative study based on eighty thousand deceased hibakusha indicated their rate of leukemia deaths was thirty times higher than normal levels and showed elevated rates of breast, lung, colon, thyroid, stomach, and four other cancers. Other studies documented higher-than-average rates of multiple primary cancers in a single survivor and late-onset cardiovascular, circulatory, digestive, and respiratory diseases. RERF reports stated that all females and anyone exposed at a young age at the time of the bomb were at significantly higher risks of cancer in their lifetimes.

  Do-oh’s heart pounded when she heard her diagnosis, but she quipped to her doctor, “So this means that now I won’t be able to enjoy fashion?” Once alone, however, Do-oh was consumed with anxiety. It’s finally come. She looked back on the bombing, her injuries, her lost youth, her fear of marriage, and her thirty years in Tokyo. And now, my breast, she thought. The ghost of the atomic bomb still haunts me. She felt robbed of the ordinary life she had finally achieved in Nagasaki, and she feared the upcoming loss of her figure, in which she had always taken pride. As cancer “started building a nest” in her breast, she was overwhelmed that she could no longer live a life shaped by her own will.

  But Do-oh reawakened to her own power. Having smoked most of her life, she now quit. When tests revealed two tumors, she ranted at them, calling them greedy. After her mastectomy, she cried often and easily, even as she felt deep gratitude for the care of her nurses. She kept a journal, prayed for the elimination of nuclear weapons, and vowed, over and over, to become a more generous, loving, and self-reflective woman. When her treatment was complete, doctors declared Do-oh cancer-free. “I was allowed to live,” she would say, vowing to stay alive until she was seventy-five. That, she thought, would mean she had triumphed over the bomb.

  • • •

  Nagano did not speak out until after the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing in 1995. Six years earlier in 1989, her husband was injured in a car accident; he remained hospitalized for eleven years and never recovered. Nagano moved into a rental house near the hospital so she could be there every day—and when her mother, too, was hospitalized at a different facility for various health issues, Nagano eventually had her mother transferred to her husband’s hospital where she could accommodate both of their needs.

  All of her life, Nagano’s mother had waited for the tomuraiage, the rite honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Seiji’s and Kuniko’s deaths—a significant event in Buddhist tradition when families gather at the gravesite for the ceremony to honor their deceased relatives. “We call it the fiftieth anniversary,” Nagano explained, “but actually, we usually have the ceremony in the forty-ninth year, so for us that meant 1994. My mother felt she couldn’t die until she participated in that commemoration for Kuniko and Seiji.”

  The day finally came, but Nagano’s mother had been diagnosed with liver cancer and was too ill to attend. Nagano and her son oversaw the ceremony. “At family gravesites,” Nagano explained, “the cabinet door where the ashes are stored typically remains closed. At this ceremony, though, the monk recites a special chant, and we open the door to let fresh air in, so that our deceased family members will be happy.”

  Nagano and her son opened the cabinet door and removed the lid from her older brother’s urn. His ikotsu (cremated remains) were white and pinkish, as she had expected. Those of her father, who had died three years after the bombing, were a mixture of black and white. When they opened Seiji’s and Kuniko’s ashes, Nagano shivered. “They were makkuro—totally black! They were white when we cremated them, but when we opened them, they were pitch-black.” The ashes of Nagano’s husband’s family who had died in the bombing were black, too. Her son felt sick. The monk told them that the ashes of twenty thousand unidentified hibakusha kept in a crate at the temple had also turned black. “Again—” Nagano remembered, her voice hushed. “Again, we grasped that nuclear weapons damage people’s bodies all the way to the bone.”

  Nagano Etsuko, age eighty-one, speaking to students at Kakumei Girls’ High School, Nagasaki, 2009. Nagano is using the map to indicate her locations and movements throughout the day on August 9, 1945; here she points to the neighborhood she walked through immediately after the bombing. (Courtesy of Nagano Etsuko)

  As the monk spoke at the service, Nagano reflected on her life. It’s been fifty years. What have I been doing, being sad for fifty years? It was finally time to free herself from grief and guilt—not to forget her sad memories, but to change, to do something that could help others. Soon after that, Nagano read a newspaper article about hibakusha who spoke to schoolchildren about their experiences. Here was something she thought she could do.

  Nagano submitted a brief summary of her experiences to the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace and was invited to join. By 1995, she was making her first speeches while her husband and mother were still hospitalized. Reading from a script, she recounted her memories but never mentioned the circumstances of her brother’s and sister’s deaths. “What I had done was so terrible, I could not bring myself to talk about it. It was too much for me to handle.”

  Nor could she have known what her decision to speak out would mean to her mother. One day, a nurse at the hospital spoke to Nagano’s mother commending Nagano for speaking out. When Nagano arrived to visit later that day, her mother suddenly broke the fifty-year emotional silence that had separated them.

  “I want you to do your best telling students how horrible the atomic bomb was,” she told Nagano. “Take care of yourself, and do your best.”

  Nagano was stunned. It was the first time Nagano’s mother had ever been happy for her, the first time in her life that she felt she had done right by her mother.

  A few days later, her mother turned to Nagano again. “E-chan,” she said, using her nickname for Nagano. “E-chan, gomen ne [I’m sorry].”

  Tears streamed down Nagano’s face. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she answered. “It should be me who apologizes to you.”

  Her mother reached out for her hand, and they cried together. Nagano stroked her mother’s swollen, yellowish skin, apologizing again and again for breaking her promise and bringing Seiji and Kuniko back. The relief she felt was indescribable. “After fifty years, my mother had finally forgiven me.”

  Nagano’s mother died a few days later, without suffering, as if she were going to sleep.

  ____

  As Taniguchi, Wada, Yoshida, Do-oh, and Nagano found deep purpose in speaking publicly about their experiences and illuminating the realities of nuclear war, a fierce debate erupted in the United States over the inclusion of hibakusha stories in a national exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. In 1988, curators of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington, D.C., had begun planning an exhibit to spotlight the Enola Gay as an important historical artifact for its role as the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Later titled “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War Two,” the exhibit was designed to honor the service, sacrifice, and memories of Pacific War veterans and also to inform the public about t
he effects of the bombings on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and about their role in igniting the Cold War—which Smithsonian curators believed were important parts of the Enola Gay story.

  The scope of the NASM’s exhibit was based in part on research conducted by a new generation of U.S. scholars who, starting in the 1960s, had used newly declassified World War II documents to reassess the complex issues around the atomic bombings of Japan. Among numerous areas of study, these researchers had reexamined U.S. motives for using the bombs and their effectiveness in ending the war. Their inquiries often challenged the orthodox atomic bomb narrative put forth by Stimson, Truman, and others—that the bombs were a military necessity, had saved a million American lives, and had been used as the only reasonable means to end the war. “No one denies that these policy makers desired to hasten the war’s end and to save American lives,” historian John Dower concluded, “but no serious historian regards those as the sole considerations driving the use of the bombs on Japanese cities.”

  These investigations revitalized questions among scholars about the morality of dropping the bombs on Japanese civilians, but they had little impact on the American public. The government’s official narrative, along with Americans’ continued anger over Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, mistreatment of Allied POWs, and atrocities in Asia, had long ago conjoined to create a powerful and multifaceted mythos about the atomic bombings that still pervaded the American consciousness. Inflated claims of the potential number of American lives saved by the bombings and the bombs’ definitive role in ending the war were so ingrained in public thought and culture that many people still perceived the bombs as virtuous instruments of peace.

  Even into the 1990s, most Americans had little knowledge of hibakusha experiences of nuclear war and its aftermath. In the 1960s, articles in Time and U.S. News and World Report led readers to believe that no increases in cancer rates had occurred in Nagasaki or Hiroshima. The U.S. government suppressed information about harm caused by nuclear fallout to those living and working in areas downwind of its nuclear weapons test sites, which eliminated an opportunity for heightened awareness of the human effects of large-dose radiation exposure. At the height of Cold War anxiety—when the controversial made-for-television movie The Day After (1983) portrayed a gruesome nuclear attack on a U.S. city and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War declared that U.S. civil defense procedures could not provide adequate protection from radiation exposure—most Americans still framed nuclear war as a terrifying potential event rather than a past actuality with historic and scientific value.

  To create an exhibit that increased understanding and explored varying perspectives on the atomic bombings, curators at the National Air and Space Museum designed a series of connected galleries that would guide visitors through an abbreviated history of the Pacific War—including the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan’s aggression throughout the Pacific theater, the making of the atomic bombs, attitudes and debates around the decisions of how and where to use them, and Japan’s surrender position in the summer of 1945. The exhibit was to have concluded with information on the delivery of the bombs, their impact on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their role in ushering in the nuclear age. The exhibit was intended to simultaneously celebrate the end of a horrific war and—while refraining from drawing conclusions about the morality of the bombs’ use—remain compassionate to those who experienced the bombings.

  NASM’s director, Dr. Martin Harwit, visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki to meet with their mayors, museum curators, and RERF officials to discuss the exhibit and negotiate which artifacts and photographs might be included. Japanese officials were most concerned that the exhibit accurately document, and in no way minimize, the horrific effects of the bombs’ heat, blast, and radiation, and the injuries, illnesses, and psychological impairments hibakusha suffered. Nagasaki artifacts proposed for the exhibit included a broken wall clock stopped at 11:02; the shadow of a clothesline imprinted on a fence; the head of an angel from a fallen statue at Urakami Church; melted ceramic roof tiles, coins, and bottles; and an infant’s burned clothing. Several of Yamahata’s early Nagasaki photographs were in negotiation, including one of an injured mother breastfeeding her child and another of a blackened corpse. Short statements from thirteen Nagasaki hibakusha—including Taniguchi and doctors Nagai and Akizuki—were also chosen for display.

  But a commemorative exhibit attempting to span the stark differences between wartime memory and meaning on both sides of a conflict would prove impossible to achieve. Many U.S. veterans who had fought an enemy as vicious and tenacious as Japan believed that a national fiftieth anniversary exhibit should only celebrate their victory and commemorate their courage. The presence of historical analysis of the necessity of the bombs or evidence of hibakusha suffering would distort and even vilify their valor and sacrifice in the final months of the war, they claimed, and would also devalue the lives of soldiers who would have died in a U.S. invasion of Japan. Similar to how the ABCC’s provision of medical treatment to survivors could have symbolized atonement, for World War II veterans, the inclusion of survivors’ stories in the Smithsonian exhibit amounted to an undeserved apology for dropping the bombs to end a war that Japan had so brutally begun with its attack on Pearl Harbor.

  The exhibit’s initial design and narrative draft were released in early 1994, after which a committee of ten U.S. historians and scholars identified some imbalances and inaccuracies for the museum staff to address. Before revisions were made, however, the 180,000-member Air Force Association, which had close historical ties to the NASM, initiated a national protest; it was later joined by the 3.1-million-member American Legion. Fueled by media coverage supporting their views, these and other veterans’ organizations accused the museum of “politically correct curating” and called the exhibit un-American. They declared a singular correct view of the bombings as having ended the war and saved lives, demanded the removal of hibakusha images and testimonies, called for more context about Japan’s atrocities, and asserted that the exhibit should evoke American pride in its victory rather than shame for its use of the atomic bombs. Veterans also insisted on the elimination of any component of the exhibit that raised a moral question about the bombings. In a Time magazine interview, exhibit curator Tom Crouch reflected that the exhibit’s critics had a “reluctance to really tell the whole story. They want to stop the story when the bomb leaves the bomb bay.”

  Nonetheless, curators revised the script four times to respond to many of the veterans’ concerns over balance and accuracy. They removed historical documentation of several leading U.S. officials’ opposition to or doubts about the bombs’ use, including General Eisenhower’s postwar claim that he had expressed his opposition to using the bomb to President Truman in July 1945. They also added more information and photographs about Pacific War conflicts, Allied casualties, and Japanese atrocities, and made subtle changes in language to reduce perceptions of sympathy toward the Japanese. The most explicit photos of dead and burned hibakusha selected for the exhibit were cut, including twelve of the grimmest images from Nagasaki. Nearly all hibakusha personal testimonies were deleted—including those by doctors Akizuki and Nagai—as was a majority of the planned final section of the exhibit on the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. Many historians believed the museum went too far in trying to accommodate veterans’ views; their most serious concerns arose when curators seemed ready to acquiesce to veterans’ demands to honor Secretary of War Stimson’s claim that the bombs saved a million Americans lives despite documentary evidence to the contrary.

  Ironically, Japan experienced similar controversies over its own fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the war’s end. New research in Japan had exposed details of the country’s previously veiled wartime history—including Japanese soldiers’ slaughter and rape of civilians during their invasion of China and other Asian countries, and their extreme brutality during the Pacific War. These
revelations stirred passionate debates over Japan’s own accountability, the emperor’s culpability, and how the war would be remembered by future generations. Nagasaki itself became the center of a national controversy when it opened the newly rebuilt Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum in 1996. In response to Japanese critics’ long-standing complaints that its exhibits had focused solely on hibakusha suffering without critical wartime context, the museum planned to expand its scope to include documentation of the Nanjing massacre, Japan’s experiments with biological weapons on humans, and its seizure and sexual exploitation of women of other Asian nations as “comfort women” for the Japanese military. The proposed exhibit created a furor among conservative Japanese nationalists, however, who protested and made anonymous threats to museum curators and museum staff. The museum subsequently modified the exhibit, eliminating, among others, photographs of Chinese civilians brutally murdered by Japanese soldiers and of starving and beaten Allied POWs in the forced eighty-mile Bataan Death March.

  At the National Air and Space Museum, the curators’ revisions to the exhibit script did not satisfy critics’ concerns. The veterans’ opposition caught the attention of several U.S. congressmen, who also began to publicly denounce the planned exhibit. By September 1994, the U.S. Senate had passed a nonbinding resolution that called the script “revisionist and offensive to many World War II veterans,” asserted the Enola Gay’s role in “helping to bring World War II to a merciful end,” and resolved that the exhibit “should avoid impugning the memory of those who gave their lives for freedom.” Four months later, in early 1995, the Smithsonian announced the cancellation of the planned exhibit and its accompanying catalog, to be replaced with a display of the Enola Gay’s enormous fuselage and brief explanations of the plane’s role in dropping the first atomic bomb and Japan’s surrender nine days later.

  Reactions in the United States and Japan were expectedly mixed. U.S. veterans who had opposed the exhibit overwhelmingly approved its cancellation. Senator Ted Stevens (R-Ala.) concurred, condemning any reframing of the official narrative as “a constant erosion of the truth” and the exhibit as “a view of the events . . . that is contrary to the memory of those who lived through the war.” At the same time, some veterans expressed reservations about the exhibit’s closing. “Even if it is true that the atomic bombings saved thousands of Americans,” veteran Dell Herndon wrote to the editor of the Whittier Daily News in California, “it is our patriotic duty to acknowledge the results of those bombs.”