Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

  NASM director Harwit resigned in protest, and fifty U.S. historians signed a letter to Smithsonian secretary I. Michael Heyman decrying factual errors and omissions contained even in the final streamlined exhibit. Japanese prime minister Murayama Tomiichi made a short statement saying that the decision to close the exhibit was “regrettable.” Nagasaki’s mayor Motoshima, however, was outraged. He responded to the news by first apologizing to those who were killed and hurt in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and for Japan’s invasion of numerous Asian nations. “But do you tell me,” he went on, “that, because of this aggression and these atrocities committed by the Japanese, there is no need to reflect upon the fact that an unprecedented weapon of mass destruction was used on a community of noncombatants?”

  Hibakusha experiences had again been excluded from the official atomic bomb narrative in the United States. Americans’ ignorance about the atomic bombings and their human effects remained intact: A 1995 Gallup poll showed that one in four Americans did not know that the U.S. had dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and even fewer comprehended the scope of the destruction. In 1995, author Jon Krakauer took a step to fill this void by traveling to Nagasaki and writing a piece about the city’s atomic bomb history. In “The Forgotten Ground Zero,” distributed by Universal Press Syndicate to newspapers throughout the United States, Krakauer briefly chronicled Yoshida’s experiences at the moment of the atomic blast and in the months and years that followed. Describing Yoshida, he wrote: “In left profile, he appears unmarked by the blast. From the other side, however, the story of the apocalypse is writ large on Yoshida’s countenance: The entire right half of his face is a matrix of purplish scar tissue and disfigured flesh.” Krakauer closed the article with a quote from Yoshida explaining his feelings toward Americans. “At first I hated Americans for what they did to me,” Yoshida said. “I didn’t understand how any nation could use such a cruel weapon on human beings. But in my old age, I have learned that holding a grudge does nobody any good. I no longer hate Americans. I only hate war.”

  In response, a letter to the editor of the Seattle Times from Olive V. McDaniel Nielsen, World War II veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, echoed veterans’ earlier outcries over the Smithsonian exhibit: “Poor Nagasaki! Poor Hiroshima!” Nielsen wrote. “If there had been no Pearl Harbor, there would not have been a bombed-out Hiroshima and a bombed-out Nagasaki. . . . How nice that [Nagasaki survivor Katsuji] Yoshida no longer hates the U.S. for what the atom bomb did to him. Does he ever wonder how many Americans still remember what his country’s planes did to Pearl Harbor?” Her letter captures the nearly insurmountable tensions between veterans’ animosity toward a former enemy and historians’ scrutiny of multilayered wartime events, particularly when the military of one country caused great harm to civilians of an enemy nation in the name of the greater good.

  At a June 1995 press conference for the opening of the scaled-down NASM exhibit, Smithsonian secretary Heyman responded to a question about why he had omitted the realities of the atomic bombs’ unprecedented destruction and human suffering. His answer: “I really decided to leave it more to the imagination.”

  ____

  For members of the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace, human imagination alone was incapable of grasping the true impact of the atomic bomb. Across Japan, a general antinuclear sentiment prevailed, but it was the hibakusha activists who believed that only by grounding the unimaginable in the specifics of human experience could people around the world comprehend the effects of nuclear war—a single bomb, instantaneously destroying a city and its population, and invisible, deadly radiation penetrating the bodies of those who survived. To fulfill their imperative, these men and women who chose to speak out persisted in openly claiming the hibakusha identities imposed on them as teenagers fifty years earlier. They chose to relive excruciating memories and opened themselves to alienation from family members, harsh judgment for publicly airing their anguish, and right-wing Japanese citizens’ untrue labeling of them as liars or communists. Speaking candidly about their personal experiences provided each a unique opportunity to influence a world they saw as both obsessed with nuclear weapons and fundamentally ignorant about their real-life consequences. They were kataribe—storytellers in the centuries-long Japanese tradition by which selected individuals pass on historical information to their fellow citizens and future generations.

  “We are now trembling at the thought of an all-out accidental nuclear war,” Dr. Akizuki declared. “In my view the evil of nuclear weapons . . . has transcended all other issues.” As the impassioned leader of the kataribe movement, Akizuki narrated one of the leading documentaries on the atomic bombings, published new hibakusha testimonies, and traveled to Europe and the Soviet Union to advocate, often before large crowds, for the elimination of nuclear weapons. In a personal meeting in Rome, Akizuki gave the pope documentary films about the atomic bombing and messages from the mayors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In his speeches, he had the rare quality of being able to express fully the truth of his own city’s suffering while also profoundly apologizing for Japan’s aggression and offering deeply felt sympathy for the immense harm his country had inflicted on others.

  Still, no matter how much he advocated for hibakusha voices to be heard or how strongly he appealed to nuclear powers to stop their production of nuclear weapons, Akizuki could never shake the sadness and despair he had felt since the moment of the bombing. Into the early 1990s, the weakened, white-haired doctor clipped every newspaper article on the atomic bomb he could find and placed them in scrapbooks. “I think it’s my duty to read them. I put them by my bedside, but often I’m exhausted and fall asleep without looking at them. I know I’ll do the same thing again, but still I continue clipping and pasting. Sadly, I’m an atomic bomb doctor.”

  One fall evening in 1992, Dr. Akizuki was returning home after presenting at an International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War conference in Nagasaki, when the cold night air triggered a severe asthma attack. “My husband always carried his inhaler,” Sugako remembered. “But he didn’t have one that day. His mind was on the conference.” An ambulance rushed Akizuki to the hospital, but his brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long. He lay unconscious in room 401 of St. Francis Hospital, the same room where he had treated patients after the bombing and in the decades since. Surrounded by gifts and flowers from family, friends, and colleagues across Japan, Sugako cared for him day and night for years, often placing her face next to his and talking softly to him as if he were conscious. When visitors came to pay their respects, Sugako brought in Akizuki’s favorite seasonal meals and asked others to eat them for her husband. “Since he worked very hard,” she said, “now God has told him to take a rest for a while.”

  • • •

  The strength of Dr. Akizuki’s vision and direction allowed the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace to thrive during his absence, both before and after Nagasaki’s 1995 public commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings. NFPP administrator Matsuo Ranko oversaw kataribe bookings and monitored their presentations to help them improve. Her work was not without the challenges of individual hibakusha personalities. Do-oh and Yoshida, for example, wanted to tell their stories in their own way, without listening to her feedback. “I am a hibakusha, and you are not,” Yoshida told Matsuo. “You cannot understand our suffering.” Do-oh felt the same way when Matsuo tried to advise her on how to better construct her speeches to help students not only feel the effects of nuclear war but also think about the causes of both the war and the atomic bombing.

  “Do-oh-san and Yoshida-san were very proud,” Matsuo remembered. “They didn’t like taking advice from someone like me who was younger and without firsthand experience of war or the atomic bombing. It took a long time to get there, but eventually they understood. When the children listened eagerly to their presentations and wrote them letters of thanks, both of them were so happy an
d moved. Many of the children said they would work hard to prevent another war.”

  In contrast to the vast majority of the more than two hundred thousand Nagasaki survivors who never spoke publicly about their experiences, forty hibakusha—including Yoshida, Do-oh, Wada, and Nagano—made up the NFPP’s core group of kataribe. Taniguchi joined them at times, while also working with several other activist organizations. Within the seemingly hopeless circumstances of thousands of nuclear warheads deployed across the globe, nuclear nations continuing to manufacture weapons, and new nations racing to develop them, this small group of hibakusha refused invisibility. Against cultural norms, they remained willing to tell their personal stories to adults and children at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, in schools and universities across the country, and at local, national, and international conferences and events. Their mandate was to speak with neutrality, without promoting any political or religious agenda. With a sense of urgency as they approached the final years of their lives, they used their unique personalities and experiences to help audiences resist official narratives and vague impressions of the bombings and grasp the human cost of nuclear weapons. Their goal was clear: that Nagasaki remain the last nuclear-bombed city in history.

  CHAPTER 9

  GAMAN

  Gaman: Enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity

  Every morning at five a.m., Wada wakes up after six hours of sleep and pauses to look out his window at the expanse of the Urakami Valley that stretches all the way to the bay. After washing his face, he heads to the kitchen, waits for the newspaper delivery, and has breakfast—misoshiru (miso soup), rice, and various dishes Hisako prepares. On days when he has speaking engagements, he dresses in coordinated slacks, a dress shirt, a tie, and a wool or tweed jacket. Since he no longer drives, Wada walks everywhere, laughing with appreciation that at his age, his legs still work.

  “In 1945, there were no cars or gas or oil—so everyone walked,” he says. “You could see the mountains from everywhere.” Now, from certain vantage points, tall buildings block his view of the mountains. Some things haven’t changed, though: The Urakami and Nakashima rivers flow into Nagasaki Bay, centuries-old Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines still stand in the older sections of the city, and on early spring mornings, fog rolls in from the sea, blanketing the city. Nagasaki is still a Mitsubishi town, with factories rebuilt on two of the company’s former sites and massive shipyards that produce some of the world’s largest commercial ships and destroyers, the latter in defiance of Nagasaki’s declaration as a city of peace.

  Little else remains of the city Wada knew in 1945. He walks down narrow streets through his neighborhood crowded with Japanese-style homes, apartments, and condominium buildings. Following a path along the Urakami River, he passes schools, parks, and grocery stores filled with fresh produce, meats, fish, canned goods, and sweets. He crosses Ohashi Bridge and strides past the former site of Do-oh’s Mitsubishi factory, near the streetcar stop where he would have died if another streetcar hadn’t derailed that morning, resulting in a change in his route. Today, cars and trucks speed by him on the Urakami Valley’s main thoroughfare, lined with storefronts, cafés, and offices. Wada passes a pachinko parlor just as someone exits, so he can hear the loud music and whirring of small metal pinballs racing through the machines inside. Color-coded streetcars still run along the same routes he drove before the bombing, their wires connected to cables overhead, though now an automated voice announces upcoming stops, and machines collect the fares. As the streetcars pass, Wada mentally calculates their speed.

  Farther south, too, the city is barely recognizable from Wada’s childhood. The circular observatory atop Mount Inasa provides an expansive view of the East China Sea and the islands off the coast of Kyushu. Below, large vessels, smaller boats, and city cruise liners dock at Nagasaki’s port in view of waterfront shops and restaurants. The modern Nagasaki Station is surrounded by multistory office buildings, department stores, and hotels. Just north of the station on Nishizaka Hill is the Site of the Martyrdom of the Twenty-Six Saints of Japan, with a long wall of life-size bronze statues and a memorial hall with religious artifacts passed down through Nagasaki’s complex Catholic history of freedom and forbidden practice. Approximately sixty-seven thousand Catholics now reside in Nagasaki Prefecture, attending services at Urakami Cathedral and other churches scattered throughout the city, prefecture, and surrounding islands. Chinatown in the old city thrives. At night, the central district of Shianbashi is filled with packed clubs. Along the main north-south street through the city, a small Ferris wheel on the roof of a department store lights up the skyline.

  In the southernmost region of the city, tourists frequent Glover Garden, perched on a hill overlooking the bay—the nineteenth-century home and gardens of Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant who established trade between Nagasaki and Britain. Dejima, the tiny fan-shaped residential and commercial island built in 1636 to segregate the Dutch East India Company traders from the rest of the city, has been restored to replicate its seventeenth-century design—a reminder that during Japan’s two hundred years of national isolation, Nagasaki was the only Japanese port open to the West. Now foreigners are so common in Nagasaki that they are barely noticed except by schoolchildren, who frequently stare at them at bus stops or from across the aisle inside streetcars.

  Veiled from view from the main road through the Urakami Valley, the bombing and its aftereffects are meticulously and elegantly remembered at Hypocenter Park, Peace Park, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, and the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. In Hypocenter Park, enclosed by lush green trees that block the sounds of traffic, a tall, black granite cenotaph points upward to the spot a third of a mile overhead where the bomb detonated. In front of the memorial, a large stone box holds a microfilm list of victims’ names. Concrete concentric circles ring the monument. Scattered through the park are numerous smaller monuments, including one for the thousands of Korean slave laborers who died in the bombing. Against the banks of the small Shimonokawa River, which runs through the park, postbomb soil from the hypocenter area is encased in glass, revealing eerily preserved pieces of melted glass and fragments of tile, ceramic dishware, and bottles.

  If you know where to look, lesser-known reminders of the atomic bomb are tucked away within the concentric circles of the bomb’s reach. Behind the rebuilt Shiroyama Elementary School, atop a hill west of the hypocenter, the cherry trees planted in memory of students who died in the bombing have now matured. Bomb shelters dug into the hillsides around the perimeter of the school are now filled in with dirt or covered by boards or chain-link fencing. At the corner of the school closest to the hypocenter, a five-thousand-square-foot section of the original building now serves as a small gallery of atomic bomb artifacts and Hayashi Shigeo’s 1945 photographs of the annihilated city.

  Behind the enormous, U-shaped Yamazato Elementary School north of the hypocenter, three 1940s-era air raid shelters carved out of the hillside are preserved where countless teachers, children, and neighborhood residents fled and died. Down the hill is the tiny hut where Dr. Nagai lived during his final years; next door is a small gallery and library of the physician’s books, photographs, and personal possessions. Scorched statues of Catholic saints stand in the front garden of Urakami Cathedral, and one of its original fifty-ton domes still lies embedded in the hillside where it fell seconds after the blast.

  Urakami Valley, viewed from Mount Inasa, 2011. (Photograph by Shirabe Hitomi)

  At the base of Mount Kompira southeast of the hypocenter, Nagasaki University School of Medicine and its affiliated hospital host multiple organizations that serve hibakusha medical needs, document historical and current studies on radiation-related medical conditions, and provide the public with data on nuclear weapons stockpiles across the world. Nagasaki’s famous one-legged stone torii gateway still perches, blackened and erect, at the hillside
entrance to Sanno Shrine. Up the hill, two scarred camphor trees—once considered dead after the bomb’s blast and heat had severed their trunks and branches and scorched them bare—are now more than twenty feet in circumference and rise fifty-five and sixty-nine feet high, their massive branches reaching out in all directions, creating a thick green canopy over the walkway leading to the shrine.

  Except for those like Yoshida who cannot hide their disfigurement, most of the approximately fifty thousand aging hibakusha living in the Nagasaki area remain invisible to the public eye. Many avoid the hypocenter district altogether because of the terrifying feelings that still arise. Others agonize that their family members’ bones lie beneath today’s bustling roads, buildings, and memorial parks. Some bow their heads in silence as they pass by in their cars or by train.

  The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) was introduced in Japan in the 1990s and came into public awareness as a psychological condition after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, but counseling remains culturally foreign and rarely available. Images of hideously burned people reaching out for help are permanently engraved in many survivors’ memories. One woman feels like she’s going insane because she can’t forget the voices of small children and their mother buried beneath their collapsed house screaming for help. Another has never eaten a pomegranate since watching—and smelling—one of her family members being cremated on top of wood from a pomegranate tree. For many, silence has remained the only way to survive.