Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

  Do-oh, Nagano, Taniguchi, Wada, and Yoshida remain among the select few who keep alive the public memory of the atomic bomb. Each year, the NFPP’s forty kataribe make nearly 1,300 presentations in 137 Nagasaki schools, plus many more for students visiting Nagasaki on field trips. In addition to Taniguchi’s U.S. travels, Wada, Nagano, and Yoshida have also traveled to American universities to tell their stories—Wada at Westmont College in California, Nagano at Oberlin College in Ohio, and Yoshida at DePaul University and Northwestern University in Chicago. Nagano was scheduled to depart Oberlin for a day of sightseeing in New York on the morning of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Unable to return home for nearly a week, she was terrorized by the images on television, not only because of their horrifying content but also because she initially misunderstood her interpreter and thought that Japan and United States were again at war.

  This terrifying event notwithstanding, Nagano, Yoshida, and Wada are proud of the dialogues they were able to create with American students. They were frequently asked about Pearl Harbor and whether they, as atomic bomb survivors, hate Americans. In response, all three apologized for their country’s attack on Pearl Harbor and told their audiences that the war had been between countries, not people. At the same time, they challenged students to think about the morality of the atomic bombings. “I don’t blame the United States,” Wada told his audience, “but I want people to understand what the nuclear bombs do. We can’t have another atomic bomb experience.”

  Since 1995, numerous books, exhibits, and documentaries about the bombings have been released in the United States. Many are from Nagasaki, including Yamaguchi Senji’s memoir Burnt Yet Undaunted; former ABCC physician James Yamazaki’s book Children of the Atomic Bomb; an exhibit of Yamahata Yosuke’s photo collection with an accompanying book and film in English; and U.S. Marine Corps photographer Joe O’Donnell’s Japan 1945—a collection with several photos of postbomb Nagasaki, including his gripping black-and-white image of Taniguchi’s back. While speaking in the United States, however, Wada was shocked to discover how many American college students knew only about the Hiroshima bombing; they hadn’t learned—or didn’t remember—that Nagasaki had been bombed as well. “The voice of Nagasaki,” he says, “has still not reached the world.”

  Back home, Wada speaks forty or fifty times a year, mostly in the fall and spring when most of Japan’s school field trips are scheduled. Energized by talking with young people, he keeps changing his presentations to stay relevant to new generations of children. “When I was younger, I wanted to stand up for what was right, but I could not,” he explains. “Now, if there’s one thing I can do to protect our children, even if it’s hard, I will do whatever I can to help.”

  Wada Koichi telling his story. (Courtesy of Wada Koichi)

  Wada falls asleep easily each night, although a few times a year, his sleep is interrupted by nightmares of Hotarujaya Terminal crashing down on top of him. In the morning, he opens his window and looks out over Nagasaki, marveling that the city before him was built out of the atomic ruins. “One person can’t do anything, but if many people gather together, they can accomplish unimaginable things,” he says. “If it’s possible to rebuild this city out of nothing, why isn’t it possible for us to eliminate war and nuclear weapons, to create peace? We can’t not do it!”

  ____

  On a sunny April afternoon in 2011, Nagano arrives by taxi at a large hotel halfway up Mount Inasa to speak to a group of junior high school students from another part of Japan. They gather in a small meeting room, the students’ chairs facing front—the boys seated on one side of the aisle, the girls on the other. Nagano sits at a table facing them, wearing a pale pink blazer and deep red lipstick. Her auburn hair is thinning.

  She adjusts her mike. “Konnichiwa [hello],” she says to the students, slowly and clearly. “Thank you for taking the time today to listen to my story.”

  Three years after becoming a kataribe, Nagano was finally able to tell her audiences about Seiji’s and Kuniko’s deaths and her fifty-year isolation from her mother. At first, Nagano cried as she recounted these stories and spoke of her lifelong sadness and guilt; now her voice cracks only slightly. During busy school field trip seasons, Nagano often speaks two or three times a day, and she has traveled to cities all over Japan. “I never imagined I would do something like this,” she says. “But I feel it is my responsibility to tell the truth. If people understand how terrifying the atomic bomb is, my survival and my witness to this experience will have had a purpose.”

  Speaking to the students at the Inasa hotel, Nagano begins with her life before the war—what it was like to be mobilized to work in the airplane parts factory, how lonely she was when her younger brother and sister were sent away for safety, and how determined she was to bring them back. She describes the moment of the flash—“pikaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”—and her feeling of dread as she raced toward Nagasaki in near darkness to find her family. She recalls the scorched people wandering through the ruins with skin from their arms hanging down to the ground, and dead bodies everywhere she turned. The students listen intently as she describes seeing her father. “By total coincidence, I ran into him on that bridge!” she says, her voice rising to a high pitch. “I was so lucky!”

  Nagano’s eyes tear up and her voice shakes as she speaks about cremating Sei-chan in a scorched field. In Japan, most students would sit politely even if they weren’t interested, but these boys and girls are just a few years younger than Nagano was at the time of the bombing, and they are riveted. “We gathered some wood scraps, laid Sei-chan on top of them, and burned his body,” she says. “I watched it with my own eyes.” She recounts Kuniko’s death and cremation in the village of Obama. “I brought them back from Kagoshima. It was my fault that they died. I still think I should have died instead of them—and wonder why I have to live this long.”

  Nagano tells the students about her mother’s icy silence and their ultimate reconciliation, about her shock at seeing about her brother’s and sister’s blackened ashes, and about being in the United States on 9/11. She leans forward and pulls them into her focus. “Please treasure your families and friends,” she says. “You were born in an era of peace. Please treasure it.”

  ____

  “I was a young girl, healthy in both mind and body,” Do-oh writes in her opening to an autobiographical essay. “I was someone who talked with friends about our dreams and burning hopes. But in one instant the atomic bomb capsized my life.” She directs her anger at the “stupidity of war . . . as a scream from the Showa era.”

  In the early 2000s, Do-oh stands tall before a large group of students and teachers, dressed in an elegant black brocade jacket and skirt she made when she was in her thirties. A hand-painted gold blouse peeks through at the breastbone. She wears small diamond earrings, and her black hair is pulled back into a stylish twist. Do-oh speaks directly, without hesitation, expressing her shame over Japan’s atrocities in China and her government’s silence about it. She describes the day of the bombing, her injuries, and her parents digging up young sweet potatoes, cooking them, and feeding them to Do-oh as her final meal. She speaks with great feeling about her agonizing decade of isolation inside her house. Do-oh presses the young people in her audience to think beyond economics and money and focus on deeper values. “We need to understand how to live with heart,” she says. “The twenty-first century has got to be the century of sensitivity.”

  A few girls in the audience cry as Do-oh draws them into her story. Do-oh urges them not to waste their abilities and implores them to try to find their own independence and life purpose. “I want to be strong, like her,” one girl comments afterward.

  For a while, Do-oh’s speaking engagements were interrupted by health problems. After surviving breast cancer in the 1990s, Do-oh suffered two strokes that left her face partially paralyzed and her body unable to feel hot or cold
. Even as she recuperated in the hospital, however, she painted and composed a collection of tanka. “For the birds and for me,” she wrote, “when the will to live rises up / even in the midst of turmoil / the unmovable mountain laughs.” Once ambulatory, Do-oh rejected her hospital gown and walked the hallways in an elegant navy cotton robe made from yukata (summer kimono) fabric. “‘If you don’t become yourself, who will become you?’” Do-oh declared, quoting a line from her favorite Japanese poet. “It’s delightful, don’t you think? This is what guides my life.”

  Do-oh Mineko recounting her story. (Courtesy of Okada Ikuyo)

  Extensive rehabilitation therapy gave Do-oh the strength to continue serving as a kataribe. The small pieces of glass still lodged in her back remain sensitive to the touch and unpredictably painful when she moves in certain ways; her doctors want to remove them, but Do-oh refuses, afraid that the shards are too close to the spine. She appears in dozens of television, radio, and print interviews, speaking on behalf of those whose bodies she had stepped over to escape the darkened, collapsed Mitsubishi factory—and for her two school friends who died. When Do-oh gives presentations for school groups, students and teachers often gasp at her striking style—beautiful fabrics, bold colors, and eyeglasses to coordinate with whatever she is wearing—and her unique fashion sense frequently stirs negative comments by some of her kataribe peers. “Children who come to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum for presentations are very curious about what kind of people hibakusha are,” NFPP kataribe coordinator Matsuo Ranko says. “Then Mrs. Do-oh comes out in a bright red dress, long, manicured nails, and big earrings. Or a cheetah print. Jaw-dropping outfits. Other kataribe came to me and asked me to talk with Mrs. Do-oh to get her to tone down what she wears.”

  Do-oh was indignant. “Why?” she retorted when Matsuo broached the subject with her. “Why is this fashion inappropriate? There is no rule that says hibakusha should all dress the same! I am a hibakusha! I am me!’”

  Matsuo agreed. She went back to those who were complaining and told them what Do-oh said. “I’m not sure they were satisfied,” Matsuo says, laughing, “but I thought it was truly wonderful.”

  ____

  In 2009, U.S. president Barack Obama gave a major speech in Prague addressing the state of nuclear weapons in the world and the United States’ moral responsibility to lead disarmament efforts. “Today,” Obama said, “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Taniguchi and thousands of hibakusha throughout Japan felt more optimistic than they had in decades. “I am counting on this new President Obama,” Taniguchi said. “Although previous U.S. presidents never worked on reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons, President Obama actually presented a plan to approach nuclear weapons reduction. We have prayed for the day when we can say it was good for us to live this long.”

  Within two years, however, Taniguchi’s hope for significant weapons reduction had deflated. He rails at Obama for continuing to modernize U.S. nuclear weapons for war readiness after receiving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his antinuclear stance. “What happened to that speech in which he called for a world without nuclear weapons?” Taniguchi demands. “Just how long is he going to continue these nuclear tests that trample on the feelings of hibakusha?”

  As of December 2014, more than 16,300 nuclear warheads were stockpiled at some 98 sites in 14 countries across the globe—94 percent of which were controlled by the United States and Russia. Still, Taniguchi keeps fighting for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. He has protested against India’s 1998 underground nuclear weapons tests and more recent subcritical tests in the United States. In his late seventies and now into his eighties, he has participated in the United Nations’ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conferences, one of several focal points for his fight for the global reduction and eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.

  Out of 193 United Nations member states, 190 have signed the NPT—only India, Israel, and Pakistan have not—making the NPT the most successful international disarmament agreement since the beginning of nuclear weapons development. The treaty, which came into force in 1970, binds signatory nations to an agreement that only the five current nuclear weapons states—the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—may possess nuclear weapons, and it mandates these nuclear nations’ ongoing commitment to the long-term goal of complete disarmament. By signing the treaty, all other countries have agreed to renounce current or future development of nuclear weapons. Since 1995, the NPT has required a majority of signatory nations to gather every five years to review the treaty’s technical aspects, report on compliance, and develop new strategies that all participating nations can agree upon to help achieve the treaty’s goals.

  Taniguchi joined the Nagasaki delegations to the 2005 and 2010 NPT Review Conferences at the United Nations in New York. Standing before more than 400 representatives from approximately 150 nations, he testified about his injuries, the long-term effects of nuclear weapons, and the critical need for faster action in international disarmament. He held up the 1946 USSBS color photo of his raw, exposed back—now one of Nagasaki’s iconic images symbolizing the physical and emotional suffering caused by the atomic bombing—and he quietly implored his audience to take action. The 2005 Review Conference got bogged down in procedural disagreements, and no substantial action steps were agreed upon. The 2010 Review Conference, however, ended with the unanimous adoption of a plan to “speed progress on nuclear disarmament, advance non-proliferation, and work towards a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.” A two-month exhibition of atomic bomb photographs and artifacts opened in the main lobby of the United Nations. Photographs of Taniguchi, Yamaguchi Senji, and others lined the wall.

  Taniguchi Sumiteru, age eighty-one, speaking before the 2010 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. He holds the 1946 photograph of his burned, raw back to give the audience a visual image of his injuries. Taniguchi spoke as a representative of Nihon Hidankyo. (Courtesy of Taniguchi Sumiteru)

  Taniguchi contains his unabated rage toward the Japanese government for attacking Pearl Harbor and for never satisfactorily apologizing. He seethes over the United States’ decision to use the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without understanding the extent of damage they would cause—especially to the human body—and the absence of official remorse. His anger is particularly triggered when he hears language that he believes distorts the truth about nuclear weapons. The phrase “peaceful use of nuclear weapons” for example, is often used by officials talking about how the atomic bombs ended the Pacific War or how, since then, nuclear weapons have deterred war. Taniguchi balks. “The word ‘peaceful’ is used to make everything acceptable,” he says. For Taniguchi, always exhausted from the physical pain he endures each day, there is only one meaning for the word “peace,” and it doesn’t include nuclear weapons. “The atomic bomb,” he says, “is the destroyer of peace.”

  ____

  “I’m as different now as clouds in the sky are to mud on the ground!” seventy-seven-year-old Yoshida declares in 2009, comparing himself to sixty years earlier. He zips through the hallways of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, often taking the stairs instead of the elevator. “The stairs are better for you!” he says, laughing, racing up to the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace’s third-floor offices for a meeting with staff. He carries snacks to give to his colleagues in case they missed lunch.

  Always on a mission to promote peace, Yoshida meets with Japanese and foreign journalists or filmmakers reporting on survivors’ lives. He escorts them through the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, where over six hundred thousand people visit each year, telling his guests about his own experiences as they walk.

  The museum’s first exhibit room captures life in Nagasaki before August 9, 1945. The next room, dark and caverno
us, is filled with actual and re-created ruins of the city in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Yoshida quickly guides his visitors into the next gallery, past a time line of the Manhattan Project, the development of the bombs, and events leading up to their delivery. On his left, they see a life-size model of Fat Man and scientific descriptions of the bomb’s blast, heat, and radiation. Yoshida leads them through crowds of junior high school students to get to his destination: the long wall of photographs documenting survivors’ injuries and the human effects of the bombing.

  Taniguchi’s famous color photo hangs here, as do the two photos of fifteen-year-old Yoshida’s crusted, scorched face taken in 1946 before and after his skin graft surgeries. He touches the black patch covering the spot where his right ear used to be. “After a while,” he says, “the swollen part here rotted and fell off. So there’s no ear here. Nothing at all—just a hole, alone.” He pauses, then grins slightly, changing the mood. “I’m okay now, but then I was completely messed up—such a handsome fellow that I was!” He happily points out that he often stands in front of these photos without anyone recognizing that he is the same person. “It’s helped me realize that my face is much better than it used to be,” he says, smiling broadly, no longer ashamed of the scars on his face and neck, the crookedness of his mouth and teeth, his shriveled left ear, or the black patch strapped to his head. “Every day I apply lotion on my skin,” he says. “And now, after more than sixty years, my face has finally improved this much!”