Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

  Joe O’Donnell’s photographs and personal narrative can be found in his book Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine’s Photographs from Ground Zero and essay “A Straight Path Through Hell,” American Heritage Magazine 56:3.

  Nagasaki survivors’ memories of the early occupation: Hashimoto Yutaka in “Mom and Silver Rice,” Crossroads 4, and Tsukasa Kikuchi in Silent Thunder, remembered the kindness of occupation soldiers; Michie Hattori Bernstein is quoted from “Eyewitness to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Blast,” WWII Magazine; Uchida Tsukasa described the occupation bulldozers in The Atomic Bomb Suppressed by Monica Braw; and Chiyoko Egashira recalled schoolchildren “cheering one another up” in Testimonies of the Atomic Bomb Survivors. See also “Resurrecting Nagasaki” by Chad R. Diehl, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University.

  For hibakusha commemorations, see Nagai Kayano in We of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai; Takashi Nagai’s The Bells of Nagasaki; Sakue Shimohira in The Last Atomic Bomb, directed by Robert Richter; and Itonaga Yoshi’s “The Sun Dropped Out of the Sky” in Nagasaki August 9, 1945, edited by Mary Wiesen and Elizabeth Cannon. Itsuko Okubo is the mother who collected remnants of a school uniform in remembrance of her son, interviewed in the film Nagasaki Journey, produced by Judy Irving and Chris Beaver. According to Dr. Nagai Takashi and others, the November 1945 memorial at Urakami Church honored eight thousand Catholic deaths; other sources indicate the number of Catholics killed in Nagasaki may be closer to ten thousand. See “Religious Responses to the Atomic Bombing in Nagasaki” by Okuyama Michiaki, Bulletin (Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture) 37; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, edited by the Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, p. 382.

  CHAPTER 5: TIME SUSPENDED

  NAGASAKI, EARLY 1946

  The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) generated more than one hundred individual reports on their investigations of the impact of Allied air attacks against Japan during the war, including civilian defense, medical, economic, and military studies. The survey’s aim to support “future development” of the U.S. military is quoted from Summary Report: Pacific War, USSBS report no. 1; additional reports specific to Nagasaki are listed in the Selected Bibliography.

  For background on the USSBS film crew in Nagasaki, including interviews with Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Herbert Sussan and Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Daniel McGovern, see Atomic Cover-up by Greg Mitchell, which includes Sussan’s quotations, “Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation” and “I shuddered when the lights were turned on to film him.” Sussan’s observation that Nagasaki seemed “like an enormous graveyard” is from “38 Years After Nagasaki, A Chronicler of the Horror Returns to an Unfaded Past” by Dave Yuzo Spector, Chicago Tribune, January 5, 1984.

  For the USSBS footage of Taniguchi at Omura National Hospital, see Video No. 342-USAF-11002, “Medical Aspect, 11/19/1945–02/04/1946,” Records of U.S. Air Force Commands, Activities, and Organizations, Record Group 342, Moving Images Relating to Military Aviation Activities, National Archives at College Park, MD. Digital copy available through the Online Public Access catalog (identifier 64449) at www.archives.gov/research/search. Taniguchi appears at marker 18:30.

  Taniguchi reflected that “doctors were clueless” about his treatment in his interview in Steven Okazaki’s documentary film White Light/Black Rain.

  For details about postwar Japan’s struggling economy and food shortages and Nagasaki’s population changes and occupation troop movements, see the occupation-related sources listed in the notes for chapter 4, especially Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower.

  Uchida Tsukasa’s memory of the old woman who inadvertently carried in human bones when gathering firewood appears in his testimony “A Dark Spot on the Hill of the Atomic Bomb Hypocenter,” originally published in Atomic Bomb Testimonials by Nagasaki City Employees, edited by the Nagasaki Testimonial Society, English translation provided by the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall.

  For stories of births following in utero radiation exposure, see Masahito Hirose’s “The Parents of Children with Microcephaly Due to Atomic Bomb Radiation” and Nagasaki Shimbun’s “Atomic Bomb Survivors Today” in Testimonies of the Atomic Bomb Survivors; and Children of the Atomic Bomb by Dr. James N. Yamazaki.

  Stories of postwar hardships: Fukahori Yoshitoshi, interviewed by the author in 2011, remembered being treated for tuberculosis with only vitamins and bed rest; Miyazaki Midori, interviewed in 2009, recalled sharing one pair of shoes with her siblings. See also The Deaths of Hibakusha, vol. 1; and Mihoko Mukai’s “Recalling Hellish Memories of My Childhood” in Voices of the A-Bomb Survivors: Nagasaki, compiled by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Testimonial Society.

  For the reopening of Nagasaki schools, see testimonies by teachers: Chiyoko Egashira’s “The Day Shiroyama Primary School Was Destroyed” and Hideo Arakawa’s “A Record of the Atomic Bombing” in Testimonies of the Atomic Bomb Survivors; Teruko Araki’s “The Children and I” in Living Beneath the Atomic Cloud, edited by Takashi Nagai; and Hideyuki Hayashi’s “From the Ruins of Yamazato Primary School” in The Light of Morning.

  U.S. SILENCING

  Sources for Japan’s transformation during the occupation include Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower; Inventing Japan: 1853–1964 by Ian Buruma; A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa to the Present by Andrew Gordon; The Making of Modern Japan by Marius Jansen; Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix; and Japan: The Story of a Nation by Edwin O. Reischauer.

  For Japan’s postwar constitution, see the Japanese National Diet Library’s online exhibition “The Birth of the Constitution of Japan,” http://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/.

  For the rules and activities of the occupation’s Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD), see The Atomic Bomb Suppressed by Monica Braw. See also Reports of General MacArthur, vol. 1 supp., chap. 8. For film restrictions, see Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan by Hiroshi Kitamura.

  Nagasaki’s anniversary ceremony: Domei News Agency journalist Hideo Matsuno describes the naming of the anniversary ceremony as the “Memorial Day for the Restoration of Peace” and other occupation censorship restrictions in his video testimony at the Global Network of the National Peace Memorial Halls for the Atomic Bomb Victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at http://www.global-peace.go.jp/. Occupation authorities noted their opposition to atomic bomb commemoration ceremonies, “for the reason that they are being used as a means of propagandizing ‘atonement,’ which in turn has an adverse effect on the war-guilt program,” in “Memo: ‘Nagasaki Ceremony,’ H.G.S. to SCAP-GHQ, August 2, 1948,” Record Group 5, MacArthur Memorial Library and Archives, Norfolk, VA.

  For the CCD censor’s concern that Ishida Masako’s memoir would “tear open war scars,” see The Atomic Bomb Suppressed by Monica Braw.

  Nagai Takashi’s view of Nagasaki as chosen “to expiate the sins” of the war is quoted from The Bells of Nagasaki. For details about the “Sack of Manila” appendix of the 1949 publication of Nagai’s Nagasaki no kane, see The Atomic Bomb Suppressed by Monica Braw; and “Nagasaki Writers: The Mission” by Kamata Sadao in Literature Under the Nuclear Cloud, compiled by Ito Narihiko et al.

  Censorship of medical studies: “Medical Censorship in Occupied Japan, 1945–1948” by Sey Nishimura, Pacific Historical Review 58:1; “Promoting Health in American-Occupied Japan” by Sey Nishimura, American Journal of Public Health 99:8; and “The Repatriation of Atomic Bomb Victim Body Parts to Japan: Natural Objects and Diplomacy” by M. Susan Lindee, Osiris 13. Dr. Shiotsuki Masao described the warning he received at a presentation about his Nagasaki experience in his book Doctor at Nagasaki.

  For the U.S. public’s reactions to the atomic bombings, see “The American People and the Use of Atomic Bombs on Japan: The 1940s” by Michael J. Yavenditti, Historian 36:2; Hiroshima in America by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell; and “Commemoratio
n and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan” by Laura Hein and Mark Selden in their essay collection Living with the Bomb.

  The postwar U.S. media’s emphasis on American scientific achievement when reporting about the atomic bombs was exemplified by the writings of New York Times science reporter William L. Laurence, hired by the Manhattan Project, while still on the Times staff, to draft exclusive press releases about the bomb’s development. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his glorified account of the Nagasaki atomic bombing (from his vantage point aboard the companion plane The Great Artiste) and his ten-part series on the atomic bomb. For Laurence’s role as the War Department’s mouthpiece, see Hiroshima in America by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell; “Covering the Bomb: Press and State in the Shadow of Nuclear War” by Robert Karl Manoff, in War, Peace and the News Media, Proceedings, March 18 and 19, 1983, edited by David M. Rubin and Marie Cunningham; and “Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer Prize” by Amy and David Goodman at commondreams.org, August 10, 2004.

  Quotations related to U.S. opposition to the bombs: “Has It Come to This” by A. J. Muste, and “The Literacy of Survival” by Norman Cousins, reprinted in Hiroshima’s Shadow, edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz. Admiral Halsey’s doubts about the bombs’ necessity were reported in an Associated Press dispatch; see, for example, the “Atom Tests” editorial in the Washington Post, September 11, 1946. Other concerns about the use of atomic weapons voiced in the U.S. press include “Gentlemen: Are You Mad!” by Lewis Mumford in the Saturday Review of Literature, March 2, 1946; and “Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith” by the Federal Council of Churches. For reprints of these articles, and others, see Hiroshima’s Shadow, edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz. See also “From Hiroshima: A Report and a Question” by Father John A. Siemes, Time, February 11, 1946; “What the Bomb Really Did” by Robert DeVore, Collier’s, March 2, 1946; and commentary by former Los Alamos scientists, including “Beyond Imagination” by physicist Phillip Morrison, New Republic, February 1946, and “Atomic Bomb Damage—Japan and USA” by R. E. Marshak et al., Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1, 1946.

  The USSBS summary reports released in June 1946 may have also contributed to the mounting concerns of U.S. leaders that public support for the bombs’ use was in jeopardy. Although the conclusion was later determined to be unsupported by the survey’s own data at the time, the USSBS claimed that, due to the depleted state of Japan’s military and economy by 1945, Japan would have likely surrendered prior to the end of the year “even if atomic bombs had not been dropped.” For analysis of this USSBS conclusion, see “Compelling Japan’s Surrender Without the A-Bomb, Soviet Entry, or Invasion: Reconsidering the US Bombing Survey’s Early-Surrender Conclusions” by Barton J. Bernstein, Journal of Strategic Studies 18:2.

  John Hersey’s Hiroshima appeared in the New Yorker on August 31, 1946. Book-of-the-Month Club president Harry Scherman’s praise for Hersey’s work was quoted in “‘The Most Spectacular Explosion in the Time of Man’” by Charles Poore, New York Times, November 10, 1946; and Monica Braw describes the reaction of occupation censors to Hiroshima in The Atomic Bomb Suppressed. For more regarding the impact of Hersey’s Hiroshima, see “John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of ‘Hiroshima’” by Michael J. Yavenditti, Pacific Historical Review 43:1 (February 1974).

  For the official story of the atomic bomb decision, see “If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used” by Karl T. Compton, Atlantic Monthly 178:6 (December 1946), and “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” by Henry L. Stimson, Harper’s Magazine 194:1161 (February 1947). President Truman approved Compton’s appraisal of the situation in a letter printed in the Atlantic Monthly 179:1 (February 1947).

  The creation of the official U.S. narrative is thoroughly explored in “Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History” by Barton J. Bernstein in Hiroshima’s Shadow, edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz. For an excellent overview of scholars’ attempts to reconstruct the bomb decision, see “Historiographical Essay: Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground” by J. Samuel Walker, Diplomatic History 29:2. Bernstein offers expert analysis of U.S. leaders’ misleading postwar claims of high casualty estimates for the planned invasion of Japan in “Reconsidering Truman’s Claim of ‘Half a Million American Lives’ Saved by the Atomic Bomb: The Construction and Deconstruction of a Myth,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22:1.

  Quotations by U.S. leaders in defense of the bombing: Harvard president and Interim Committee member James B. Conant expressed his concern about bomb opponents causing a “distortion of history” in a letter to Harvey Bundy, September 23, 1946 (Records of President James B. Conant, Harvard University Archives). Additional quotations related to Stimson’s 1947 article appear in the microfilm edition of the Henry L. Stimson Papers at the Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives; see Felix Frankfurter to Stimson, 12-16-46 (reel 116); James Byrnes to Stimson, 1-28-47 (reel 116); and McGeorge Bundy to Stimson, 2-18-47 (reel 117). As noted by Barton J. Bernstein and others, McGeorge Bundy in Danger and Survival (New York: Random House, 1988) later regretted the purposeful half-truths and omissions in the “Decision” article that allowed the U.S. public to believe that the atomic bombs were given adequate forethought by Truman and his advisers.

  NAGASAKI, LATE 1946–1948

  Taniguchi’s descriptions of his intense pain while lying facedown “on the verge of death” are quoted from his unpublished speeches from 1986 and 2010. Taniguchi provided copies of his speeches and his Omura National Hospital medical records.

  Dr. Shiotsuki Masao recalled the “molten lava” of survivors’ stubborn keloid scars in his book Doctor at Nagasaki.

  For the psychological impact of the bombing, see Hiroshima and Nagasaki, edited by the Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, chap. 12; and Death in Life by Robert Jay Lifton. Numerous hibakusha testimonies provided personal perspectives on psychological trauma; the father who questioned his own survival daily while kneeling before his daughter’s ashes described his experience anonymously in response to a 1985 Nihon Hidankyo survey; see The Deaths of Hibakusha, vol. 1, p. 130.

  For Lt. Colonel Victor Delnore, see “Victor’s Justice: Colonel Victor Delnore and the U.S. Occupation of Nagasaki” by Lane R. Earns, Crossroads 3. Delnore reflected on his aim to “wake the people up” in “Gentle Warrior Saw Beyond Bombs/Brought Compassion to Nagasaki Job” by Mary Frain, Telegram and Gazette (Worcester, MA), August 13, 1995. He described the Buddhist ceremony for unidentified survivors in a letter to his family; see Victor’s War: The World War II Letters of Lt. Col. Victor Delnore, edited by his daughter, Patricia Delnore Magee. Delnore’s memo to the Civil Censorship Detachment in support of the publication of Ishida Masako’s book is in The Atomic Bomb Suppressed by Monica Braw.

  Winfield Niblo and square dancing: “‘Dancing People Are Happy People’: Square Dancing and Democracy in Occupied Japan” by Lane R. Earns, Crossroads 2. See also “Yank Teaches Square Dance to 20,000 Japs in Nagasaki,” Reading Eagle (Reading, PA), September 7, 1947; and “Japs Adopting Our Democratic Square Dances,” Milwaukee Journal, April 14, 1949.

  For hibakusha stories about suicides: Catholic hibakusha Fukahori Satoru described his resolve to “suck it up” in Steven Okazaki’s film White Light/Black Rain. Toyomi Hashimoto remembered her husband’s suicide attempt in “Hellish Years After Hellish Days” in Cries for Peace, edited by Soka Gakkai, Youth Division. Other sources include Senji Yamaguchi in Burnt Yet Undaunted, compiled by Shinji Fujisaki; Hisako Kyuma’s “Engulfed in Light and Fire” and Kazuko Nagase’s “The Twenty-nine Years I Have Lived Through” in Voices of the A-Bomb Survivors: Nagasaki, compiled by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Testimonial Society; Komine Hidetaka’s “A Message to the World from Hiroshima and Nagasaki” exhibit panel a
t the United Nations Headquarters in New York, May 2010; multiple testimonies at “Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Messages from Hibakusha,” http://www.asahi.com/hibakusha; and Shimohira Sakue in “In the Words of an Atomic Bomb Survivor” by Brian Burke-Gaffney in Crossroads 3.

  Do-oh’s memories of her despair during the long days hidden inside her house are quoted from the title essay of her collection Ikasarete ikite [Allowed to Live, I Live], edited by Keisho bukai (Do-oh Mineko iko shuu) henshu iinkai [Legacy Group (Do-oh Mineko Posthumous Collection) Editorial Committee], translated into English for the author’s use.

  Survivors’ ways of remembering: School memorials are described in Chiyoko Egashira’s “From Memories of Darkness and Hardship: Up Until the Day Shiroyama Primary School Was Closed” in The Light of Morning; and Itonaga Yoshi’s “The Sun Dropped Out of the Sky” in Nagasaki August 9, 1945, edited by Mary Wiesen and Elizabeth Cannon. Tsue Hayashi planted cherry trees in honor of her daughter at Shiroyama Elementary School; see “Kayoko Zakura” in Hibaku: Recollections of A-Bomb Survivors, edited by Mitsue Kubo; and “Tsue Hayashi” in At Work in the Fields of the Bomb by Robert Del Tradici.

  Tsujimoto Fujio and other student testimonies from Yamazato Elementary School appear in Living Beneath the Atomic Cloud: Testimonies of the Children of Nagasaki, edited by Takashi Nagai. A reprint of this collection is available from the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. For an alternate translation of Tsujimoto’s testimony, see also The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, edited by Kyoko and Mark Selden.

  CHAPTER 6: EMERGENCE