by John Hersey
The Cadillac arrived, and the jubilant minister decided to take the gas guzzler for a spin. As he was climbing the heights of Hijiyama, to the east of the city, he was stopped by a policeman and arrested for driving without a license. It happened that he had recently begun serving as chaplain of the police academy, and when the higher-ups at the police station saw him brought in they laughed and let him go.
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IN midsummer of 1950, Cousins invited Tanimoto to return to the United States for a second tour, to raise money for the World Federalists, for moral adoption, and for the peace center, and late in August Tanimoto was off again. Marvin Green arranged things, as before. This time, Tanimoto visited two hundred and one cities, in twenty-four states, over eight months. The high point of the trip (and possibly of his life) was a visit to Washington, arranged by Cousins, where, on February 5, 1951, after having lunch with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he gave the opening prayer for the afternoon session of the Senate:
Our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the great blessing Thou hast granted America in enabling her to build in this last decade the greatest civilization in human history….We thank Thee, God, that Japan has been permitted to be one of the fortunate recipients of American generosity. We thank Thee that our people have been given the gift of freedom, enabling them to rise from the ashes of ruin and be reborn….God bless all members of this Senate….
Virginia’s Senator A. Willis Robertson rose and declared himself “dumbfounded yet inspired” that a man “whom we tried to kill with an atomic bomb came to the Senate floor and, offering up thanks to the same God we worship, thanked Him for America’s great spiritual heritage, and then asked God to bless every member of the Senate.”
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THE DAY before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the city, in fear of incendiary raids, had put hundreds of schoolgirls to work helping to tear down houses and clear fire lanes. They were out in the open when the bomb exploded. Few survived. Of those who did, many suffered bad burns and later developed ugly keloids on their faces, arms, and hands. A month after Tanimoto returned from his second trip to the States, he started, as a project of his peace center, a Bible class for about a dozen of them—the Society of Keloid Girls, he called them. He bought three sewing machines and put the girls to work in a dressmaking workshop on the second floor of another of his projects, a warwidows’ home he had founded. He asked the city government for funds for plastic surgery for the Keloid Girls. It turned him down. He then applied to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, which had been set up to study the radiation aftereffects of the bomb—aftereffects that those who made the decision to drop the bomb had utterly failed to foresee. The A.B.C.C. reminded him that it carried on research, not treatment. (The A.B.C.C. was keenly resented for this reason by hibakusha; they said that the Americans regarded them as laboratory guinea pigs or rats.)
A woman named Shizue Masugi now visited Hiroshima from Tokyo. She had led a wildly unconventional life for a Japanese woman of her time. A journalist, married and divorced while young, she had later been the mistress, in turn, of two famous novelists and, later still, had married again. She had written short stories about the bitter loves and bitter solitude of women and was now writing a column for lovelorn Women in the big Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. She would become a Catholic before she died, but she would choose to be buried in the Tokeiji Temple, a Zen center founded in 1285 by a monk who felt sorry for women with cruel husbands and decreed that any of them who took asylum in his temple as nuns could consider themselves divorced. On her trip to Hiroshima, she asked Kiyoshi Tanimoto what most needed to be done for women who were hibakusha. He suggested plastic surgery for the Keloid Girls. She started a campaign for funds in the Yomiuri, and soon nine girls were taken to Tokyo for surgery. Later, twelve more were taken to Osaka. Newspapers called them, to their chagrin, Genbaku Otome, a phrase that was translated into English, literally, as Α-Bomb Maidens.
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IN October 1952, Great Britain conducted its first test of an atomic bomb and the United States its first of a hydrogen bomb. In August 1953, the Soviet Union also tested a hydrogen bomb.
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THE Tokyo and Osaka operations on the girls were not altogether successful, and, on a visit to Hiroshima, Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s friend Marvin Green wondered whether it might be possible for some of them to be taken to America, where the techniques of plastic surgery were more advanced. In September 1953, Norman Cousins arrived in Hiroshima with his wife to deliver some moral-adoption funds. Tanimoto introduced them to a few of the girls, and spoke of Marvin Green’s idea. They liked it.
After their departure, an awkward meeting took place in the Mayor’s office, at which distribution to orphans of the moral-adoption funds was discussed. Cousins had brought fifteen hundred dollars, but it turned out that two hundred dollars of this amount had been set aside for six particular children, sixty-five dollars had been allocated to the Maidens, and a hundred and nineteen dollars had been spent by Tanimoto at the Fukuya department store for briefcases to be presented as gifts by Norman Cousins to the directors of six orphanages. This left eleven hundred and sixty-five dollars, or only about two dollars and seventy cents for each of four hundred and ten orphans. The city officials, who thought they were in charge of the project, were furious about the sums Tanimoto had deducted. In a report of this meeting, the Hiroshima paper Chugoku Shimbun reported, “Rev. Tanimoto responded, ‘I was following Mr. Cousins’s instructions in this, not my own wishes.’ ”
Tanimoto had lately been getting used to criticism. His long absences from his church for trips to America had earned him the nickname of A-bomb minister. Hiroshima doctors had wanted to know why the Maidens were not operated on in Hiroshima. And why just girls? Why not boys? Some people thought they saw the Reverend Mr. Tanimoto’s name in the paper too often. The enormous Cadillac had not gone down well, even though it had quickly turned out to be a dog and had had to be junked.
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ON March 1, 1954, the Lucky Dragon No. 5 was showered with radioactive fallout from an American test at Bikini Atoll.
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NORMAN COUSINS had gone to work in New York on the Maidens idea, and in late 1954 Dr. Arthur Barsky, the chief of plastic surgery at both Mount Sinai and Beth Israel hospitals, and Dr. William Hitzig, an internist on the Mount Sinai staff and Cousins’ personal physician, arrived in Hiroshima to cull from among the Maidens those whose prospects for transformation by surgery were best. Of the many disfigured girls in the city, only forty-three presented themselves to be examined. The doctors chose twenty-five.
On May 5, 1955, Kiyoshi Tanimoto took off with the girls from Iwakuni Airport in a United States Military Air Transport plane. As the girls were being settled in host homes around New York, he was hustled off to the West Coast for the start of yet another fund-raising tour. Among other appointments on his itinerary was one for the evening of Wednesday, May 11th, at the NBC studios in Los Angeles, for what Cousins gave him to understand would be a local television interview that would be helpful to the project.
That evening, somewhat fuddled, he was seated before bright lights and cameras on a living-room-like set. An American gentleman he had just met, named Ralph Edwards, beamed and, turning to the camera, addressed an estimated forty million Americans he attracted every Wednesday night: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ‘This Is Your Life.’ The ticking you hear in the background is a clock counting off the seconds to 8:15 A.M., August 6, 1945. And seated here with me is a gentleman whose life was changed by the last tick of that clock as it reached eight-fifteen. Good evening, sir. Would you tell us your name?”
“Kiyoshi Tanimoto.”
“And what is your occupation?”
“I am a minister
.”
“And where is your home?”
“Hiroshima, Japan.”
“And where were you on August 6, 1945, at eight-fifteen in the morning?”
Tanimoto had no chance to answer. The ticking grew louder and louder, and there was an uproar from kettle-drums.
“This is Hiroshima,” Edwards said as a mushroom cloud grew on the viewers’ screens, “and in that fateful second on August 6, 1945, a new concept of life and death was given its baptism. And tonight’s principal subject—you, Reverend Tanimoto!—were an unsuspecting part of that concept….We will pick up the threads of your life in a moment, Reverend Tanimoto, after this word from Bob Warren, our announcer, who has something very special to say to the girls in the audience.”
The fateful clock of doom, now unheard, ticked off sixty additional seconds as Bob Warren tried to remove Hazel Bishop nail polish from a blonde’s fingernails—an effort that was unsuccessful, even though he resorted to using a metal scouring pad, with which he had succeeded in removing rust from a frying pan.
Kiyoshi Tanimoto was totally unprepared for what followed. He sat there, torpid, sweating, and tongue-tied, as, after the manner of the famous program, his life was sketchily reviewed. Through an archway came Miss Bertha Sparkey, an elderly Methodist missionary who had taught him in his youth about Christ. Then came his friend Marvin Green, with a joke about life in divinity school. Then Edwards pointed out in the studio audience some parishioners Tanimoto had had just after his ordination, during a brief temporary pastorate in the Japanese-American Hollywood Independence Church.
Next came the shocker. In walked a tall, fattish American man, whom Edwards introduced as Captain Robert Lewis, copilot of the Enola Gay on the Hiroshima mission. In a shaky voice, Lewis told about the flight. Tanimoto sat there with a face of wood. At one point, Lewis broke off, closed his eyes, and rubbed his forehead, and forty million watchers across the land must have thought he was crying. (He was not. He has been drinking. Years later, Marvin Green told a young journalist named Rodney Barker, who was writing a book on the Maidens, that Lewis had panicked the show people by failing to turn up that afternoon for the rehearsal of all the participants except Tanimoto. It seemed that he had expected to be given a fat check for appearing on the show, and when he learned that he would not, he had gone out bar crawling. Green said he had found the copilot in time to get a cup of coffee in him before the show.)
Edwards: “Did you write something in your log at that time?”
Lewis: “I wrote down the words, ‘My God, what have we done?’ ”
After that, Chisa Tanimoto trotted onstage with clipped steps, because she was wearing what she never wore at home—a kimono. In Hiroshima, she had been given two days to uproot herself—and the four children she and her husband now had—and get to Los Angeles. There they had all been incarcerated in a hotel, kept strictly away from their husband and father. For the first time on the show, Tanimoto’s expression changed—to surprise; he seemed to have become a stranger to pleasure. Next, two of the Maidens, Toyoko Minowa and Tadako Emori, were presented in silhouette behind a translucent screen, and Edwards made a pitch to the audience for money for the Maidens’ operations. And, finally, the four Tanimoto children—daughter Koko, who had been an infant in the bombing, now ten; son Ken, seven; daughter Jun, four; and son Shin, two—came running out into their father’s arms.
INCOMING TELEGRAM:
CONFIDENTIAL
FROM: TOKYO
TO: SECRETARY OF STATE
MAY 12, 1955
EMBASSY-USIS SHARE WASHINGTON CONCERN LEST HIROSHIMA GIRLS PROJECT GENERATE UNFAVORABLE PUBLICITY….
TANIMOTO IS LOOKED UPON HERE AS SOMETHING OF A PUBLICITY SEEKER. MAY WELL TRY TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF TRIP TO RAISE FUNDS FOR HIROSHIMA MEMORIAL PEACE CENTER, HIS PET PROJECT. DO NOT BELIEVE HE IS RED OR RED-SYMPATHIZER, BUT HE CAN EASILY BECOME SOURCE OF MISCHIEVOUS PUBLICITY….
By diplomatic pouch:
SECRET
The Reverend Tanimoto is pictured as one who appears to be anti-Communist and probably sincere in his efforts to assist the girls….However, in his desire to enhance his own prestige and importance he might ignorantly, innocently, or purposefully lend himself to or pursue a leftist line….
RALPH J. BLAKE
AMERICAN CONSUL GENERAL, KOBE
UPON getting back East after the show, Robert Lewis, who had resigned from the Air Force and was working as personnel manager of Henry Heide, candy makers, in New York, was called to the Pentagon and given a heavy chewing out by the Defense Department.
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THE whole Tanimoto family remained in the United States through the rest of Kiyoshi’s speaking tour, which took him to a total of a hundred and ninety-five cities, in twenty-six states. The television show had brought in about fifty thousand dollars, and he raised ten thousand more. Chisa Tanimoto and the children stayed through a glorious summer in a guesthouse on Pearl Buck’s farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
On August 6th, the tenth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Tanimoto placed a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. On that day, in Hiroshima itself, far away from him, a genuine Japanese peace movement, riding the anger over the Lucky Dragon incident, got under way. Five thousand delegates attended the first World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs.
The Tanimotos returned to Japan in December.
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KIYOSHI TANIMOTO had been swept out of the mainstream into an eddy. On his American speaking tours, he had displayed an energy that was remarkable for a hibakusha, speaking night after night after night on the weary circuits. But the reality was that for some years now he had been hurled along on the white water of Norman Cousins’ ferocious energy. Cousins had given him heady experiences that fed his vanity, but he had also now taken out of the minister’s hands the control of his own undertakings. Tanimoto had started the whole effort for the Maidens, but he discovered that even though the money raised by “This Is Your Life” would pay the Maidens’ expenses, all but one thousand dollars of the money he had raised on his tour was also to be controlled by New York. Cousins had bypassed the peace center in Hiroshima and dealt with the city government; Tanimoto had begged to have the moral-adoption project put under the center’s wing, but his role had turned out to be that of a shopper for briefcases. The crowning blow came when the ashes of the Maiden named Tomoko Nakabayashi, who had died under anaesthesia at Mount Sinai, were returned to her parents in Hiroshima and he was not even invited to the funeral, which was conducted by his old friend Father Kleinsorge. And when all the Maidens had come home and, astonishingly, found themselves the objects not only of public curiosity but also of envy and spite, they resisted his publicity-minded efforts to form them into a “Zion Club,” and fell away from him.
Nor did he have any place in the Japanese peace movement, for he had been out of the country at crucial moments in its development, and, besides, his Christian outlook made him suspicious of the radical groups that were on the cutting edge of antinuclear activity. While he was away on this last trip, a national organization called Nihon Gensuikyo, the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, had come into being, and there had been a surge of activity pushing the Diet for medical care for hibakusha. Like many hibakusha, he was repelled by the growing political coloration of these doings, and he stayed away from the mass meetings in Peace Park on the subsequent anniversaries.
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ON May 75, 1957, Great Britain conducted its first hydrogen-bomb test, on Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean.
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KOKO, the daughter who as an infant had experienced the bombing, had been taken almost every year to the American-run A.B.C.C. for a physical checkup. On the whole, her health had been all right, althoug
h, like many hibakusha who had been babies at the time of the bombing, her growth was definitely stunted. Now, an adolescent in junior high school, she went again. As usual, she undressed in a cubicle and put on a white hospital gown. When she had finished going through a battery of tests, this time she was taken into a brightly lit room where there was a low stage, backed by a wall marked with a measurement grid. She was stood against the wall, with lights in her eyes so glaring she could not see beyond them; she could hear Japanese and American voices. One of the former told her to take off the gown. She obeyed, and stood there for what seemed an eternity, with tears streaming down her face.
Koko was so frightened and hurt by this experience that she was unable to tell anyone about it for twenty-five years.
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ONE day toward the end of August, 1959, a baby girl was left in a basket in front of the altar of Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s church. A note attached to its diaper gave the baby’s name, Kanae, and its birth date, April 28th, and went on to say, “I am afraid I can’t keep her at the moment. God bless her, and will you look after her in my stead?”