CHAPTER 22
HIBAKUSHA
Maybe I didn’t look like a proper woman but my feelings inside have not changed. If I don’t like a man, I don’t want him. Even if I have bad scars … I don’t have very high ideals but I have some ideals, you see? Inside I have the same hopes, same dreams!
A 19-year-old hibakusha, or ‘bomb-affected person’
SEIKO IKEDA’S FATHER DID NOT recognise his daughter when he found her on the floor of the village hospital. He came with a neighbour and a stretcher. The little clinic was dark and crowded. ‘Seiko, your father is here for you!’ he announced in the twilit gloom. He knelt over the children’s figures. ‘Daddy!’ Seiko cried out. He turned towards a vaguely human form strewn on the floor, the hair matted and singed, the face, swollen beyond recognition. The impression was of a little red scarecrow. At first, her father refused to believe this was the daughter who had set off on her first day as a labourer in Hiroshima.
He took the bundle home. For days she suffered a 40-degree Celsius temperature, nausea and diarrhoea; her face and body swelled; her lacerations got infected. ‘I was just crying and shouting all day, “It hurts, it hurts.”’ She received no medical treatment; local doctors set her aside with the hopeless, and reserved their time for the hopeful. ‘They even started to prepare my funeral service,’ she recalled in an interview with me. Her parents fought to keep their daughter alive, scrounging for nutritious food and bartering for medicines with products from her father’s shop.
Her friend Chie returned to the village a few days later. Chie had volunteered to stay in Hiroshima to help the injured and sick. She had no burns or external injuries; her pretty face was unblemished. The village rejoiced; Chie’s family wept with joy.
The Ikeda family did what they could to ease their daughter’s pain: her father applied a white powder to her face, then a gauze, which had to be changed twice a day to release the pus. Flies laid eggs in her wounds; her sister removed the maggots with tweezers: ‘My father would be so upset by the maggots on my face,’ Seiko recalled.
Then, within a few weeks, Seiko’s fever eased and she sat up in bed. At about the same time, her girlfriend Chie, whose unmarked features had caused such delight, lost her hair. Then Chie’s stomach and chest swelled up and purple spots appeared on her body. She bled from her nose, ears, mouth and vagina. The girl begged the doctor to heal her: ‘Please help me! I don’t want to die yet … I didn’t do anything bad, why do I have to die? Help me!’ She died, to her family’s shock, yet she bore no physical injuries. ‘She spent days in Hiroshima helping others,’ Seiko said. Chie, who had stayed in the city immediately after the bomb, died of residual radiation poisoning, the existence of which the American authorities continued to deny.
Within three months, Seiko was able to move. The family hid the mirrors. But if she could not see her face, she could feel the changes to her skin – the clawed and matted scar tissue called ‘keloids’: ‘I searched all over for a mirror and found a small one hidden away in the back of a drawer. I was so shocked when I saw myself. My face was bright red, with keloids and skin gathered. The keloids built up and it looked like a liver. My chin was stuck to my neck. My bottom lip was open and the water would come off it when I tried to drink, since I couldn’t hold it in. I was so afraid and scared when I saw my face. I lost all my courage.’
She ventured outside to play with other children. They ran away, shouting, ‘Red Demon! Red Demon!’ Seiko ran home crying. ‘My mother would hold me every day, saying: “Who made my daughter’s face like this!”’ In time her psychological anguish would overtake her physical suffering. She was 13 years old.
Eight months after the bomb Seiko returned to school. An empty space surrounded her on the packed train: ‘When my face came near someone else they would shrink away from me. They didn’t want my face touching them. I couldn’t bear other people watching me like this.’ At school, the children fled at the sight of her, pointing and yelling ‘monster’ and ‘demon’. She lost hope: ‘I became such a bad girl. I would yell at my parents and say that they should not have taken care of me, they should have left me to die. I envied Chie for dying; I wanted to die too.’
One day, after running away from school, she stole in the back door and overheard her father talking in a low voice to the neighbour. Seiko, he said, ‘had a wound on her heart, and she was a bad girl, but since she was so strong she would once again be a good girl’.
‘When I heard my father saying this about me,’ she recalled, ‘it was such a shock. I thought that no one loved me; but my father believed in me despite my behaviour. I was so moved, I started crying while hiding and listening. From then I resolved to do my best to live. Then I started going to school.’
Gloves had protected her hands from the flash. They are beautiful hands, and she displayed them shyly to me, as though offering the only valued part of her body to a careless world. Her face is now slightly scarred, and warm and engaging; modern surgery has reconstructed what had once seemed beyond repair: ‘Beauty and looks were important for girls, and my mother brought me up thinking that. Though I wanted to be beautiful I could not [be].’ Her mother purchased creams and make-up, and kept applying it, ‘saying that I would be beautiful, always encouraging me’.
Her family did not believe the girl would marry. Yet she did, in 1950, at the age of 18, to a cousin, a childhood friend, who had lost one brother in the atomic bomb; another languished in a Soviet prison camp. Her husband cared little for her deformities: ‘We just wanted to live together and support each other,’ she said. ‘So he asked me to marry him.’
Early attempts at plastic surgery failed. But in coming years, Japanese plastic surgeons would learn to apply American techniques and work wonders. Seiko underwent surgery 15 times, and her face gradually improved. ‘My doctor told me I was becoming beautiful, but that was not the reason I went through the surgery; I wanted my original face back.’ Thanks to the operations and her doctor’s determination, Seiko recovered her self-confidence. She learned dress-making and later opened a dress-making school. It prospered. She learned to dance – beautifully. She and her husband soon produced a healthy daughter.
* * *
There was never any pretence that the foreign medical teams entering Hiroshima and Nagasaki were there to ease the people’s suffering. Navy Secretary James Forrestal outlined their experimental role with crystalline clarity in a note to Truman on 18 November 1945. The study of the effect of radiation ‘on personnel’ – that is, Japanese civilians – he wrote, had started as soon as possible after Japan’s capitulation, under the auspices of the army and navy and the Manhattan Project: ‘Preliminary surveys involve about 14,000 Japanese who were exposed to the radiation of atomic fission. It is considered that the group and others yet to be identified offer a unique opportunity for the study of the medical and biological effects of radiation which is of utmost importance to the United States.’ The scientists’ express instructions were not to treat the people; rather, to experiment on them. ‘The Japanese had sole responsibility for treating bomb victims,’ noted the USSBS, ‘though the American forces did provide some medical supplies…’ Late in 1945, Japanese doctors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki continued to work in ruins, had no plasma or blood, and only a negligible quantity of vital drugs.
In 1946 it was evident to the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Atomic Bomb (the peak body representing the US Armed Forces and the Manhattan Project teams) that long-range investigations of the survivors were required. On 25 November 1947 America’s highest scientific body, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, received a presidential directive ‘to undertake a long-range continuing study of the biological and medical effects of the atomic bomb on man’. The directive shifted the experiment from military to civilian scientists because the danger of radiation went ‘beyond the scope’ of the armed forces to ‘humanity in general’ – not only in war but ‘in peaceful industry and agriculture’. The directive did not mention treatment: prolonging life, easing pain, were neither the intentions nor the by-products of the job.
Whether the patients – or more accurately the exhibits – lived or died was immaterial to the foreign doctors’ charter. How the victims lived or died; whether their conditions improved or deteriorated; whether they suffered from cancer at some distant date or reproduced it in their children; such were the questions of cold scientific inquiry. In short, irradiated Japanese civilians were to serve as American laboratory rats. Herein lay a benefit – future rationalists would argue – of dropping the bomb on a city: to harvest scientific data about gamma radiation. The doctors were not expected to show a duty of care – though in practice, incidental to the experiment, many did. They were human, after all. The degree of care depended on the attitude and resources of the particular physician but it was not part of his job description. In this sense, the presidential directive to America’s peak medical research body prescribed a flagrant violation of the Hippocratic Oath: ‘I will provide regimens for the good of my patients and … never do harm to anyone.’
The research proceeded under the auspices of a new body set up under MacArthur’s jurisdiction named the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), which drew on, and vastly expanded, the work of the pioneering medical teams that had first entered the cities. The initial aim of the ABCC’s Hiroshima laboratory, which moved from the Red Cross Hospital to a purpose-built facility on Hijiyama hill – was to ‘re-examine’ Japanese records, autopsy records and patient medical histories (the patients had no right to privacy); to ‘collect’ and examine survey cases; and to ‘obtain’ photographs of victims, according to the ABCC’s charter.
They were to prod, probe and test the irradiated human relics of the first atomic bomb. ‘Does radiation produce long range effects in human beings? Finding the answer to this question is the purpose of the … ABCC,’ wrote Lieutenant Colonel Carl F. Tessmer, the first director of the commission. ‘Treatment of patients is not undertaken by the ABCC because such matters properly are in the hands of Japanese physicians in Kure, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’ Such matters may have been in their hands had Japanese doctors access to American medical research on radiation sickness. In any case, many Japanese doctors did not help themselves, or their patients: wary of foreign rivals, some refused American help even when it was offered and were strongly opposed to Americans treating Japanese people. And some had no qualms about studying – when they might also be treating – their countrymen and accepted jobs at the ABCC.
* * *
About 100,000 Japanese adults and 80,000 children who had been exposed to the atomic bombs participated in these wider experiments in some form. They were not coerced; the ABCC offered incentives such as nutritious rations, fresh water and candy. Many ‘patients’ were furious when they later discovered that they had been used as part of a vast experiment, and claimed they were misled. The arrival of American doctors, who showed them kindness and understanding, fostered the hope of treatment for their and their children’s ongoing sickness. They were now callously disabused. Stories of the humiliation of Japanese patients and the insensitivity of foreign scientists proliferated – for example, of naked women being examined by crowds of male physicians; of the ABCC jeep arriving at family funerals ‘to ask if they could dissect the body … it would be good for the society as a whole’.
Some foreign teams gave the impression of being quack apothecaries with a ‘morbid lust for corpses’, harvesting Japanese cemeteries for victims of the bomb. There is some official evidence for this: Dr Stanley Finch, Chief of Medicine at the ABCC in 1960–62, wrote of the ‘base population’ for a pathology study in Hiroshima—Nagasaki consisting of a ‘sub-set of persons’ who were candidates for post-mortem studies. In other words, the ABCC chose some patients precisely because they had no chance of living, the better to study the effect of radiation on the dying. To their families’ horror, many ‘patients’ did not come out of the lab on Hijiyama hill alive. ‘Autopsy rates as high as 45 per cent in the early 1960s,’ Finch added, ‘have provided information of great value’; his clinical contentment suggested to journalist Wilfred Burchett a vision of the ‘professional body snatchers’, who valued the dead and dying over the living.
That grim conclusion must be set against the fact that the ABCC’s scientists did draw valuable medical findings from their dazed and defeated sample. What galled the local population was the lack of any concurrent duty of care for the people under the microscope. ‘Why won’t the American doctors help us?’ was a constant local refrain. Their point was reasonable: the Americans were far better resourced and experienced to treat radiation sickness than local doctors, on whose flimsy and ill-equipped clinics fell that terrible responsibility.
The ABCC’s earliest experiments were devoted to the genetic effects, if any, of radiation on the development of children – including foetuses. Under the guidance of Dr James Neel, the study examined more than 71,000 pregnancies in the two cities between 1948 and 1953. Neel used rice ration registration forms to identify subjects: pregnant women were allowed an extra rice ration from the fifth month of pregnancy. The study found no relationship between the parents’ exposure to radiation and subsequent rates of genetic mutation and stillbirths in children conceived after the bomb. This confounded expectations. Indeed, one Hiroshima politician, convinced of future hereditary deformities, proposed that bomb survivors submit to a voluntary program of sterilisation: ‘I had my wife sterilised because I don’t want abnormal children,’ he said. ‘We should set them [the A-bomb survivors] aside and not mix them with the rest of the population.’*
Foetuses exposed to the bomb were, however, severely affected, especially those irradiated prior to the 25th week of gestation. Many of those who survived to birth were born with smaller head sizes (microcephaly), severe mental retardation, stunted development and anaemia. The worst affected infants were placed in psychiatric institutions. Their afflictions were not genetic malformations, as was commonly supposed – rather, the baleful influence of radiation on a developing foetus. Another dramatic early finding was the sharply increased rate of leukaemia in A-bomb survivors. After a two to three year period of latency, the number of cases peaked in 1950–52.
* * *
They were called the hibakusha – literally, ‘bomb-affected people’ – a neutral term that pointedly did not connote ‘survivor’ or ‘victim’. For years they existed in a nether world, the flotsam of official indifference and the jetsam of American experimentation. To Japanese society, they were untouchable, the people you did not employ or let your son or daughter marry. Many were refused compensation, jobs, love, family – shunned to the extremities of a community unable to bear the hideous after-effects of total war; their scars were painful reminders of the disgrace Japan had brought upon herself. A red-hot iron pressed against the bare skin would have had the same penetrating effect as the flashburn, searing deep into the flesh, according to Dr Tomin Harada. The resulting wounds took months to heal, leaving the victim’s face contoured in thick keloids – derived from the Greek word for crab claws – which had the segregating power of leprosy. The afflicted were refused entry to public baths in case they contaminated the water, and compelled to work in nocturnal jobs out of private shame and public revulsion. The keloid-scarred women who staffed one nightly pinball parlour ‘dreaded the daylight … because they had such hideous burn scars as a result of the pikadon [explosion]’. These girls were obliged to hang their clothes and wash their plates in separate areas to prevent the ‘contamination’ of healthy employees.
For a brief period the hibakusha seemed to occupy the place vacated by the burakumin, the untouchables of Japanese society, whose Hiroshiman ghettos were destroyed in the bomb. The comparison is inapt, as the burakumin’s strong identity, dating back to their ancestors, the eta, readily reformed in fresh ghettos, confounding the hopes that the bomb had blown away entrenched discrimination. The burakumin were segregated by class and occupation. The hibakusha, however, shared no attributes of class, religion or culture – only common exposure to the bomb. Gamma rays did not discriminate.
The A-bomb survivors responded to society’s repugnance with deep anxiety and shame – as though it were somehow their fault that they wore the mark of a defeated nation. The most miserably scarred became the elephant men and women of Japanese society. Playground cruelty knew no restraint in the presence of such disfigurement; teenage hibakusha were taunted to the edge of suicide. They hid themselves away, stayed indoors, and shielded their faces in masks.
The hibakusha’s awareness of the improbability of love, marriage, even friendship – that ordinary jobs were unobtainable, that Japanese society shunned them – were preludes to an ocean of loneliness. Many younger victims, denied the normal hopes of adulthood, experienced a common death wish. One young man, aged 26, his face covered in keloids, tried to end his life several times after his marriage proposals were rebuffed. Thirty per cent of hibakusha have experienced suicidal feelings since the war, with the figure rising to 70 per cent among those with the worst physical deformities, according to a statistical study by Tadashi Ishida.
‘Nobody’s going to marry those Nagasaki girls,’ said one woman from a village in Nagasaki Prefecture. ‘Even after they reach marrying age, nobody’s going to marry them. Ever since the Bomb fell, everybody’s calling them “the never-stop people”. And the thing that never stops is their bleeding. Those people are outcasts – damned Untouchables. Nobody’s going to marry one of them ever again.’ Gossip condemned houses, suburbs and whole villages of survivors as untouchable. One rural community near Nagasaki feared it would become ‘a village of bleeders’. Kawauchi village in the Asa district became known as ‘Widows’ Village’ – Goke-mura – when all 75 wives living there became instant widows after the bomb killed their husbands, then labouring in Hiroshima.
Their fear of cancer – or confirmation of it – drove many to suicide: one girl happened to see ‘myeloid leukaemia’ on her medical chart and promptly hanged herself. Whenever he heard such stories the great Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, himself exposed to the bomb, felt relieved that Japan ‘is not a Christian country. I feel an almost complete relief that a dogmatic Christian sense of guilt did not prevent the girl from taking her own life. None of us survivors can morally blame her. We have only the freedom to remember the existence of “people who do not kill themselves in spite of their misery”.’ In time, many hibakusha’s resistance to illness faded, and in subsequent decades tens of thousands succumbed to radiation-related cancers, usually leukaemia.
Kikuyo Nakamura had her uterus and ovaries removed at the age of 25 years. She lost her hair as a result of anti-cancer treatment and wears a wig. She experienced little discrimination because ‘almost everybody else in Nagasaki of my age has been exposed to radiation’. Her baby son, Hiroshi, later developed leukaemia, for which she blames her exposure to radiation, despite the fact that the link between hibakusha and second-generation medical conditions is not proven.
‘But when I asked my doctor why my child developed leukaemia, he told me that it was because he had been fed my breast milk.’
Hiroshi grew up and married but did not tell his wife that his mother was a hibakusha. When his wife found out she screamed at her mother-in-law, ‘The doctor told me that you gave my husband this disease!’ The two women could not live together: ‘Every time she looked at me, she felt angry,’ Kikuyo recalls. Hiroshi’s wife soon moved out and divorced him; he died soon after.
Stronger souls resisted the condemnation of the post-war society: ‘Maybe I didn’t look like a proper woman,’ said one spirited 19-year-old girl, her face rent with scars, in the 1950s, ‘but my feelings inside have not changed.’ Social attitudes that expected her to feel grateful for a man’s attention enraged her. ‘If I don’t like a man, I don’t want him. Even if I have bad scars … I don’t have very high ideals but I have some ideals, you see? Inside I have the same hopes, same dreams!’
* * *
Not all experienced misery. Thousands recovered and lived relatively happy lives, found jobs, married and had healthy children despite rumours of possible deformities in the second generation. Their experiences vary widely, of course; but their personal stories convey the range of consequences of the bomb better than statistics or medical analyses. Their determination to live as comfortably and happily as possible confounds the agenda of those who, usually foreigners, seek to impose an unwelcome martyrdom on the A-bombed cities. Here are a few examples.
Of 165 Japanese people who experienced both atomic bombs, Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only officially recognised survivor ‘twice over’. That extraordinary coincidence for these people did not, of course, necessarily make their ordeal any more trying than that of a person acutely exposed to a single bomb. During the war Yamaguchi lived with his young family in Nagasaki, where he worked as an engineer with Mitsubishi shipyards. On 6 August he visited Hiroshima on a business trip. Three kilometres from the blast, he sustained facial burns and spent the night in an air-raid shelter before returning home two days later, where he experienced the second nuclear attack. He, his wife and baby son survived without injury.
After the surrender Yamaguchi worked as a translator for the US forces and then became a teacher. He broke his silence about his past when his son, six months old at the time of the Nagasaki bombing, died of cancer, aged 59. His loss turned Yamaguchi into a vocal supporter of nuclear disarmament (and a key participant in the documentary Niju Hibaku – Twice Bombed, Twice Survived).
His mother’s will probably saved her son Iwao Nakanishi. In late August 1945 the 15-year-old’s seemingly healthy body broke down with the usual bomb-related symptoms. Lacking medicine, she sold her kimonos, obi (sash) and Japanese trinkets to the occupying troops in exchange for nutritious food – butter and canned meat, condensed milk and chocolate. At a time when women were too scared or shy to approach foreign soldiers, many of them Australians and New Zealanders, this drew nasty gossip.
Iwao lived. So would his younger sister for a while. Unhurt in the blast, she grew into a beautiful young woman. In 1951, aged 18, she came second in the Miss Hiroshima beauty contest. Her exposure to residual radiation is believed to have caused the cancer that killed her several years later.
Iwao joined a Japanese company and married, aged 27. His wife’s family were ‘very worried’ and asked for his medical reports. A year later his wife gave birth to a healthy son. For the rest of his life Iwao experienced intermittent illnesses linked to bomb exposure; he survived prostate cancer. Today he works as a volunteer guide at the Peace Museum in Hiroshima. He studied the history of the war and, ashamed of Japanese war crimes, visited the Nanking Massacre Memorial Museum recently on a ‘cultural exchange’: it was ‘the best I can do as an act of atonement’.
Tsuruji Matsuzoe, the boy in the torpedo tunnel who had been consigned to the piles of dead in a Nagayo school, graduated from his teachers’ training college in Nagasaki in 1949. His health returned, though his hands remain badly scarred, and three operations failed to heal his crippled right hand. He suffers from a recurring pulmonary disease, which has required years of treatment. He briefly worked as a national elementary school teacher, and later became a newspaper journalist. ‘I did not feel particularly discriminated against. However, when I married, I did not mention it. My wife did not mind at all, but her family were not happy when they found out.’
On 11 August, in the ashes of their home, Dr Takashi Nagai discovered the bones of his wife’s body beside her rosary beads; he buried her in a full Catholic ceremony. Over the next few years he resumed teaching at the university, and writing his book The Bells of Nagasaki. Completed on the first anniversary of the bomb, it was initially suppressed but eventually became a bestseller. Seriously ill with leukaemia, Dr Nagai spent the last few years of his life confined to bed in a small hut built near the site of Urakami Cathedral, where he received visits from Emperor Hirohito and an envoy of the Pope. He died in 1951 and 20,000 people attended the funeral of the man who became known as ‘the Saint of Urakami’.
Tomiko Matsumoto’s uncle retrieved her from a makeshift clinic in the school assembly hall in Fuchucho, a village in the Aki district, near Hiroshima. The 13-year-old’s facial burns shocked her family. Without any medicines or painkillers, her grandmother used herbs and grated cucumber juice on the wounds.
One day Tomiko’s grandmother produced a black box containing the bones of her mother and three-year-old brother; nothing was found of her second-youngest brother who died instantly while playing outside. To this day, he remains one of thousands of people whose bodies are unaccounted for. Tomiko’s father, notwithstanding his injuries and exposure to black rain while searching for her, survived.
Father and daughter recovered and returned to Hiroshima, he limping, drawing her along in a two-wheeled cart. They built a small, makeshift shelter in the ashes of their former home. There they lived, on pumpkin roots, rice balls and grass. ‘People said that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for 75 years,’ she later said, ‘but grass started to appear among the burnt-out ruins. We would pick the grass and eat it.’
Tomiko returned to school in 1946. A disused military barracks at the foot of Hijiyama served as a temporary classroom for the 30 surviving children in her form. She wore a hat over her bald head, and long sleeves to hide her keloids, ‘even in summer’.
‘We all had keloid scars. There was one girl whose fingers had been stuck together with burns and she couldn’t separate them.’ Soon many of her school friends died of leukaemia and other diseases. ‘I hoped to be able to return to some semblance of a normal life after the war ended, but I was terribly wrong.’ One night in May 1948 her father, almost completely bedridden with radiation sickness, killed himself. ‘Every day, he would say, “I want to die, I want to die”,’ she recalled.
She lived off the kindness of strangers and her own wits. After class, she would go around the city collecting scrap metal, which she sold for rice or vegetables. Her relatives sent money for school fees, and she graduated in 1950. She began to look for work in Hiroshima – but ‘nobody would give us jobs’. Tomiko found work in 1952, at a sweet shop, where she remained for six months. She survived, and lives today in Hiroshima, a robust 78-year-old, and an outspoken advocate for peace.
Taeko Nakamae’s father, a soldier, came looking for her on a bicycle; student relief workers had seen her name on a list of survivors at Kanawa Island near Uji. He had already organised the funeral for her younger sister, Emiko, who died of burns at Koi Primary School. The beautiful young teacher who saved Taeko also passed away, on 30 August: ‘When I heard that,’ Taeko said, ‘I wished that I had died in her place. She not only saved me but she had gone all over Hiroshima saving her students.’
Her family kept her face bandaged and the mirrors hidden. ‘Even when I cried and asked them what my injuries were, they continued to hide it from me.’ In October, feeling better, she found the strength to remove her bandages and look at herself in a mirror: ‘When I saw my face, I lamented my teacher for helping a student with such a terrible ugly face – as a 15-year-old girl. I felt that as a woman my face was the most important thing…’
She underwent three plastic surgery operations. She later fell in love but left the relationship to avoid causing the man or his family trouble. Though not openly discriminated against, she remembers lots of rumours about hibakusha having deformed children. ‘I resolved to be a working woman instead’ – and she got a job as a clerk at the national railway company. In 1963, aged 33, she married. To please her husband, she resolved to undergo a fourth operation on her face, but ‘he told me that he married me – even though I had scars – just the way I was, and so I shouldn’t go through any more pain’.
* * *
In the years after the A-bomb, survivors hoped to receive government support. Their cities were battlefields; they were legitimate casualties of war. Yet they were denied any medical recognition or compensation for more than a decade.
In October 1945, the Japanese domestic law that guaranteed compensation for war victims ceased to exist. Neither hibakusha nor victims of conventional bombing received a cent’s worth of medical care. ‘There were no appeals at the United Nations, nothing was done by the government for 11 years,’ said Nori Tohei, co-chairperson of Nihon Hidankyo (the Japanese Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organisation).
For nearly a decade, the world would hear nothing of the human repercussions of the atomic bombings. The occupying forces not only ignored the A-bomb survivors’ medical complaints; they refused to recognise their existence. American censors forbade media references to the atomic bomb or its effects. The Japanese media, under American control, readily complied. The hibakusha were a low priority in a nation that shunned such dreadful reminders of a disastrous war. Not until 1952, when the occupation ended, were Japanese reporters able to write about the atomic bomb. With the media’s tiresome love of sensation, they cast a lurid eye over these wretched young women whom they dubbed ‘Keloid Girls’ or ‘A-bomb Maidens’, cruelly reinforcing the girls’ marital status. While reports of ‘atomic freaks’ boosted newspaper sales, the government ignored the issue and refused to accept the hibakusha’s medical complaints. Indeed, the A-bomb survivors became a national irritant: why should they receive special treatment, complained the victims of conventional firebombing. Nobody accepted the peculiar, ongoing horror of radiation exposure as a special case, a long-term medical issue. Indeed, it took another atomic bomb to provoke any interest.
On 1 March 1954, America detonated a hydrogen bomb, the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, on Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. The explosion, the first in a series of thermonuclear tests, yielded energy equivalent to 15 megatonnes of TNT – or about 600 to 800 Hiroshima bombs. Extensive radioactivity saturated the atoll and neighbouring islands. Of the 290 people unintentionally exposed to radiation, 239 were inhabitants of three nearby atolls (of whom 46 died between 1954 and 1966); 28 were American observers on Rongerik Island; and 23 were crewmen of a Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5), one of whom died. Among the non-human casualties, millions of irradiated fish were rendered inedible.
Most upsettingly for the hibakusha, the American director of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission offered immediate medical treatment to the crew of the Lucky Dragon. So either the commission was lying when it claimed it had no authority to treat A-bomb casualties; or it meant to use the fishermen for similar experiments under the pretence of treating them. The case provoked a public outcry in Japan – dozens of Japanese articles appeared under headlines such as, ‘We Won’t be Treated as Guinea Pigs’ – and stirred the ire of the hibakusha, whose claims had gone unheard for almost a decade. The disease that dared not speak its name had killed a Japanese fisherman; now it would bear responsibility for the chronic illnesses and deaths of hundreds of thousands.
‘This was when the broad citizens’ movement in Japan against nuclear weapons started, and the hibakusha gained attention,’ said Nori Tohei. ‘Not until 1954,’ noted a committee of Japanese scientists, ‘did the Japanese government adopt any official policies to help the A-bomb victims. The immediate cause was the groundswell of public concern … provoked by the damages to crewmen of the Japanese fishing vessel.’
The explosive publicity drew foreign sympathy and hopes of recovery: US doctors had developed new plastic surgical techniques which promised to restore some of a patient’s original likeness. In 1955 the American philanthropist Norman Cousins organised, with the assistance of a Japanese cleric, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a visit to the United States of some 25 Hiroshima women with severe A-bomb scarring. The ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ arrived to a lavish New York reception and the welcoming smile of the star turn, a local debutante called Candis, aged 18. Candis’s beauty and long white ball gown set in brutal relief the disfigured faces and drab clothes of the vanquished Japanese. Their smiling American hosts arranged an excruciatingly implausible A-bomb ‘reunification’ on the popular daytime television show This Is Your Life (dedicated to the life of Reverend Tanimoto) of the Maidens and Captain Robert Lewis, assistant pilot of the Enola Gay, whose plane had delivered their misery. Two Maidens appeared on the program behind screens: ‘To avoid causing them any embarrassment,’ the presenter explained, ‘we’ll not show you their faces.’ If the producers felt any qualms over this exhibition, they did not let it intrude on the show’s constructive intent: to raise $60,000 in donations to finance the Maidens’ tour and plastic surgery.
Surgeons at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital performed 127 operations on the women. The methods – including ‘Z-plasty’, ‘defatting’, ‘split skin graft’, ‘scar bridle’ – were not completely successful. The women received tattooed eyebrows and grafts of skin taken from their thighs, arms and stomachs. Doctors removed the worst of their keloids. Simply being able to blink, or open and close their mouths, transformed their lives. One girl’s lidless left eye, open and weeping for 10 years, received a new eyelid; another woman, named only Hiroko T., underwent 12 operations, including a ‘tubed pedicle’ – a grafting technique that involved sewing down a long flap of skin – after which she found she could eat through her mouth for the first time since the bomb. Asked what she would like to eat she indicated ‘a hot dog’. On their return to Japan, the Maidens’ medical improvements were not instantly perceptible to a nation hungry for miracles; but the trip performed a useful public relations role.
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The publicity surrounding the Lucky Dragon and the Maidens’ tour compelled the Japanese government to act. In 1957 a new Medical Law granted a ‘health passbook’ to people who could prove they had been exposed to atomic radiation. Initially, it entitled them to twice-yearly free medical checks and a percentage of burial costs. For the first time the Japanese government recognised the hibakusha as medical casualties of war – that is, wounded by a weapon of war.
Having a passbook did not mean the government offered to pay for their medical treatment or provide other form of compensation. In 1963, the Tokyo District Court rejected – on the grounds that an individual could not act alone – the case of an atomic bomb victim who tried to sue for compensation. The decision marched in lockstep with the government’s unwillingness to accept the scale of radiation sickness, partly to avoid embarrassing American interests in Japan. The hibakusha took their cue that only mass action would work and organised as a collective force. Over the years, after countless legal cases, their medical complaints gradually won recognition.
In time the Japanese government placed them in categories. There were those directly exposed to the bomb; those exposed to residual radiation (that is, who entered the city within two weeks after the bomb fell); those exposed while treating victims; and those not yet born who received radiation poisoning in utero. Sub-categories further delineated the claimants – for example, according to their proximity to the hypocentre; people within a 1-kilometre radius were the most seriously affected, of course. But that did not automatically qualify them as hibakusha – sometimes local councils in the bombed cities defined them differently. A sympathetic mayor might help citizens less eligible than those living nearer the hypocentre.
Being hibakusha, carrying a passbook, still did not generate government-paid medical assistance. The new Atomic Bomb Survivors Relief Law recognised as bomb-related a very narrow range of cancers: just 2000 people, or about 0.6 per cent, of the 300,000 A-bomb survivors, received government-assisted treatment between 1945 and 2000. The rest got nothing because their peculiar ailments were not ‘officially approved’ illnesses.
In time, mounting evidence of a far wider range of medical problems prompted the hibakusha to launch a series of class actions. In 2003, the first cases came before the Japanese courts; in the next six years Nihon Hidankyo, the peak body representing radiation victims, won 19 cases representing 306 claimants, 60 of whom died during the proceedings. These high-profile victories forced the government to add liver, thyroid and other conditions to the official list of bomb-related diseases, and to accept that the hibakusha’s medical ailments were linked to their exposure, directly or indirectly, to the atomic bombs.
In March 2009, nearly 70 years after Groves, Oppenheimer, Farrell, the New York Times and teams of US experts dismissed the risk of widespread radiation sickness, Japanese authorities had designated precisely 235,569 Japanese people as atomic bomb sufferers, and granted them a health passbook. Their average age was 75.9 years. That year the passbook entitled the holder to, among other benefits, free medical checks twice a year (including cancer checks) and a state subsidy of 90 per cent of their medical fees. Most passbook holders have had cancer; most will die of it.
On 6 August 2009 the hibakusha won another victory: the Japanese government unconditionally surrendered to the atomic bomb victims. After losing 19 straight cases over the right to certification of people seeking recognition as sufferers of bomb-related illnesses, Tokyo granted unconditional medical relief to every case that succeeded at the first hearing. A compensation fund is being planned. The age and vulnerability of the plaintiffs, and the government’s and claimants’ deep reluctance to relive the horror of the atomic bombs through the Japanese courts, partly explained the legal capitulation. The then Prime Minister, Taro Aso, signed the agreement after attending the commemorative ceremony marking the 64th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, thus ending the 306 plaintiffs’ six-year-long legal battle. ‘Considering that the plaintiffs are aging,’ Aso said, ‘and they have fought this legal battle so long, we have decided to introduce the new policies to bring relief to them swiftly.’ Tokyo recently extended the medical compensation to foreign nationals – Koreans and prisoners of war – who were exposed to the atomic bombs: survivors are urged to contact the Japanese government through their embassies.
On hearing of the breakthrough, Haruhide Tamamoto, a 79-year-old plaintiff, told the Japan Times: ‘A certificate … means the government admits that it started a war and caused this atrocity. Being dead without receiving one is an absolute tragedy.’ Another plaintiff, Kamiko Oe, 80, said: ‘I once held grudges against the government, but my hard feelings went away today.’ The government added an apology, which may be read as a symbolic act of restitution after 65 years of neglect. ‘Lawsuits have been drawn out, A-bomb survivors have aged, and their illnesses have worsened,’ said then Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura. ‘By extending its thoughts to A-bomb survivors’ sufferings, which cannot be described in words … the government apologizes.’
* * *
Some of the worst cases triumphed over the most appalling circumstances, to lead happy and fulfilling lives. They tend to share a striking absence of self-pity. As Anne Chisholm has recorded in her book Faces of Hiroshima, Hiroko T., whose deformities were so acute she wore a face mask for years, grew into a lively, quick-witted woman utterly free of morbid self-consciousness or self-pity; she later married an ex-marine who read about her in the papers and courted her for 10 years before she finally said ‘yes’ (at first she angrily interpreted his affection for pity). Hiroko has had 29 facial operations – between finding work as a shop-owner, a dressmaker and a fashion saleswoman. Had she never despaired, Chisholm asked. ‘So many of the others had thought about killing themselves,’ Hiroko replied. ‘I, never! If I think back on my life, I think I was really a lucky girl.’
‘My best subject was mathematics,’ said Miyoko Matsubara, a pupil at Hiroshima Girls’ Commercial School in Danbara. ‘I wanted to become a bank employee.’ Miyoko came from a poor family and hoped to find financial security. Her school was progressive: it believed girls should have a trade and get a job. On 6 August she was among 250 mobilised children working on a demolition site at Tsurumicho. Her flashburns were so severe no one would employ her after she graduated. She quickly abandoned her dream of working in a bank and getting married. She spared Japan the trouble of setting eyes on her: she shut herself away as a live-in carer at an orphanage for the blind. For eight years, from morning to night, a group of sightless children were among the few creatures on earth who valued Miyoko’s existence.
A friend persuaded her to join the Nagarekawa Methodist Church, where Reverend Tanimoto’s mission worked to help the worst affected. Her new faith, and just as likely, the influence of this enlightened pastor, ‘put my heart at ease’. He recommended her for a job at the Peace Museum before he passed away. For years she underwent plastic surgery, and recent advances have partly remoulded her face. Her personal warmth shines through the residual scarring: ‘My younger brother and my niece and several other relatives are all bank employees now,’ she said with a sigh, when I spoke to her in 2009.
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Yet some cases were so severe, they at first appeared beyond the reach of medical science or even humanitarian care. A close friend of Miyoko Matsubara has endured 66 surgical operations in an effort to rebuild her broken body. So badly burned and smashed up, these people live solely, it seems, because they can: a stoic rebuttal to those who, 65 years ago, set them aside on triage fields to die.
In 2009 I visited a nursing home in the suburbs of Hiroshima built exclusively for hibakusha: the Kurakake Nozomi-en (Nursing Home for A-bomb Survivors) is devoted to treating the full range of physical and psychological problems associated with exposure to the atomic bomb. The president, Dr Nanao Kamada, showed me over the facility. ‘In a general nursing home they cannot mention the atomic bomb, but here,’ he said, ‘they can speak freely about their psychological problems.’ The patients were having lunch as we entered. The upward gaze of the ward seemed surprised by the sight of a Western visitor – ‘Why is he here, to study us?’ their eyes seemed to say. Some were psychologically damaged, mute, expressionless, with no outward physical signs of bomb exposure, only a dark and abiding memory; others were severely deformed, their bodies twisted, dessicated and tiny, their faces scarred and wrenched in extreme directions. One or two waved from their wheelchairs, smiling. The effort lent a strange sense of hope – that nobody here takes for granted the use of their hands or the movement of their lips. A source of happiness here is being able to smile.
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About a month after the bombings, some 16,000 child evacuees waited in the temples and shrines around Hiroshima for their parents to collect them. About 5000 of these children were not yet aware they were orphans. In time a succession of strange uncles and aunts and cousins would arrive; or their badly scarred mother or father. Some children, not recognising their parents, would run away in terror.
One unclaimed third-grade girl recounted her experience: ‘The friends I had been living with were gradually taken back to Hiroshima – today one, the next day two – by their fathers and brothers. It was saddest when the time came for my best friend to go. Just before she left, when I should have been there to share her joy, I hid instead in the shadow of the old temple and wept … no-one came for me…’
On 10 August Shoso Kawamoto, the Hiroshiman schoolboy evacuated with his classmates to Kamisugi village in the countryside, sat similarly unclaimed in the temple near Hiroshima. He thought his entire family were dead and ‘cried tears of joy and couldn’t speak, I was so happy’, when his elder sister Tokie, 15, arrived to collect him. The day after the explosion, Tokie, apparently unhurt, had returned to the site of their home where she found the burnt remains of their mother, younger brother and sister locked in an embrace. She could not find their father and second sister.
Shoso and Tokie took a train to the outskirts of Hiroshima to resume the search. Not a building interrupted their view from West Hiroshima Station to the mountains. After fruitless hours spent wandering the ruined city, they collected a little ash near their home and buried it in Numatacho, a suburb where their relatives lived.
Their whole family, they presumed – with the exception of their eldest brother then in Manchuria – were dead. Shoso and Tokie went to their relatives’ house in Numatacho. Their uncles and aunts wanted to adopt them separately but Tokie refused. ‘My sister,’ said Shoso, ‘was adamant that we wouldn’t be separated as we were the only survivors of our family.’ The two children returned to Hiroshima and lived together in a corner of the partly destroyed train station. The strong-willed Tokie got an administrative job in the railway company, which let them wash in the station bathroom. They scavenged for food – potatoes and rice balls – with the help of friends. ‘Looking back I realise what a wonderful older sister she was,’ Shoso said. Hundreds of these atomic street kids would die of cold and starvation in the coming winter; the survivors, like Tokie and Shoso, got jobs; or formed gangs that roamed the cities, thieving and begging, and growing up to become Yakuza-style gangsters.
Within a year Tokie succumbed to radiation sickness and Shoso’s uncle placed him in the care of a nearby village head, Rikiso Kawanaka, who gave the boy a job in the family’s soy sauce store. ‘Mr Kawanaka told me that if I worked hard for 10 years he would build me a house,’ Shoso said. ‘So I worked very hard for the next 10 years and he built me a house.’
Shoso fell in love with a local girl, whose father refused to allow the marriage: ‘You were in Hiroshima,’ he said. ‘You must have been exposed to radiation. You probably won’t live long either, so I can’t possibly give my daughter to you.’
Shoso walked away in shock. His house, his job, meant nothing to the girl’s father. ‘Even after working so hard for all that time, I couldn’t marry the woman I loved, so I quit my job.’ He returned to Hiroshima and joined a gang – many of them A-bomb orphans, like Shoso – who took care of him. ‘My experience had taught me that hard work doesn’t pay off. So I just hung out with gangsters and lived a low life.’
In his 30s he abandoned the life of a gangster, moved to Okayama and started a food production business. In 1995, a fellow A-bomb orphan invited him to the 50th anniversary of the atomic attack. Shoso, then almost 60, decided to sell up and return to Hiroshima. Today he derives great happiness guiding school groups around the Peace Museum.
‘Did you subsequently marry?’ I asked him.
‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to experience that pain again.’
‘You never saw her again?’
‘Never.’
‘Have you ever been sick yourself in any way? Do you suffer any radiation effects?’
‘No, thankfully I haven’t experienced any radiation effects at this stage.’
* * *
Mitsue Fujii’s eyes blaze with anger at the memory of the short life of her mother, Shizue. After the family returned empty-handed to Hiraki village, Zenchiki, Mitsue’s grandfather, literally worked Shizue to death. In addition to her domestic and farm chores, she was responsible for nursing his two surviving daughters who had returned from Hiroshima severely injured; every day she washed them and placed cucumber slices on their burns.
Meanwhile, anxious to find out whether her husband – Zenchiki’s son – had survived the war, Shizue plied returning soldiers for news. They tried to sound optimistic – ‘He’ll come back one day’ and ‘I think he’s alive’ – and averted their eyes from the woman’s imploring gaze. One day, a year after the surrender, she received a standard government notice informing her that her husband was dead. There was no ceremony, funeral or compensation. The news mortified the old man, and left Shizue helpless: ‘From that point on, my mother had no future,’ her daughter Mitsue said.
Two years later, aged 35, Shizue died of illnesses linked to her exposure to residual radiation. Her three children survive her. ‘I remember feeling pure hatred towards my grandfather,’ said Mitsue, now 70. ‘My grandfather only cared about his own children, and he considered his daughter-in-law disposable.’
When their grandfather died shortly after, the three children stayed on the farm – in happiness. To avoid being sent to orphanages, Mitsue’s elder brother, Hisao, then 16, insisted on raising her, then 10, and their little sister. ‘To me, my older brother is my father,’ Mitsue says. The three children helped each other: ‘We never fought, we just worked hard.’ They gathered wood and vegetables, cooked, worked in the fields. Their neighbours were very kind, and offered food and a regular bath. Mitsue, eager for an education, sometimes lied to her brother and slipped away to school in Hiroshima.
At 19, Hisao married and his wife came to live with them: ‘She was like a mother to me,’ Mitsue recalled. ‘They were so kind. I was so happy. I wanted to live with them forever.’ But she had to find work. In her teens, Mitsue got a job as a trainee hairdresser and lived in the salon. A highly intelligent child, she studied in her spare time, to the anger of her boss who ordered her to stick to hairdressing. For nine years she cut hair and suffered recurring illnesses linked to her exposure to residual radiation. She was constantly being told that ‘hibakusha are weak’, ‘hibakusha cannot have children’.
Doctors measured her white blood cell count at half that of a normal person. Her illness ruined her hopes of marriage. So she saved money to open a salon. Within a few years, however, she met her future husband – a man who, like Mitsue, had lost his mother to the bomb and his father in the war.
The couple started a family with deep anxiety: ‘When I was pregnant, I was in constant fear that my child would be born without arms or legs, or have some other deformity,’ she said. Mitsue ‘aches with sorrow’ over the memory of her mother but she has found happiness and is now a cheerful grandmother, with five healthy grandchildren. Fifteen years ago, aged 55, she resumed her studies. Today, she is a volunteer worker in the Hiroshima Peace Museum.