CHAPTER 5

TIME SUSPENDED

In January 1946, eleven U.S. military filmmakers and photographers arrived in Nagasaki. They came as part of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), assessing the effectiveness of the United States’ conventional and nuclear bomb attacks on Japan as a means to support the “future development of the United States armed forces.” In the fall of 1945, over a thousand USSBS military and civilian experts had traveled throughout Japan and its previously occupied territories to review surviving Japanese records, document the destruction from U.S. bombing strikes, and interview thousands of former Japanese military leaders, government officials, and civilians. In a second round of investigations in selected Japanese cities, a small USSBS team came to Nagasaki to further document the city’s destruction.

They entered the city by train from the north, climbing over lush green mountains before descending into the leveled Urakami Valley. Not much had changed in the six months since the bombing. To their left, the Americans saw the vast expanse of atomic destruction and debris. In the distance, they glimpsed the wreckages of Urakami Church and Nagasaki Medical College at the edge of Nagasaki’s eastern mountains. On their right, they passed the crushed Shiroyama Elementary School and the tangled webs of steel and mangled equipment of the Mitsubishi factories along the river. Their train came to a stop at a single shack serving as Nagasaki Station.

For weeks, the camera crew recorded Nagasaki’s material damages. “Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there,” Army Air Forces 2nd Lieutenant Herbert Sussan remembered. “The quietness of it all . . . it was like an enormous graveyard.” Sussan’s director, 1st Lieutenant Daniel McGovern, recalled bone fragments and hundreds of children’s skulls scattered near cremation sites. The camera crew recorded survivors’ physical suffering as they lay infirm in relief stations, hospitals, and crude huts constructed in the ruins. Some hibakusha died on camera during the filming. Others stared blankly, slowly turning their faces and bodies to reveal their whole-body burns and hardened, protruding keloid scars.

On January 31, the USSBS team arrived at the rural Omura National Hospital north of Nagasaki, where approximately four hundred burned and injured survivors languished inside small barracks-like buildings. Entering one of the patients’ rooms, they saw Taniguchi lying on a bed low to the ground. Taniguchi had just turned seventeen, but with his tiny skeletal figure and shorn scalp, he looked much younger.

Now in his sixth month lying prostrate, Taniguchi was coping not only with relentless pain from burns that would not heal, but also with chronic diarrhea, minimal appetite, a weak pulse, and periodic fevers. Bedsores on his chest, left cheek, and right knee festered. His red blood cell count was half the normal level. Hospital staff administered penicillin compresses and boric acid ointment to his back, and gave him blood infusions, injections of vitamin C, vitamin B, and glucose from grapes. “The doctors were clueless about how to treat me,” Taniguchi reflected.

As the crew set up their lights for filming, Taniguchi’s breath was shallow, his pulse raced, and pus oozed from the burns on his back and arms. “I shuddered when the lights were turned on to film him,” Sussan recalled, fearing the pain that the heat of the lights would cause on Taniguchi’s burned flesh. But Taniguchi remembered that the warmth from the lights felt good as he lay there, always cold in his unheated hospital room with only a thin wooden wall to block the bitter winter chill.

The filmmakers captured three minutes of silent color footage of Taniguchi lying naked on the bed while three doctors in white coats ministered to his burns. At the start, the camera focuses on Taniguchi’s back: From shoulders to waist, his raw, bloodred tissue glistens under the lights. The flesh of his emaciated left arm is salmon-colored and translucent. Exposed burns and blisters cover both his buttocks. Using foot-long tweezers, the doctors peel off a thin layer of gauze soaked in blood and pus and gently dab the excreting areas with swabs of cotton. With no skin or scabbing, nothing protects Taniguchi from the torment of even their grazing touch.

The camera shifts to the other side of his body. His face is visible now, propped up by his chin digging into the bed. Taniguchi’s eyes are closed, and for a moment his face is calm. His torso barely expands and contracts with quick, shallow breaths—in-out-pause, in-out-pause. As the doctors place a fresh layer of thin gauze across his back, Taniguchi furrows his brow and bares his teeth in a silent growl of unbearable pain. A second later, his muscles relax and his calm expression returns—until his face twists in pain again.

The frames flutter to a stop as the camera is turned off and the American team moves on. Several months later, all of the reels of the estimated ninety thousand feet of USSBS Pacific Survey film, including the footage of Taniguchi, were locked into trunks and shipped to the United States, where they were classified and withheld from public view for more than twenty-five years.

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For two years after the bombing, hundreds of thousands of people moved into and out of Nagasaki. Civilian families who had been forcibly moved to Manchuria to support Japan’s military efforts came home—many underfed and sick with scabies or tuberculosis—only to find their homes burned and their families dead, injured, or struggling with the effects of whole-body radiation exposure. Thousands of Japanese military personnel and POWs also returned from locations across the Pacific, some carrying rations of rice and other food, to find no surviving relatives.

Thousands left Nagasaki as well, mostly non-Japanese. Forced laborers from Korea, China, Formosa, and other Asian countries were finally repatriated. As the occupation consolidated its operations throughout Japan, U.S. soldiers converged on the port city before boarding ships for home. Having completed Nagasaki’s demilitarization efforts, approximately twenty thousand men from the 2nd Marine Division who had been stationed there had also departed by early 1946, leaving the 10th Marines in Nagasaki to oversee routine surveillance, reconnaissance, and the disposal of Japan’s war supplies.

More hibakusha evacuated, too, often walking for days and weeks in search of a less penurious life in the countryside or on outlying islands. Some found solace away from the devastation and death; for others, living with distant relatives whose lives were still intact was too painful to bear, and many chose to return to Nagasaki, where they were surrounded by survivors who shared their suffering. Homeless hibakusha subsisted in flimsy shacks and slept on earthen floors or tatami mats found in the debris. Fourteen or fifteen people often lived in a single room with no furnishings. Running water was still not available, so survivors hauled springwater from the mountains and collected rainwater to boil and drink. Without toilets, people dug holes in the ground outside their shanties and covered them with wooden boards. Without bathtubs, they heated water in large oil drums and bathed standing up. To battle the winter winds, families wore as many layers of donated clothing and blankets as they could, huddling beneath umbrellas around wood-burning hibachi to protect themselves against the rain, sleet, and snow that fell through their makeshift roofs. In pitch-dark nights, survivors walking through the ruins cut their feet on glass shards, old nails, and slivers of wood and broken tile.

Aging men and women living alone, with no one to depend on or any way to provide for themselves, became known as the orphaned elderly. Uchida Tsukasa, sixteen years old at the time of the bombing, recalled the moment when an older homeless woman suddenly appeared in the doorway of his family’s hut. His mother invited her to stay with them. “One day,” Uchida remembered, “the old woman gathered charcoal from the ruins behind our house and began to make a fire in a clay stove. Looking at it closely, I was astonished to see that the charcoal contained charred fragments of human bones. We were literally living in a graveyard. My mother said that it was some kind of message, and she looked after the old woman until the very end of her life.”

The city’s social services were not yet operational, and many children with no surviving family members were forced to live on the streets. Monks at the Catholic monastery Seibo no Kishi took in more than a hundred orphans, and other organizations, including Dr. Akizuki’s First Urakami Hospital, offered them free medical care. Relief workers sometimes adopted unidentified babies. But many girls with nowhere to go turned to prostitution to survive, and for months and even years, orphaned boys wandered the region alone or in pairs, living in train stations and under bridges, panhandling, stealing, and scouring for food as they were bounced back and forth from one location to the next by railroad authorities and local police who considered them a nuisance.

Expectant mothers gave birth in the atomic ruins without the help of a doctor or midwife, terrified of the rumors that their babies might die or be born deformed after being exposed to radiation inside their wombs. Death rates were, in fact, high for intrauterine-exposed infants: 43 percent of pregnancies in which the fetus was exposed within a quarter mile from the hypocenter ended in spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, or infant death. Many babies who survived birth were significantly underweight. With only thin rice gruel or other scraps they could find, their mothers, too, struggled to stay alive. An eighteen-year-old woman—three months pregnant when she was exposed just over a half mile from the hypocenter—had subsequently experienced a high fever, vomiting, bleeding gums, purple spots, and numbness in her back and hands. Just as she began to recover at the end of 1945, during her eighth month of pregnancy, she noticed that her baby was no longer growing in her belly. On a cold, snowy day several weeks later, with no water break, she suddenly went into labor and gave birth to a baby boy, his skin severely dry and creased. Some new mothers, unable to produce milk, quickly depleted their limited supplies of rationed milk and begged other mothers to share their breast milk. They did not know it yet, but the survival of their in utero–exposed infants marked the beginning of new lives for their families, with even greater hardships to come as their children’s physical and mental disabilities would unfold.

 • • • 

Do-oh and Nagano had homes, families, and just enough financial means to survive the immediate postwar crisis. In their own ways, however, both remained trapped by the impact of the bomb on their lives. Do-oh’s father still applied cooking oil and recycled gauze bandages to the gash at the back of her head, the burns on her arms and legs, and the deep lesions from glass fragments that had pierced her body. Each week, her parents, family members, and friends carried her to Dr. Miyajima’s house for the limited medical care he could provide.

Their perseverance paid off. In the spring of 1946, Do-oh’s radiation illness subsided, some of her wounds began to heal, and she was able to stand, walk, go to the bathroom, wash her face, and use chopsticks on her own. But when she moved in certain ways, the glass slivers lodged in her back and arms caused intense pain. Most critically, the burned patches of her face were still raw and inflamed, and her hair would not grow back. Do-oh stayed hidden in her house, too ashamed to allow anyone but her closest family to see her marred face and bald head.

In the village of Obama on the nearby Shimabara Peninsula, Nagano lived with her mother in a tiny one-room structure they had built on the grounds of her elderly great-aunt’s house. Her older brother moved away for a job in another prefecture, and while her father worked in Nagasaki and came home when he could, Nagano worked at a salt factory during the day and helped at home on the evenings and weekends.

She and her mother got by with her own and her father’s meager wages and through her parents’ strategic efforts. At first, her father brought back the food they had stored in the underground bomb shelter next to their former house; later, he hauled back their goemonburo (cast-iron bathtub), which had survived the fires because it had been set in concrete and filled with water. A personal bathtub was a rare treasure in Japan, and Nagano’s parents decided to use the public baths and trade their goemonburo for four straw bags of rice and the same amount of barley, giving them sufficient food staples for months. Her mother sold small amounts of the grains to buy fish and sometimes vegetables. Relatives in the area also gave them food, so they always had enough to eat. For safekeeping during the war, Nagano’s mother had given their family’s remaining kimonos to an acquaintance outside of Nagasaki, which she reclaimed and sold to pay for clothing.

“Every day, I watched my mother cry,” Nagano remembered. “But she never said to me, ‘Sei-chan and Kuniko died because you brought them back to Nagasaki.’ If she had said that, I could have told her that I was sorry. I could have told her that I had never imagined an atomic bomb.” But Nagano’s mother never said a word about it. Nagano desperately wanted to approach her but had the impression that her mother wouldn’t accept anything she said. She was further devastated to learn that her mother complained about her to other women in the neighborhood, telling them that Nagano wasn’t a loyal child. “I felt so sad when I heard this,” Nagano said. “It’s like she had told them, ‘Etsuko killed them. Etsuko killed Seiji and Kuniko.’ The neighbors glared at me with very cold eyes. The women told me that I was a terrible child for making my mother cry. It was unbearable for me.”

Nagano wanted to move out and thought maybe she could stay with one of her friends who lived in another prefecture. But her mother strongly opposed the idea and told Nagano that if she left, she would be cutting off her relationship with her parents. “Because she said it like that, I didn’t go,” Nagano recalled. “With things as they were, I felt it was my fate to take care of my parents. I thought that nothing I did could change my destiny, so I gave up and accepted the situation. Looking back, I think that my mother would have been lonely if I had gone. Even though she complained a lot, I think she felt safe when I was there. But the air that flowed between us was incredibly cold.”

 • • • 

Both in Nagasaki and across Japan, economic stability did not come for many years, and except for wealthy business barons who had amassed enormous profits during the war, most families faced unrestrained financial distress. Wholesale prices in Japan climbed over 500 percent in 1946, with inexorable increases over the next three years. Extreme hunger and malnutrition were exacerbated by poor harvests, dysfunctional distribution systems, internal corruption, and the postwar termination of food imports from countries Japan had invaded in its quest for resources. Thousands of Japanese starved to death. Even occupation supplies of antibiotics could not curb the many communicable diseases—already prevalent during the war—that ravaged the country. Over 650,000 cases of cholera, smallpox, scarlet fever, epidemic meningitis, polio, and other infectious diseases were reported; of these, nearly 100,000 people died. Every year until 1951, an additional 100,000 people died from tuberculosis. In Nagasaki, one tuberculosis patient remembered being treated only with vitamins and bed rest.

Fortunate hibakusha like Nagano’s father had been able to keep their jobs at the Mitsubishi Shipyard and other industrial sites still standing after the bombing. Another Mitsubishi plant was transformed to manufacture cast-iron pots, providing jobs for some of the factory’s former employees. Some hibakusha found work as teachers or medical support staff.

But a huge segment of Nagasaki’s industrial capacity lay in ruins. Two major utility plants and a railway factory had been destroyed, and numerous sites that had produced munitions, steel, electrical machinery, and ships for Mitsubishi’s four major companies were no longer functional. Material and financial assets for innumerable businesses and individuals, as well as records documenting their existence, were completely destroyed. Some businesses beyond the reach of the atomic bomb were able to keep their doors open, but even employers who were less impacted by the bombing found it almost impossible to operate effectively within virtually nonexistent economic, social, communications, and transportation infrastructures.

Thousands could find only part-time jobs with paltry wages in meat or bread shops or as janitors or day laborers in the limited number of operating factories, government offices, and businesses. Some hibakusha worked without pay in exchange for food, or left Nagasaki to search for jobs elsewhere. Countless more were too weak or too ill to work, and others stayed home to care for critically ill family members. To help provide for his family, Do-oh’s father went into the mountains every day to cut down trees, then hauled the wood back into the city to sell it for small sums. As prices for everyday items continued to soar, few could afford to provide even the most basic needs for themselves and their families. Many wore waraji—thin straw sandals—even in the rain and snow, and one survivor remembered sharing one pair of shoes with her brothers and sisters. In another family, six children who lost both parents and three of their siblings lived off the minimal earnings of their eldest brother, who was only sixteen.

Wada’s postwar income could not support his sister and grandparents, so they supplemented his income with the savings his father had accrued from his job at a local bank before his death years earlier. Like Nagano’s mother, Wada’s grandparents traded many of their family’s belongings to farmers for rice and vegetables. “Back then, we called it take no seikatsu [a bamboo shoot life]. When you eat bamboo, you have to peel off the outer skins and eat the small shoots. That’s what it was like for us—we had to peel off our clothes and sell our possessions in order to survive. The only ones who weren’t hungry were the unethical people in positions of power and particularly clever people who hoarded food during the war. Regular, ethical people couldn’t do that. We never ate enough to feel full.

“I was unethical, too,” Wada confessed. “One day when I was working on the train, someone gave me onigiri. I quickly ate half of it. To tell you the truth, I wanted to eat the whole thing. Then I thought about my grandparents—my grandfather was seventy-one and couldn’t work anymore. When I thought about them, I stopped eating and saved the other half. When I brought it home, they were very happy. But I did eat half, which I shouldn’t have done.” On another occasion, Wada stole potatoes from agricultural fields and ate them raw. “I had to eat something,” he said. “There were people who died from hunger because they were honest and couldn’t bring themselves to do these kinds of things. I wasn’t able to do that.”

Wada quickly credited the United States for the food staples it provided to Nagasaki, part of its effort to prevent both disease and civil unrest in postwar Japan. Additionally, for six years after the war, the Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia (LARA), a coalition of thirteen U.S. relief agencies, shipped food, clothing, and other provisions to Japan. “LARA was like UNESCO or UNICEF today,” Wada explained, referring to the essential food staples LARA distributed to schools and families, including powdered milk, pineapple juice, bread, and canned goods. LARA also provided clothing, combs and brushes, soap, and toothpaste. “They saved a lot of children. It isn’t widely known now that America did this for us. Of course the atomic bombs were wrong,” Wada said, “but at the time, many hibakusha who hated America for dropping the bombs didn’t know that the food they were eating came from America.”

Still, U.S. support could not eradicate hunger or stabilize the Japanese economy. In 1946 alone, the price of rationed rice tripled, and fish, soy sauce, miso, and bread remained under strict distribution controls. Open-air black markets flourished across the country. Near the Shianbashi Bridge at the entrance to the older part of Nagasaki, throngs of hungry citizens swarmed around tents made of cardboard boxes and wooden-plank floors, where hawkers peddled rice, fish, vegetables, sweet cakes, and hand-rolled cigarettes. They also sold used clothing, occasionally taken from dead bodies, and scrap metal and wood from the wreckage of abandoned homes. Customers with any means at all scraped together the money to pay the vendors’ high prices in order to supplement government rations and help their families survive. Shunned as failures for Japan’s defeat and with no aid from the drained Japanese government, war veterans, many missing limbs, gathered in small groups nearby and begged for money by playing the accordion and singing wartime military songs.

Hibakusha without homes or jobs staved off hunger by planting vegetables, beans, and peanuts behind their huts and sifting through American soldiers’ garbage for discarded food—scraping the sides of cans for remnants of meat and sipping leftover drops from empty pineapple juice cans. Many families ventured into the mountains to scour for firewood and edible weeds and tried to satiate their hunger by eating wild grass, roots, orange peels, pumpkin leaves, and grasshoppers. One hibakusha remembers her family being so hungry that they ate dog meat.

 • • • 

The city’s physical recovery came in small steps. Despite earlier reports that plants and trees would not grow back for seventy years, some vegetation reappeared in the spring of 1946—although abnormalities and malformations were observed for three or four more years. That summer, gas service was restored to almost eight hundred households, and Mitsubishi Shipyard completed construction on the Daiichi Nisshin Maru, its first vessel since the atomic bombing. Rebuilding of the older sections of Nagasaki continued as construction of more rudimentary municipal housing units for hibakusha and veterans began at the periphery of the hypocenter area, each with a small kitchen and toilet. Parishioners cleared away the ruins of Urakami Church, leaving only parts of the facade, and held Mass in a damaged room inside Dr. Akizuki’s First Urakami Hospital. Eventually they built a small wooden temporary chapel next to the damaged southern entrance to the church, but they lacked sufficient funds to build a roof, so services were held beneath the open sky. Nagasaki Medical College began offering classes at Shinkozen and hospitals in the region. Near the center of the city, a new movie theater was built to present Hollywood films.

Schools across the city slowly began reopening at their original sites, though many children could not attend because of injury, illness, hunger, or the need to care for family members. A quarter mile west of the hypocenter, a limited number of classes resumed in Shiroyama Elementary School’s partially crushed three-story concrete building, where fifty-two mobilized students and teachers had died at the time of the bombing. Classroom walls were still warped and buckled, and one teacher remembered that both faculty and students lost their focus as they gazed through broken windows at the huge sweep of atomic wasteland.

At Yamazato Elementary School, situated on a bared hillside a half mile north of the hypocenter, weeds sprouted up in the heaps of charred wood, tangled wires, and slabs of smashed concrete. The enormous U-shaped building had been internally gutted, so the classrooms and corridors had no walls to divide them, and rooms in the deep interior of the building had no light. Children who had been evacuated before the bombing had returned to Nagasaki and rejoined their classmates, many of whom still suffered from hair loss, bleeding gums, and chronic weakness. During inclement weather, classes ended early and students walked home already soaked from the rain and wind that had swept through the building.

In March 1946, both Yamazato and Shiroyama elementary schools held modest graduation ceremonies for their sixth-grade students, bringing to a symbolic close the first seven months of postbomb life. At Yamazato, fewer than three hundred of sixteen hundred students had survived. Seventy-five students made up the graduating class, sixty-one of whom had directly experienced the bombing. A small vase with a solitary flower decorated the stark room, and the short commemoration ended with the students singing songs of gratitude and farewell, interrupted by the sobbing of both children and teachers. At Shiroyama—which had formerly graduated more than three hundred students every year—only fourteen sixth graders graduated. Thirty students, five teachers, and three parents attended the observances. In his address, the vice principal praised the students for their hard work in overcoming the immense challenges after the atomic bombing, and teachers and students wept as he offered prayers for the souls of their schoolmates, teachers, and relatives who had died in the attack, and good wishes to the graduating students for their futures.

In July, the United States’ highly publicized tests of its first postwar nuclear bombs took place in a remote region of the South Pacific, a site that would become one of two U.S. testing grounds in the decades to follow. Two weeks later, on the hot summer morning of August 9, 1946, grieving hibakusha gathered in the rubble at the hypocenter to observe the first anniversary of the atomic bombing of their city. Simple ceremonies also took place in the ruins of Nagasaki Medical College, near the destroyed Mitsubishi factories along the river, and at Suwa Shrine near Yoshida’s family home.

A year after the bombing, tens of thousands of survivors remained severely injured and ill from radiation exposure. Others, like Wada, had significantly recovered. Following his grandmother’s bidding, he had continued to drink her persimmon tea each day. Eventually his gums had stopped bleeding, and he no longer observed blood in his urine. Still, overall weakness caused him to miss work sometimes—and his hair would not grow back. “I was nineteen years old, and I was embarrassed,” he said. At times he thought it might be better to die than live through any more hardships.

But Wada was not one to give in, a characteristic he attributed to having lost his parents at a young age and feeling responsible for his family’s well-being. Wearing a wool cap his grandmother knitted for him, he sat behind the steering wheel of the streetcar, maneuvering through the city—from Hotarujaya Terminal past the gutted Nagasaki Prefectural Office to the collapsed Nagasaki Station, then north along the river into the barren Urakami corridor. He came to see that compared with that of so many others, his suffering had been minimal. Sometime around the first anniversary of the attack, Wada made up his mind to do everything he could to forget this period of his life and never speak about the atomic bombing again.

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Under General MacArthur’s leadership, by the end of 1945, U.S. occupation personnel had demobilized the Japanese military, removed promilitary ultranationalists from positions in the Japanese government, abolished Shinto as the state religion and vehicle for nationalistic propaganda, and established a massive American oversight structure to monitor all operations of the Japanese government. In what was perhaps MacArthur’s most controversial occupation policy, Emperor Hirohito was retained as the head of state, contradicting the Allied nations’ “unconditional surrender” terms and countering many U.S. and Allied leaders’ calls for the emperor’s prosecution as a war criminal. MacArthur believed that removing the emperor from his position as the symbol of Japan’s culture and history would destabilize social order, trigger rebellion, and hinder the goals of the occupation, and his insistence on preserving the emperor prevailed. Over the next few years, Hirohito had no choice but to allow occupation leaders to transform his relationship to the Japanese people—from adulated deity who had inspired passionate loyalty during Japan’s holy war to pacifist human figurehead who represented “the symbol of the State and unity of the People.”

MacArthur’s next step was to realize the United States’ agenda, both visionary and patriarchal, to metamorphose Japan into a new, egalitarian nation. In what historian John Dower called a “revolution from above,” the occupation’s widespread political, economic, and social reforms echoed Japan’s individual and civil rights movements in the 1920s before the right-wing military extremists rose to power. Economic restructuring included the dismantling of the zaibatsu—large industrial and banking conglomerates that had dominated Japan’s economy before and during the war. Land reforms required the minority of large farm owners, who owned 90 percent of Japan’s agricultural acreage, to sell all but a small portion of their holdings to their tenants. New trade union laws gave workers the right to organize, bargain collectively, and strike. Within four years, an estimated 56 percent of Japanese workers were union members.

Japan’s education system also underwent massive reforms. The “imperial” label was removed from the names of elite universities, and the emperor’s portrait was removed from schools, government offices, and public buildings. Teachers, who only six months earlier had been required to train Japanese children to die for the emperor, were now asked to embrace democratic and pacifist ideologies, and their new curriculum instructed students to reflect on the failure of the Japanese people to think critically about and resist the nationalistic military movement that had ultimately led to Japan’s defeat. Coeducation was instituted in public schools, and new laws provided equal education for women. Newly issued textbooks endorsed Western concepts of individuality, rational thinking, and social equality.

At the same time, MacArthur and his team practiced secretive and oppressive policies that contradicted the democratic values they claimed to promote. An early example was Japan’s new constitution, which MacArthur presented to the Japanese public in March 1946 as a document brought forth by the will and desire of the Japanese people. In reality, however, members of the occupation’s Government Section had secretly drafted the new constitution over the course of a single week; the will—or even the knowledge—of the Japanese people played no part in Japan’s adoption of its new parliamentary democracy, and Japanese government leaders provided only minor revisions after the fact. In an odd contradiction, the new constitution established many human rights and equalities for the Japanese people, but the country’s social and economic reforms, individual freedoms, and its new democracy itself were, in effect, forced on Japan by an occupying nation.

Contradicting the new constitution’s guarantee of freedom of expression and explicit wording that “no censorship shall be maintained,” the occupation’s Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) continued to carry out broad media restrictions. Staffed by more than 8,700 American and Japanese personnel in Tokyo and in regional offices in northern and southern Japan, the CCD monitored radio and television broadcasts, films, personal mail, and telephone and telegraph communications. From 1945 to 1949, when it suspended its operations, the department examined an estimated 15 million pages of print media from 16,500 newspapers, 13,000 periodicals and bulletins, and 45,000 books and pamphlets, plus innumerable photographs, political advertisements, and other documents. Banned topics covered not only the more obvious subjects, such as emperor worship and militaristic fervor, but also any direct or perceived criticism of the United States, its allies, or the occupation government, including the physical damages, death tolls, and injuries caused by U.S. firebombings of Japanese cities.

Across the country, movie theaters could only show films approved by the CCD after stringent review; among other criteria, any challenges to the provisions of the Potsdam Declaration, the terms for Japanese surrender, or the announced objectives of the Allied occupation were forbidden. Documentaries about historical events were required to be “truthful,” as defined by occupation authorities. Other subjects barred from media coverage included “overplaying” starvation across the country; black-market activities; the differences in living standards between occupation forces and Japanese citizens; and fraternization between U.S. servicemen and Japanese women and the biracial children born from these encounters. References to U.S. atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific were highly restricted. The Japanese people were prohibited from traveling overseas or communicating with anyone beyond Japan’s borders, limiting their knowledge of world affairs to occupation-approved reports from U.S. or Allied media sources. As before, no reports about or even allusions to censorship policies were tolerated, so most Japanese knew nothing of those policies’ existence.

No specific censorship rules related directly to the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombings, but the CCD eliminated most statements about the nuclear attacks in print and broadcast journalism, literature, films, and textbooks. Public comments that justified the U.S. use of the bombs or argued for their inevitability were sometimes permitted, but subjects that continued to be censored included technical details about the bombs’ blast, heat, and radiation; the extent of physical destruction in the two cities; death and casualty counts; personal testimonies of atomic bomb survivors; and any photographs, film footage, or reportage of survivors’ suffering from atomic bomb injuries and radiation effects. Even phrases such as “Many innocent people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki” were banned. Nagasaki named its annual commemoration of the bombing the Memorial Day for the Restoration of Peace, calling it a “culture festival” to appease U.S. officials, who believed these services were Japanese propaganda tools that indirectly called for U.S. atonement and hindered U.S. efforts to promote Japanese war guilt.

Some hibakusha writings slipped by occupation staff and were published locally in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but numerous books written by survivors were blocked from publication, including a small book by fourteen-year-old Ishida Masako, Masako taorezu [Masako Did Not Die], which described in vivid detail her memories of the Nagasaki bombing. The CCD felt the book was historically significant but banned it over the concern that it would “tear open war scars and rekindle animosity” toward the United States and tacitly indict the Nagasaki atomic bombing as a crime against humanity.

Also banned was Dr. Nagai’s 1947 Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of Nagasaki), a personal account of the days and months immediately following the bombing in which Nagai offered unique perspectives as a physician, a man himself afflicted with radiation disease, and a Catholic—including his belief that Nagasaki had been chosen “to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War.” Although his message reinforced the concepts of Japanese war guilt and repentance actively promoted by occupation officials, The Bells of Nagasaki was not permitted to be published for reasons similar to those that led to the banning of Ishida Masako’s book. After numerous appeals, Nagai’s book was finally approved for publication two years later, with the stipulation that it include an extended appendix, written by U.S. military officials, that provided a graphic written and photographic account of Japanese soldiers’ complete destruction of Manila in 1945—including the torture, mutilation, rape, starvation, and burning of innocent women and children. Ironically, the inclusion of this appendix resulted in the juxtaposition of the U.S. atomic bombings with Japanese atrocities in the Philippines, which could have been easily construed as a statement of their moral equivalence.

CCD policies also impeded the efforts of hundreds of Japanese scientists and physicians racing to comprehend the nature of survivors’ numerous radiation-related conditions and develop effective treatment methods. Scientists were already required to obtain permission to conduct studies on the effects of the atomic bombings. Further, on the basis of maintaining “public tranquility” in Japan and protecting the United States’ exclusive knowledge about the bombs, all Japanese research findings had to be translated into English and submitted to censorship offices, where they were evaluated for clearance or shipped to the United States for additional review, with little hope of being returned. In either case, permission to publish was rarely given.

Numerous atomic bomb–related scientific reports were also blocked from publication in Japan, including the former Tokyo Imperial University’s extensive early postbomb studies and Dr. Shirabe’s meticulous 1945 study of the medical conditions of eight thousand Nagasaki hibakusha. Censorship actions were so pervasive, and the editors of medical journals were so afraid that their publications would be shut down if rules were broken, that the number of published atomic bomb–related scientific reports diminished to three each year in 1948 and 1949. Japanese scientists and physicians eager to support hibakusha health and recovery were further impeded by the United States’ 1945 confiscation of early Japanese research teams’ blood samples, specimens, photographs, questionnaires, and clinical records from victim autopsies and survivor examinations. Researchers’ and survivors’ grievances over this violation were later aggravated when they discovered that the United States claimed sole use of these body parts—taken without their consent—for military studies to help defend U.S. civilians against nuclear attack. Even after the CCD closed in 1949, research studies on atomic bomb–related topics were banned from discussion at Japanese medical conferences until 1951.

Prior to a postwar presentation at a university in Tokyo, Dr. Shiotsuki Masao, the physician who had painstakingly conducted and preserved hibakusha autopsy specimens at Omura Naval Hospital, received a note of warning. It read, “Please be careful what you say. There is a detective here from the Motofuji police station.” Shiotsuki, who by then was working in a different field of medical research and had no knowledge of the censorship imposed on Japan’s physicians and scientists, was dumbfounded. It would be years before he and others fully understood the U.S. policies that had constrained public dialogue of the atomic bombs, restricted doctors’ efforts to improve treatment methodologies, blocked hibakusha themselves from understanding their persistent illnesses, and kept survivors’ suffering almost completely concealed from public view.

 • • • 

In the United States, while the terrifying truth about Japan’s nuclear cataclysm continued to be obscured from American citizens, top U.S. military and government leaders conducted a new, hard-hitting media campaign to justify the use of the bombs and promote public support for nuclear weapons development. In what social activist A. J. Muste called “a demonstration of . . . the logic of atrocity,” the campaign’s message was delivered through a new round of official denials of the impact of large-dose radiation exposure on hibakusha, combined with decisive statements that the bombs were an absolute military necessity that saved innumerable American lives and ended the war. Officials also deflected opposition to the bombs’ use by making repeated statements that fueled U.S. wartime hatred and racism against Japan and built the foundation for justifying the bombings as righteous and deserving acts against a savage enemy. It is a matter of conjecture whether these efforts were needed to influence Americans’ sentiments; in the immediate postwar years, most Americans—even those who felt disquieted by the enormity of harm the bombs had caused—supported the use of the bombs for reasons that included hatred of Japan’s brutality during the war, pervasive anti-Japanese racism, and huge relief that the war was over.

Even so, in order to prevent potential questions about the necessity and morality of the bombs and abate disapproval of the nation’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program, U.S. officials continued to limit American media access to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. With few exceptions, news stories out of the atomic-bombed cities were abstract and impersonal, focusing on the rebuilding of the cities, healing and rebirth out of the atomic ashes, and potential reconciliation with the United States that—according to American journalists—many atomic bomb victims desired. Reporters typically referenced the atomic bombings in the context of government calls for heightened civil defense policies, appeals for international control of atomic energy, or praise of U.S. scientific ingenuity and achievement. Photographs of the mushroom clouds became the iconic images of the atomic bombings, with no representation of the hundreds of thousands who died and suffered beneath them.

Mainstream journalists rarely challenged the government’s perspectives. In early 1946, however, a small number of articles in the national press criticized the U.S. nuclear weapons program and examined the ethical dilemmas of the U.S. decision to use the bombs. These articles sparked a heated national debate. No formal opposition movement came together, but that summer new editorials and commentaries disapproving the bombs’ use on Japan, combined with an increased number of articles and books that explored the hibakusha experience, fostered new dialogues about the ethics of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Public engagement with the hibakusha experience swelled in August, when, in a single issue, the New Yorker published John Hersey’s new work, Hiroshima, a sixty-eight-page account of the Hiroshima atomic bombing through the eyes of six survivors. Hersey, a former war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer who had spent three weeks in Hiroshima in the spring of 1946, wrote a vivid nonfiction narrative that captured readers’ imaginations, helping them to see Hiroshima as a real place and empathize with hibakusha as real people with families, homes, and jobs. Hiroshima’s graphic descriptions of instantaneous death, human anguish, and the mysterious symptoms from radiation exposure evoked powerful emotional responses across the United States. The issue sold out at shops and newsstands, requests for reprints multiplied, and approximately fifty American newspapers republished the story in serial form. Albert Einstein ordered a thousand copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club distributed hundreds of thousands of copies free to its subscribers because, in the words of club president Harry Scherman, “We find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be of more importance at this moment to the human race.” ABC Radio broadcast the entire text of Hiroshima in half-hour segments over four weeks. Letters, telegraphs, and postcards—most of which expressed approval of the story—poured into the New Yorker offices. By the end of October, Alfred A. Knopf had published Hiroshima in book form, and within six months, over a million copies were sold around the world. In Japan, however, the book was prohibited from publication for another three years over concerns that Hersey’s depictions might invite perceptions that the bombs were “unduly cruel.”

Immediately following the publication of Hersey’s article, statements by two influential figures that challenged U.S. justifications for using the bombs ignited further controversy. At a mid-September press conference about other naval matters, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was quoted as saying that the bombings were a mistake because at the time they were dropped, Japan was on the verge of surrender. Two days later, a scathing essay in the Saturday Review by renowned journalist Norman Cousins presented readers with a series of pressing questions to blast open some of the unspoken realities of the atomic bombings and the implications of U.S. nuclear weapons development. “Do we know, for example, that many thousands of human beings in Japan will die of cancer during the next few years because of radioactivity released by the bomb?” Cousins asked. “Do we know that the atomic bomb is in reality a death ray, and that the damage by blast and fire may be secondary to the damage caused by radiological assault upon human tissue?”

Apologists for the atomic bombings fought back. Nervous that negative views of their decision to use the bombs might intensify public perceptions of the atomic attacks as immoral or even criminal, concerned that such sentiments would damage postwar international relations and threaten U.S. nuclear development, and eager to defend genuine beliefs that the bombs were necessary, government and military officials hurriedly strategized ways to prevent what they considered “a distortion of history.” Their plan: to effectively argue the necessity of the bombs and suppress objections to their use. In the words of Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, a longtime friend of former secretary of war Henry L. Stimson, their intention was to silence the opposition’s “sloppy sentimentality.”

Their efforts worked. Two articles by prominent government officials published in late 1946 and early 1947 offered intelligent and persuasive “behind-the-scenes” perspectives on the decision to use the bombs that effectively quelled civic dissent and directed focus away from personal stories of people who had experienced the bombs. The first article was authored by Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a respected physicist who had helped develop the atomic bombs. In the December 1946 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Compton compared the death toll and damages in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with those from the Tokyo firebombing raids. Without mentioning the radiation effects and ongoing suffering caused by the atomic bombs, he provided casualty estimates for a land invasion of Japan had the war dragged on, claiming that the atomic bombs had prevented the loss of “hundreds of thousands—perhaps several millions—of lives, both American and Japanese.” By most historical accounts, these figures are far higher than those estimated by the U.S. military prior to the bombings. Compton concluded that using the bombs was the only rational decision that U.S. leaders could make, and that the delivery of the two bombs one after the other and the emperor’s decision to surrender less than a day after the Nagasaki bombing were evidence that the atomic bombs ended the war. In a short letter published in a later edition of the Atlantic Monthly, President Truman validated Compton’s perspectives, describing his article as “a fair analysis of the situation.”

Compton’s Atlantic Monthly commentary set the stage for an extended article by former secretary of war Stimson, published in Harper’s Magazine in February 1947, which Secretary of State James Byrnes hoped would “stop some of the idle talk” by those who opposed the use of the bombs. Though a team of military and political leaders contributed to Stimson’s final draft, it was Stimson himself who provided the rank, respect, and reasoned communication style to successfully shut down almost all public criticism of the bombs.

With clarity and unquestionable authority, Stimson told American readers that during the war, the U.S. atomic bomb policy had been a simple one: “to spare no effort” in securing the earliest possible development of an atomic bomb in order to shorten the war, minimize destruction, and save American lives. Like Compton, however, Stimson omitted many critical facts that would have given American readers a more thorough grasp of the numerous and complex factors involved in choosing to use atomic weapons on Japan: He failed to include key officials’ prebomb debates over modifying the “unconditional surrender” restriction that he himself had recognized as a possible key to bringing Japan to an earlier surrender. He explained that the Potsdam Declaration had provided adequate warning to Japan but did not clarify that the declaration’s wording made no reference to nuclear weapons. He justified the two cities’ death tolls by comparing them to an estimate of more than a million American lives saved by avoiding a costly invasion—without mentioning the impact of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, which would have caused Japan to fight on two fronts, altered Allied invasion strategies, and possibly ended the war prior to Allied forces landing on Japan’s main islands. In claiming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets, Stimson obscured the obvious fact that the atomic bombs did not discriminate between military and civilian locations and personnel as they obliterated the two cities.

Ultimately, Stimson claimed that the decision to use the bombs was “the least abhorrent” option that resulted in exactly what military and government officials intended: Japan’s surrender without a U.S. and Allied invasion of Japan’s main islands. By the article’s conclusion, Stimson had shifted readers’ moral focus to the United States’ obligation to retain international control over nuclear technology, weapons development, and testing to prevent other countries from producing or using atomic weapons. Nuclear weapons in U.S. hands, he maintained, would keep the United States and the world safe.

It would be decades before historians gained access to the internal memos and documents of Stimson and his team of contributors that would reveal the careful construction of the secretary of war’s arguments and the number of misstatements and omissions they contained. In the meantime, in the months following its publication, the Harper’s article was reprinted in its entirety by numerous newspapers and magazines across the country and quoted at length by dozens more. By virtue of his authority and careful reasoning, Stimson had created a singular atomic bomb narrative with such moral certitude that it superseded all others and became deeply ingrained as the truth in American perception and memory: The atomic bombings ended the war and saved a million American lives.

The U.S. government’s campaign to justify the bombs and mute opposition had done its job. Media reports on the survivors’ lives—and the empathy they evoked—virtually ceased. Even with the popularity of Hersey’s book, the combined impact of occupation censorship and U.S. justification and denial diminished Americans’ ability to grasp both the colossal scope of damages and death in Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the unpredictable and odious aftereffects of radiation exposure. Referring to atomic bomb dissenters, McGeorge Bundy—a behind-the-scenes contributor to Stimson’s article and coauthor of Stimson’s autobiography—remarked, “I think we deserve some sort of medal for reducing these particular chatterers to silence.”

____

Shrouded in silence, hibakusha entered a new stage of long-term atomic bomb survival. At Omura National Hospital, the bedsores on Taniguchi’s chest did not heal and were so deep that portions of his ribs and pulsing heart were visible. “Lying on my stomach with my chest wounds pressed down into the bed—the pain was excruciating,” he said. New sores continued to develop on Taniguchi’s lower left jaw, his knees, and both sides of his body near his hips—anywhere his body made contact with the bed. Powerless to move anything except his neck and right arm, Taniguchi lay drenched in pus secreted from these wounds and the swollen and festering burns on his back, arms, and legs. He was constantly enveloped in the smell of decomposing flesh that pooled around his body. Taniguchi’s red blood cell count remained dangerously low, his pulse was strained, and he frequently experienced fevers that spiked to perilously high levels. When he was able to eat, he was forced to do so while lying on his stomach. Food often became stuck in his throat, and on at least one occasion he choked and stopped breathing. Sometime in 1946, his father returned after sixteen years in Manchuria. In Taniguchi’s hospital room, father and son met for the first time since Taniguchi was an infant. Except to confirm that it happened, Taniguchi barely spoke of this moment. After their visit, his father moved to Osaka, where Taniguchi’s sister and brother lived.

Every morning, the doctors and nurses whispered among themselves, amazed that he had survived another day. But in the daze of constant pain, all Taniguchi could think about was dying. He cried every time he heard the instrument cart approaching, and when the nurses removed the gauze from his back, he screamed in pain and begged the nurses to let him die. “Kill me, kill me,” he cried, over and over again. “Please let me die.” Again and again, his family members visited, then gathered at his grandmother’s house on the slopes of Mount Inasa to plan his funeral. “No one thought I would survive,” he said. “I lingered on the verge of death but failed to die. . . . Somehow I was made to live.”

His grandmother stayed home to manage the farm, so Taniguchi’s grandfather stayed at his bedside to support the physicians’ and nurses’ round-the-clock care. They made short entries in his medical record each day. Bedsores desiccated. Body temperature up and down. Low-grade anemia. Top layer of skin beginning to form in certain places, like islands. Weak and small pulse. Bones are visible through bedsore wounds. Secretions slightly increased. Appetite good. Blood in stool, four times. They treated Taniguchi with regular doses of vitamins B and C, cod liver oil, and penicillin ointment, but there was little indication of any significant impact on his condition. Throughout the hot summer of 1946, Taniguchi lay beneath mosquito netting, but flies managed to find their way through the mesh and lay their eggs inside his wounds. Maggots crawled through his flesh, creating an incessant sensation that Taniguchi could not relieve. Three times he fell into a coma. Whenever he was conscious, Taniguchi felt an intense hatred for the war and fierce resentment toward all the parents who had done nothing to try to prevent it. Day after day, he stared at a tall persimmon tree visible outside the window in his room, nostalgic for his childhood and heavy with sadness that he might never feel happy again.

 • • • 

Yoshida lay faceup in the hospital bed next to Taniguchi. His father and grandmother had both died that year, so Yoshida’s mother and sister took turns staying at his bedside. He was able to see now, but he couldn’t turn onto his side or stomach because of the blackened burns on his face. Over time, the left side of his face and the lower left side of his body began to heal, but the right side of his face remained scabbed and infected. At some point, his burned right ear finally rotted and fell off, leaving only a small hole on the side of his head through which he could still hear.

Doctors performed three skin graft surgeries to the right side of his face. The first procedure came quickly: In early 1946, the surgeon had taken skin from his left thigh and attached it across his right cheek. “We thought it was going to work,” Yoshida recalled, “but ultimately an infection grew beneath the new skin and then the transplanted skin fell off. When the infection healed, the right side of my face scabbed over, as hard as a cast. The same problems happened after the second surgery. I remember feeling like I was going crazy from the pain.”

With only enough skin left for one more surgery, doctors tried again, and this time, his wounds did not become infected, the grafted skin remained attached, and Yoshida’s face gradually healed as much as it could. For the rest of his life, however, he suffered from having no sweat glands on the right side of his face, a problem that particularly affected him during the summer when his face became overheated because he could not perspire to cool it down.

____

Norman Cousins’s impassioned call that “the atomic bomb is in reality a death ray” and a “radiological assault on human tissue” not only reflected survivors’ immediate postbomb hardships, but also foreshadowed a heavy stream of recurring atomic bomb–related diseases and deaths. After tens of thousands of survivors had endured—and in some cases recovered from—the initial effects of radiation exposure, many more became ill and died from radiation-related conditions that developed in the decade after the war. They faced repeated episodes of purple spots on their skin, internal bleeding, fevers, diarrhea, nausea, low blood pressure, hypersensitivity to cold, low blood cell counts, and weight loss due to an inability to hold down food—all indications of atomic bomb disease. Radiation toxicity also caused severe liver, endocrine, blood, and skin diseases; impairments of the central nervous system; premature aging; reproductive disorders leading to full or partial sterility, miscarriages, and stillbirths; gum diseases; vision problems; and ailments such as sharp pains and deep coughing that could not be linked to a specific diagnosis. The living cells in people’s mouths were damaged, causing their teeth to fall out, leaving only rotting bone. Most commonly, survivors experienced violent and unpredictable dizzy spells, fainting, dramatic losses of consciousness, and a profound depletion of energy. From the survivors’ perspective, the atomic bomb had burned their bodies from the inside out.

Although not caused by radiation exposure, thick, rubbery keloid scars developed on many hibakusha with moderate to severe burns on their faces, limbs, and across large areas of their bodies. This ungainly scar tissue—“like molten lava,” one physician remembered—caused intense itching, stinging, and throbbing pain, and when it covered elbows, shoulders, or leg joints, mobility was limited or impossible. Some survivors with keloids on their faces could not open their mouths, constricting their ability to eat. Physicians’ attempts to excise the keloids in order to perform skin grafts were thwarted because the scar tissue often grew back.

Many survivors suffered destabilizing physical and emotional exhaustion from chronic pain, loss, caring for family members with protracted injuries and diseases, and the financial burden of having to borrow money to cover the costs of medical care. Countless hibakusha felt isolated, ashamed of their physical disfigurement or their inability to feed and house their families. The sense of being internally contaminated led to constant fear of what the invisible and deadly radiation was doing inside their bodies.

In these early years, hibakusha also struggled with what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton called “the suddenness and totality of their death saturation.” In Nagasaki, seventy-four thousand people had been killed indiscriminately, equaling nearly 70 percent of everyone living in the central Urakami Valley and over 40 percent of communities in adjacent townships. Guilt plagued many hibakusha who, in order to survive, had left a family member trapped beneath a building or engulfed in flames—or who had not been able to answer their loved ones’ or strangers’ cries for help, or give them a sip of water before they died. For years, identifiable corpses were still found in stairwells or the ruins of a home being cleared away. Though most people relinquished hope of ever finding their missing loved ones, some survivors never stopped searching and listening to daily radio programs dedicated to reuniting missing persons with their families. Some held memorial services without a body. One man who lost his wife and three children in the bombing could not set his eyes on other people’s children without feeling overwhelmed with grief. Every day until the first anniversary of the bombing, he sat in front of his eldest daughter’s ashes and asked himself why he had survived.

In their own ways, two American occupation officials strived to support Nagasaki’s survivors’ psychological recovery. The first, Lieutenant Colonel Victor Delnore, a decorated combat veteran, had taken over as commander of the Nagasaki Military Government Team (NMGT) in the fall of 1946 after the last of the 10th Marines regiment had left. Delnore directed a small administrative team that supervised activities to increase public safety, oversaw the training of Japanese police officers on subjects including democracy and Japan’s new constitution, monitored labor conditions, and tracked the Japanese government and military leaders who had left or been forced out of their positions. Except for several serious crimes against Japanese citizens by U.S. soldiers, the period of civilian occupation under Delnore’s direction passed with relatively minimal conflict between the Japanese and their American conquerors, and the overall relationship between the NMGT and Nagasaki’s civilian government leaders and officials was both cooperative and respectful.

But Delnore saw his responsibilities as more than administrative. “I had to wake the people up to the fact that life was not over,” he remembered. During his four years in Nagasaki, he frequently visited Shinkozen, where he knelt down to speak with patients at eye level. He attended a special memorial service at which Buddhist monks consecrated the ashes of thousands of unidentified hibakusha. “I was deeply moved,” he later wrote. “Whether it was the strangeness of the ceremony, the numerous mourning womenfolk, or the boxes of the ashes of the 10,000 unclaimed and unidentified victims of the atom bomb that were piled all around the altar, I’ll never know.” Delnore also supported survivors in telling their stories, exemplified by his letter to U.S. censors advocating for the publication of Ishida Masako’s Masako Taorezu: “For us to properly realize the significance of the atomic bomb,” he wrote, “to experience vicariously the feelings that so many thousands of Japanese people experienced, is desirable in these propitious times.” Two years after his arrival, Delnore authorized the first public commemoration in Nagasaki for the third anniversary of the bombing.

Winfield Niblo, the NMGT’s chief education officer, tried to offer hibakusha a sense of hope by introducing American square dancing as a wholesome mode of entertainment for the devastated city. Niblo, a former high school social studies teacher, football coach, and square-dancing caller from Denver, Colorado, had attended a dinner for Japanese athletics teachers from across the city at the home of the chief of physical education for Nagasaki Prefecture. After dinner, the teachers performed traditional Japanese folk dances, and Niblo in turn offered to teach them the Virginia reel. The teachers caught on quickly, and from there the idea took hold to train Japanese athletics instructors in American folk dances and offer classes in Nagasaki’s schools. “Hidari te! [Allemande left!]” callers bellowed. “Swing your lady!”

Eventually, the phenomenon spread throughout Japan and was endorsed by occupation officials as a form of physical education that also promoted Western perceptions of healthy social interactions between men and women. By the early 1950s, the National Folk Dance Training Course had been established in Tokyo, and thousands of Japanese across the country were sashaying and do-si-do-ing to American folk tunes like “Little Brown Jug” and “Oh! Susanna.” The Japanese Ministry of Education later asked Niblo to contribute to a textbook on the subject. “Dancing people are happy people,” he wrote, “and America is happy that this bit of American culture can bring a portion of happiness to Japan.”

 • • • 

Delnore’s and Niblo’s efforts notwithstanding, survivors’ ways of coping with profound trauma and moving forward in their lives varied for each hibakusha. Some who had lost their entire families reminded themselves that if they didn’t stay alive to look after their family’s graves, no one else would. Some survivors directed their focus each day to their children or to others who were dependent on them as a way not to kill themselves. Others drank excessively to escape their exhaustion, loss, and shame. Obeying their religious tenet forbidding suicide, many Nagasaki Catholics had to find ways, in one survivor’s words, to “just suck it up” and keep going.

But in the first years after the bombing, many hibakusha reached a point where they could no longer endure and saw no other option but to end their lives. In the woods behind Omura National Hospital, a young woman with severe facial burns hanged herself. A man caring for his younger brother at the Shinkozen temporary relief hospital jumped from a high window to his death. A young husband and father, too ill to work, tried repeatedly to hang himself, and when his despairing wife called the police, he pleaded, “Let me die! I can’t stand the agony of my life anymore!” A twenty-year-old girl who couldn’t work because of crippling injuries to her legs tried to overdose on medication three times. A young boy, taunted in elementary school for the keloid scars on his feet and legs, swallowed poison, but his mother found him before he died. Another mother suffering burns over half her body and tormented over the loss of four sons threw herself from an upper-story window of the former Nagasaki Medical College Hospital. Even as late as 1952, a young man, despairing over the suicide of his best friend and his own inability to get a job because of his disfigurement, climbed a hill overlooking the city, cut his wrists, and lay down to die; he survived only because the sleeve of his shirt slowed the blood flow. In 1955, a nineteen-year-old girl who ten years earlier had lost her mother on the day of the bombing and had herself been afflicted with poor health ever since, walked to the railroad tracks, placed her sandals and umbrella next to the rails, and threw herself in front of a moving train.

Nagano experienced anguish and guilt so overpowering that she repeatedly considered ending her own life. “Really, there weren’t any good days with my mother,” she said, “and whenever I asked myself why my sister and brother had died, my sadness was so intense, it felt like someone had scraped out the inside of my chest. But no matter how sorry I felt, they didn’t come back.” She heard that her grandparents, too, blamed her, and when they died, the intensity of her guilt kept her from attending their funerals. She felt it would be better if she died, thinking suicide could be a way to apologize to her parents. “But if I died,” she remembered, “I realized there would be no one to take care of my parents when they got older. When I thought about that, I realized that dying wasn’t an option, either.”

Do-oh, too, came close to killing herself. Like countless other young women who were disfigured and sick with persistent radiation-related symptoms, she remained secreted inside her house, tormented by the scars on her face and her loss of hair. Her face broke out as if toxins were being released from her body. “It itched a lot, and fluid came out of the pimples,” Do-oh remembered. “It smelled awful, like rotten fish.” She constantly stared at her face in the mirror, trying to find even the smallest improvement. But there was little change. Instead of hair, soft raggedy fuzz grew on her scalp, so thin and transparent that she looked almost bald, but even that would fall out—then grow in and fall out again. She had almost no understanding of what had happened to her or why she wasn’t getting better. “My mother cried as she washed my face and head,” Do-oh recalled. “She felt sorry for me and made a black scarf—black to look more like hair. I spent my adolescence with my head wrapped in a scarf.” When guests came to their house, Do-oh hid behind a sliding door and wished she could die. Alone in her room, she quietly fumed. Why me? Why do I have to stay so ugly—I didn’t do anything! “I still had a lot of dreams then,” she remembered. “I wanted things to go back to how they’d been before.”

One day when Do-oh was alone in her house, she found a pink-colored bump the size of her thumb on the top of her head. “I was so tired from this long period of recuperation, and I felt so desperate, that it didn’t matter anymore what happened to me,” she recalled. “If I was going to have this kind of life, it didn’t matter if I died.” She picked up a pair of sewing scissors and cut the bump off her head. Blood poured from her scalp. When her family came home, they found her with a bloody towel wrapped around her head. Her parents reprimanded her harshly. “My mother cried,” Do-oh remembered. “She said she wished she had been injured instead of me so I wouldn’t have to suffer. She took the scissors and knives from the kitchen and hid them.”

When Do-oh heard that the two friends she had escaped with on the day of the bomb had died, she began questioning why she had been allowed to live—particularly with such a “pitiful face.” “I wondered what God wanted me to do with my life,” she said. “That was my question. What had God given me this life for?”

 • • • 

Hibakusha who managed to live could only search for ways to endure the traumas they could not forget. Many schools held regular ceremonies to mourn the deaths of teachers and students who died on the day of the bombing and in the years that followed. Teachers at Shiroyama Elementary School held memorial services for their colleagues who had died instantly while weeding the vegetable gardens, as well as for the unidentified victims whose ashes they had buried on the school grounds. City and prefectural government officials worked with Mitsubishi to collect data on hibakusha who had died in the company’s factories. The staff of Junshin Girls’ High School compiled a complete list of the 214 teenage girls who had died in the blast or afterward from injuries and radiation-related illnesses. Later, the school disinterred and cremated the bodies of those students who had been buried in the public cemetery at Togitsu and gave a portion of the ashes to the girls’ families, then buried the remaining ashes beneath a memorial built on the school grounds.

Personal commemorations often took place out of the reach of occupation censors. Even in the crudest of huts within the atomic wasteland, families managed to display the urns containing the ashes—or the presumed ashes—of their family members and pray every day for the repose of their souls. Hayashi Tsue, the mother of a girl who died at Shiroyama Elementary School on the day of the bombing, planted young cherry trees in the playground of the school in memory of her daughter and all the victims she had seen during her harrowing search for her child in the days after the attack. No saplings were available anywhere in the city, so a gardener transported them from another prefecture northeast of the city. As the trees grew, every spring Hayashi quietly observed the beauty of the trees, consoling herself by imagining that her daughter’s soul had transformed into their blossoms.

In the privacy of their classrooms, Nagasaki teachers guided their students in writing about their postbomb lives, and under the direction of Dr. Nagai, their essays were later published in a collection called Living Beneath the Atomic Cloud. Tsujimoto Fujio, a fourth grader at Yamazato Elementary School who lost his parents and siblings in the attack, wrote about living with his sixty-year-old grandmother in a shanty constructed where his house used to be. Every morning, his grandmother attended Mass, then went to the banks of the Urakami River to search for shells, which she sold to help pay for their food. She was always holding her rosary, he wrote, always praying. She would tell him that all was fine, that everything was the will of God.

But Tsujimoto did not feel as hopeful as his grandmother. He longed for his former life, when his grandmother ran a food shop, his father was a well digger, and the family had plenty of money. “Please give me that life back . . . please,” he begged in his essay. “I want my mother. I want my father. I want my brother. I want my sisters. . . .”

His mother had been cremated in young Tsujimoto’s school yard. As he ran and played with his friends there, sometimes a sudden memory of that day filled him with longing, and when his schoolmates walked across the area where his mother’s body had lain atop the funeral pyre and burned, he felt anger rise up in his body.

“I go to [that] spot . . . ,” he wrote, “and touch the ground with my fingers. When you dig into the ground with a bamboo stick, flakes of black ash come out. If I stare at these, I can see my mother’s face with my mind’s eye.”