CHAPTER 6

EMERGENCE

As years passed and Nagasaki’s days and nights became further distanced from the detonation that forever split its history, hibakusha who had survived the chilling first years after the bombing pushed forward to reconstruct their city, their lives, and their identities. Contrast and contradiction defined everyday life. In the late 1940s, rationed food was more available than before, but still there was not enough. Some hibakusha found jobs to help stabilize a subsistence income for their families, even as unemployment and inflation continued to rise. Newly constructed housing provided shelter for some, but as late as 1950, less than 5 percent of survivors’ housing applications could be met, and thousands still lived in shacks with dirt floors, surrounded by atomic ash and debris. Most startling, just as survivors were finally healing from their injuries, illnesses, and burns, new radiation-related illnesses began to appear, some of them fatal. For many, survival remained tenuous, and long-term planning was nearly impossible. With tremendous will, the help of their families and communities, and as much strength as their physical and emotional health would allow, the people of Nagasaki inched their way through their postnuclear existence, trying to regain some semblance of a recognizable world.

In late 1946, Taniguchi was able to move his lower legs. Still lying on his stomach, he bent his legs at the knee and moved them in random directions to stretch and strengthen his knee joints. Doctors continued to use gauze soaked in liquid penicillin to treat his back and left arm. Scabs finally began to harden over small sections of these areas, and skin formed along the edges of his burns. The scorched patches of skin on his buttocks were nearly restored, and his blood cell counts had stabilized.

One day in early 1947, surrounded by his medical team, Taniguchi twisted his legs to the edge of his bed, lifted his torso, and sat up for the first time in seventeen months. Everyone applauded, thrilled that this moment—which none of them could have imagined even a year earlier—had actually come.

Taniguchi had never seen his burned back, and as he allowed himself to believe that he might recover, he decided to take a look. While he lay facedown, doctors brought in a large mirror to his bedside and held it at an angle near his head. Taniguchi lifted his chin and held it up for a brief moment, glancing into the mirror to see his back, arms, and legs covered with infected scar tissue and barely scabbed flesh. Overwhelmed with disappointment, he lowered his head to the bed. Everyone had told him that his wounds were getting better, and before that moment, he had visualized improvement far greater than what he saw.

Soon, Taniguchi was able to stand up for the first time since the bombing. Dizziness overcame him at first, and sharp pain coursed through his feet. After resting, he stood again—and with immense resolve and the aid of bamboo crutches, he took his first steps. “I had never been happier than on that day,” he remembered. “I felt at that moment that I was resurrected.”

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The left side of Yoshida’s face and body also healed significantly, and at last he, too, was able to walk. On his release date in January 1947, sixteen months after the bombing, hospital staff drove him to the Omura train station. When he walked into the small waiting room, Yoshida heard people gasp and whisper about his face; then the room went completely silent. Everyone stared. During his entire stay at the hospital, Yoshida had avoided catching even a glimpse of his own reflection, so while he and other patients had become accustomed to each other’s burns and scars, he was totally unprepared for how people outside the hospital would react to his face. Yoshida lowered his head and walked to the corner of the room, where he crouched down, crying.

He hoped he would be left alone on the train, but at each stop, people stared as they got off and on. Keeping his head bowed, Yoshida wept as the train passed through one rural village after another, then over the mountains into Nagasaki. Maybe the people in the city will be accustomed to seeing faces like mine, he thought. But in Nagasaki, too, people gasped. “When I think back,” he said, “I can’t believe I went back to Nagasaki with that face.”

For the next two years, Yoshida lived with his mother and four siblings. His mother helped him fill the gaps in his memory—of the day of the bombing, his unconscious months at home, and his first weeks at Omura Naval Hospital. He learned that each of the six friends he was with at the time of the bombing had died.

Twice a week, Yoshida went to a neighborhood clinic where a doctor applied ointment to the grafted skin on his face. In between visits, however, the salve hardened beneath the bandages, like a cast. “Every time I went back,” he remembered, “the doctor told me to look out the window—and then he tore off the bandage. Blood poured out. It was excruciating.” His injuries prevented him from opening his mouth more than a tiny degree, making it difficult to eat. Yoshida also suffered unyielding pain in his side; he later discovered that at the time of the bombing, he had broken two ribs that had never been reset. Further, the scar tissue on his legs prohibited him from sitting cross-legged or in seiza—the formal Japanese way of kneeling and sitting back on the soles of one’s feet, required for many occasions. The tissue beneath the skin of his right hand had been destroyed, and the skin that had healed over the wounds was so tight and dry that it split open every winter. His fingers were curled up almost in a fist, frozen in the position they were in at the moment of the atomic blast. In an attempt to straighten his fingers, Yoshida’s doctor instructed him to fill a bucket with sand, turn his hand palm up, wedge the bucket handle between his curled fingers and palm, and then allow the weight of the bucket to pull the handle down and force his fingers to straighten. “Itaaaaaaaaai [it hurt],” he recalled, wincing. “It felt like my hand would break.”

More than any other challenge, however, fifteen-year-old Yoshida’s profound fear of people staring at his facial scars and disfigurement kept him hidden inside his house. He would not leave even to bathe at the public baths with his family, so his mother placed a metal washtub outside their house, out of sight of the neighbors, permitting her son to bathe in private. Even at home, a woman from the local neighborhood association stopped by to visit and gawked at his blackened face and the scars that covered his neck. Mortified, Yoshida told his mother he would rather die than live with injuries that evoked such horrible responses from people.

It was the need for a haircut that finally compelled Yoshida to leave his house. “By that time, my hair had gotten bosa-bosa [long and messy],” he remembered. But Yoshida was terrified to walk even the fifty yards from his house to the barbershop, so his mother asked the barber to come to their house on his day off to cut her son’s hair. The barber offered instead that Yoshida could come to his shop early one morning before it opened.

As the barber cut Yoshida’s hair, he asked Yoshida what had happened to him. Yoshida had just begun to tell his story when he was interrupted. “Oops!” The barber gasped. Yoshida looked up and was petrified to see in the mirror that a customer had walked into the shop. The man didn’t see him, and for a moment Yoshida thought he was safe. He peeked into the mirror again, and this time the customer was staring at him. “Our eyes met in the mirror,” Yoshida said. “The man looked away immediately. I don’t know why, but at that moment I became very sad. Then I panicked. My haircut was almost done, but I couldn’t wait.” Yoshida raced out of the shop in tears. That night, the barber went to his house to finish cutting his hair, but Yoshida’s shame could not be allayed, and for many months he again refused to leave his house.

 • • • 

On March 20, 1949—three years and seven months after the atomic bombing—Taniguchi was finally released from Omura National Hospital. Though he still struggled with persistent fevers, nausea, diarrhea, generalized weakness, and infections in his wounds, he had learned how to walk freely without assistance. Doctors had performed two surgeries to try to increase the mobility of his left elbow and the extension of his arm, but neither procedure was successful, so his elbow remained permanently bent, and he could not raise his arm above shoulder level. As his release date approached, Taniguchi felt extremely anxious—about his injuries that had not fully healed, about his ability to go back to work, and about how people would react when they saw his scars. “These thoughts filled me with sorrow and hatred toward war,” he remembered. “Night after night before leaving the hospital, I went outside the ward and cried.”

He was twenty years old and over a foot taller than when he had entered the hospital in 1945. On the day of his release, Taniguchi put on a borrowed blue suit, tied up his few personal items in a furoshiki, thanked his doctors and nurses, and bowed good-bye to hospital staff who gathered to wish him well. Like Yoshida, Taniguchi took the train from Omura, but because his injuries were mostly hidden, he did not suffer people’s stares. Arriving at Nagasaki Station, Taniguchi walked to the ferry that took him across the bay to the base of Mount Inasa, and from there he climbed the steep slope to his grandparents’ house, where they greeted him with a special meal of raw fish, soybeans, rice, and sake.

Within two weeks, he was welcomed back to work at the post office by supervisors and workers who had also survived the bombing. Taniguchi’s new job was to deliver telegrams across the city, riding through Nagasaki on a new red bicycle. After an eight-hour workday, he ascended the mountain to his grandparents’ house, where he collapsed with exhaustion.

As Taniguchi crisscrossed the city on his bike, he saw signs of Nagasaki’s renewal. Telephone service was restored to prewar levels, and some retail shops in the city’s older districts and in front of Nagasaki Station had reopened. Streetcars now moved north of the main station into the leveled atomic plain and beyond. With gradually increasing support from the national government, hundreds of public housing units now stood in the scorched fields bordering the hypocenter area. Administrators, teachers, students, and parents had rebuilt their local schools and furnished them with desks, chairs, cabinets, shoe racks, and bookshelves that, one teacher recalled, “gave off the fragrance of new wood.” Donated tree saplings grew outside Yamazato Elementary School, where young students, many of them orphaned by the bomb, had carried away pieces of broken concrete and debris to plant vegetable and flower gardens. Every morning and evening, church bells sounded across the city.

The city held lotteries for new housing units, giving priority to hibakusha whose houses had burned down. Nagano’s father had gone to every drawing until he finally won a single room in a four-unit row house on Heiwa Doori (Peace Street), built on top of a burned field in Shiroyama-machi. In 1948, Nagano and her parents finally returned to Nagasaki to their new 157-square-foot room, which included a tiny kitchen with an earthen floor and a wood-burning stove. Like most other people in the city, they walked to the public baths to bathe.

The year 1949 was a turning point for Nagasaki’s recovery. Although the economy had not yet stabilized, skyrocketing inflation was finally subdued, and food shortages had eased. The National Diet—Japan’s legislature—passed the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law and the Nagasaki International Culture City Construction Law, legislation that proclaimed new public images for each city and provided additional funding for their rebuilding projects. Under strict occupation supervision, Nagasaki’s docks were again open to foreign trade. That year, Victor Delnore left his post as Nagasaki Military Government Team director, leaving a minimal occupation presence in the city—part of General MacArthur’s “progressive relaxation of controls” toward the eventual goal of full Japanese self-government. Most of the occupation’s censorship policies ended, allowing publishers to gradually release popular literature and medical journals relating to the atomic bombings. Ishida Masako’s and Nagai Takashi’s books were published; Nagai’s Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of Nagasaki) sold 110,000 copies in the first six months.

As the largest Christian community in the nation, Nagasaki was briefly propelled into world view when it hosted the massive opening celebration honoring Spanish missionary Saint Francis Xavier’s arrival in Japan four hundred years earlier. To prepare for the ceremonies, the city underwent major beautification efforts. Nagasaki Station was restored, a main thoroughfare was widened, and a new park was built on a hill just east of the station where twenty-six Christian martyrs had been executed in 1597.

When Catholics and media representatives from across the nation and the world converged in the city on May 29, 1949, Nagasaki experienced the largest influx of outside visitors since rescue and research teams had arrived immediately after the bombing. Starting at Oura Church in the south, three priests led a procession of children’s choirs, a brass ensemble, several hundred nuns, and thousands of Japanese Catholics clutching rosaries in their hands. Tens of thousands more lined the streets and attended services led by Vatican representatives on the hill of the twenty-six martyrs and in the ruins of Urakami Church. When the ceremonies came to a close and international press coverage ended, Nagasaki and its citizens returned to relative obscurity and their tenacious efforts to endure and rebuild.

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For many of the estimated ten thousand Catholic hibakusha in Nagasaki, physician and spiritual leader Nagai Takashi offered a message of destiny and sacrifice that fulfilled their existential confusion and gave spiritual significance to the devastation of their city, the loss of their loved ones, and their survival. Before the bombing, Nagai was already ill with leukemia from his years of radiological work, and in the spring of 1946, he had collapsed near Nagasaki Station and was restricted to bed rest thereafter. On a hillside overlooking the hypocenter area, members of the Urakami congregation used corrugated tin siding to construct a forty-three-square-foot hut for Dr. Nagai and his two young children. He named his tiny residence Nyokodo—an abbreviated term for “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself House.”

Nagai continued to interpret the Nagasaki bombing as a baptism—a means by which Japan and the world could purge itself of its sins and begin anew—and an act of providence, for which the people must give thanks for being chosen for such a high purpose. Carrying forward the city’s nearly four-hundred-year history of Christian martyrdom, Nagai believed that the Urakami Valley was sacrificed for the peace that came to the world after Japan surrendered. He praised Catholic hibakusha for being faithful martyrs for God. “And as we walk in hunger and thirst, ridiculed, penalized, scourged, pouring with sweat and covered with blood,” he wrote in The Bells of Nagasaki, “let us remember how Jesus Christ carried His cross to the hill of Calvary. He will give us courage.” Nagai also publicly condemned the war and denounced Japan for its military aggression. “It is not the atomic bomb that gouged this huge hole in the Urakami basin,” he wrote in a later book. “We dug it ourselves to the rhythm of military marches. . . . Who turned the beautiful city of Nagasaki into a heap of ashes? . . . We did. . . . It is we the people who busily made warships and torpedoes.” He saw the atomic bombings as “anti-war vaccinations” and prayed that the Nagasaki bombing would serve as the last act of war in human history.

Confined to his bed, Dr. Nagai wrote fifteen books and numerous articles, becoming the best-known hibakusha writer during the occupation. He donated much of his proceeds to plant trees in Nagasaki, built a private library for impoverished hibakusha children, and supported the rebuilding of the city and Urakami Church. People across Japan hailed him as “the saint of Nagasaki” and considered him an unparalleled spiritual teacher. He received a commendation from the prime minister, was paid a rare visit by the emperor, and was named a national hero by the Japanese government for his contributions to Japan’s postwar restoration and healing. The Vatican sent two papal messengers to Nagai’s bedside, one of whom carried a gift of a rosary from Pope Pius XII. In 1950, The Bells of Nagasaki was made into a feature film—but only after occupation officials required filmmakers to eliminate all visual images of the atomic bombing except for two: a distant view of the atomic cloud rising above the city and a scene in which Dr. Nagai finds his wife’s rosary in the ruins of their home. After a national release, the film’s beloved title song became an unofficial theme song for Nagasaki. Although the Catholics in Nagasaki were a small percentage of the population, Nagai’s writings strongly influenced the Japanese public’s characterization that Nagasaki’s response to the atomic bombing was prayerful and even passive—different from the national perception that Hiroshima survivors were activists willing to express public outrage.

Dr. Nagai died on May 1, 1951, at the age of forty-three. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral, packing the interior of Urakami Church and the rubbled fields all around. A close friend rang one of the church’s famous bells, still temporarily mounted on a wooden platform outside the church. Several days later, huge crowds assembled again at Sakamoto International Cemetery, where Nagai was buried beside his wife, Midori, in the hills overlooking the Urakami Valley.

He left behind a generation of Nagasaki Catholics, many of whom believed, in the words of one survivor, that “God dropped the atomic bomb on Urakami as a test of love and forgiveness.” Another said, “It was good that the bomb dropped on Urakami. If it had dropped on people without faith, they could not have borne the burden.” Nagai also influenced the lives of non-Catholics: In 1978, thirty-three years after the bombing, a Japanese man told Catholic missionary Paul Glynn that Nagai’s writing, which he had stumbled upon in a public library, had changed his life. The man had been enraged with Japan’s leaders and his wartime teachers who had brainwashed everyone into believing that Japan was a divine nation that could never be conquered, and he agonized that perhaps “human effort and personal values were ultimately meaningless.” Nagai’s writings persuaded him to convert to Christianity and believe in a God “who is always good, even though it may not appear so in the short term.”

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Nagai was not without his critics, however. Dr. Akizuki, a former student of Dr. Nagai’s, adamantly opposed Nagai’s views and believed that his message—that the people of Nagasaki had served as sacrificial lambs to God for the sake of peace—minimized and silenced the survivors’ suffering, provided a rationalization for the United States’ use of the bombs, and gave credence to the existence of nuclear weapons. Raised a Buddhist, Akizuki had also explored the Bible and other sacred texts, and he could not believe in a God whose will and divine plan allowed the suffering he had witnessed after the atomic bombing. The barely five-foot-one doctor often challenged hibakusha nuns at his hospital about their beliefs. “Why is it that you have to suffer like this?” he demanded. “Why people like you, who’ve done nothing but good? It isn’t right!” Unshaken, the Catholic sisters replied that they believed in providence, in the will of God. But Akizuki could not agree. He blamed the Americans for dropping the bomb and hated the Japanese government “who had willfully perpetuated this senseless war.”

Still, Akizuki’s perspectives on the bombing and its grim aftereffects did not offer him a deeper meaning that could help him cope with the surreal horror he had witnessed. After more than two years of caring for injured and irradiated survivors, he found himself physically and mentally depleted, and overwhelmed by a penetrating anxiety and a sense of emptiness. Standing at a hospital window overlooking the scorched atomic ruins, he decided to leave the city in order to reclaim a quiet life and cleanse himself of the grimy “victim of war” mentality that plagued him. “I protected this place by giving up everything,” he thought, “but now it’s time for me to go.”

Before his departure, he visited his former mentor, Dr. Nagai. Inside Nyokodo, Akizuki sat on the tatami mat next to his friend, who lay on a futon, extremely pale and his stomach bloated as a result of the leukemia. Akizuki told Nagai that he felt his heart “was covered with weeds” and that he could no longer tolerate staying in Nagasaki. “I want to leave Urakami,” he said. “I want to clean my mind.”

In March 1948, thirty-two-year-old Akizuki placed a few items of clothing and some small possessions into a willow basket and left First Urakami Hospital. Boarding a train, he headed twenty-two miles northeast of the city to the rural village of Yue, where he had studied agriculture in high school. At the foot of Mount Taradake, he rented a single room inside a grilling shack behind a farm, where he planned to rest, write, and improve his health by following a diet of brown rice, seaweed, and sesame seed salt as an alternative to traditional medicines.

Akizuki’s life was tranquil at first, enveloped in fresh air, sunlight, and the green of the mountain. He began his new diet, recorded its effects on his health, and wrote a thirty-page essay titled “A Week Covered with Blood,” documenting both the horror of Nagasaki and the courageous work of his colleagues during the first seven days after the bombing. But his life took an unexpected—and unwanted—turn when the people of Yue discovered that a doctor lived in their midst. Every day, sick villagers arrived at his door, and despite his longing for rest, Akizuki could not turn them away. The stethoscope he had brought with him to monitor his own heart became an instrument for treating the local villagers, and he took the limited amounts of medicines he had brought with him and divided them into small doses for patients with colds or stomach pain.

In return, the villagers cared for Akizuki, felling trees, constructing a small house and clinic for him, and insisting—against Akizuki’s protests—that he find a nice wife. Upon reflection, Miss Murai Sugako came to his mind, a young woman who had assisted him in a medical procedure at the moment of the bombing and had worked by his side ever since. Dr. Akizuki sensed that Sugako might understand his way of living, thinking, and searching for meaning.

He invited her to visit him in Yue, and as they stood together on top of the mountain with the Ariake Sea in the distance beyond, Sugako resolved to marry him. Following a tiny marriage ceremony in Nagasaki, they returned to Yue for a rustic reception the villagers held for them. Soon, after much anxiety over the impact of their radiation exposure on their unborn child, Sugako gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

During his five years in Yue, Akizuki had succeeded in improving his health, had written and published short works on the atomic bombing and alternative food therapies, married, and had a child. Still, he longed for the quiet life he had never achieved. They never had enough money to pay for even their basic living expenses, so Sugako attended to patients in their home clinic. They rarely had time to share a meal together. As Akizuki rode his bicycle on bumpy, muddy paths between rice fields to the homes of sick villagers, he grumbled to himself that he “hadn’t come all the way to Yue to live like this.”

Then in the spring of 1952, Dr. Akizuki’s chronic asthma worsened and the tuberculosis he had experienced nine years earlier recurred. He felt he had no choice but to return to Nagasaki with his family. The First Urakami Hospital on Motohara Hill was now run by sisters of the order of Saint Francis, whose head offices were located in Springfield, Illinois. Renamed St. Francis Hospital, the rebuilt and newly equipped facility was again fulfilling its earlier purpose as a tuberculosis sanatorium. While receiving medical treatment, Akizuki resumed his work there.

In an unusual twist, Akizuki converted to Catholicism in 1953. His motivations remain somewhat unclear; he later hinted that he felt isolated as a Buddhist working at a Catholic hospital, surrounded by daily masses, hymns, and nuns who prayed for his conversion, and he said that he appreciated the profound support his Catholic friends and colleagues derived from their faith. He also admired their dedication, commitment, and self-sacrifice in almost single-handedly rebuilding the hospital—even before their own houses were reconstructed and while their family members lay sick and dying at home. After his conversion, however, Akizuki remained ambivalent toward his religion. “If this hell day came to me again, and the atomic bomb burned us up again,” he said, “would Jesus Christ save us?”

As he searched for the deeper meaning of his survival and a potent way to support the healing of others, Dr. Akizuki came to believe in the immense power of personal story as a means for individual and social transformation. Over the next forty years, Dr. Akizuki forged a life of activism and became one of Nagasaki’s leading advocates for hibakusha to articulate their atomic bomb experiences in writing and in oral presentations. His efforts offered survivors new ways to heal their psychological trauma while also heightening international understanding of the effects of nuclear war and furthering the cause of eliminating nuclear weapons arsenals across the globe. Akizuki wholeheartedly believed that had Dr. Nagai lived longer, his perspectives and teachings on the atomic bombing would have changed over time to include the unequivocal denunciation of nuclear war.

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For countless hibakusha, trying to understand their new identities as atomic bomb survivors included coping with chronic health conditions and the inability to fully recover from their injuries, burns, and radiation-related conditions. Slow recovery was often a result of high doses of radiation that had destroyed regenerating cells and damaged their natural defense mechanisms. For many, postsurgery scars did not heal and developed infections. Large numbers of hibakusha—particularly those exposed within 1.25 miles of the hypocenter—also complained of various unclassifiable symptoms, including bouts of extreme dizziness, lack of mental energy, numbness, and incapacitating fatigue.

Numerous new health conditions also emerged. Cataracts, the clouding of the eyes’ crystalline lenses, were so frequently diagnosed that for a time they were called atomic bomb cataracts, caused by radiation damage to cells on the back surface of the lens. Researchers later determined that the incidence and severity of survivors’ cataracts correlated to their age and estimated radiation dose. Microcephaly—a condition defined by a significantly smaller-than-average head size in proportion to a child’s body, reduced life expectancy, and decreased brain function—occurred in approximately 15 percent of children exposed to radiation in utero up to 1.25 miles from the hypocenter, a rate almost four times higher than for those not exposed. Other intrauterine-exposed infants were born with brain damage that resulted in mental retardation or other developmental disabilities. Many hibakusha—like Yoshida’s father in 1946 and Nagano’s father in 1948—died prematurely for unknown reasons or from conditions their families believed, but could not confirm, were caused by radiation exposure. Although the high mortality rate of their patients alarmed them, Nagasaki doctors remained cautious in attributing radiation exposure to survivors’ unexplainable conditions and deaths until further studies were conducted.

Some diseases, however, were accurately ascribed to radiation toxicity, first by informal observation and later by documented research. After a period of latency, in 1947, physicians began observing increased rates of childhood and adult leukemia among hibakusha—and these rates swelled in the years that followed. Later studies confirmed disturbing figures: Depending on shielding, hibakusha exposed within three-quarters of a mile from the hypocenter were up to six times more likely to develop leukemia than those not exposed, and people exposed within a mile and a half of the hypocenter faced double the risk compared to those not exposed. At highest risk were children under ten within a mile at the time of the bombing, who developed leukemia at a rate eighteen times greater than the general population. Children ages ten to nineteen followed, with an incidence rate eight times higher than average. Autopsies continued to reveal the severe internal damages radiation had caused to survivors’ bodies. One young man, twenty-eight years old and healthy at the time of the bombing, became more and more sick in the years after the war and was eventually diagnosed with leukemia. He died in 1950. In their autopsy report, doctors described the man’s internal organs as “black and pulpy, like coal tar.”

Other malignancies also escalated, including cancers of the stomach, esophagus, larynx, colon, lung, breast, thyroid, uterus, ovaries, bladder, and salivary glands. Later analysis of their medical records confirmed that hibakusha exposed to radiation within approximately three-quarters of a mile were 40 to 50 percent more likely to develop cancer than those not exposed. Physicians who knew the details of how these cancers manifested remained exasperated and furious with occupation censorship policies that had blocked them from speaking publicly about their cases. Grieving family members and friends felt intense bitterness and outrage. Fear of illness and death never ceased.

Brutal private and social stresses persisted as well. As with Nagano’s painful emotional distance from her mother, many families remained shattered by blame and guilt. Children with visible injuries and hair loss were taunted by their uninjured schoolmates who called them “one-eyed devil,” “chicken leg,” “baldy,” “monster,” “atomic bomb,” and “tempura”—the last referring to Japanese deep-fried shrimp and vegetables. Some microcephalic children were blocked from enrolling in elementary school or participating in school sports and extracurricular activities. Inaccurate rumors circulated that one could get atomic bomb illness by touching a survivor.

Even young children without physical injury or illness experienced ongoing distress. One day in her second-grade Japanese literature class, a Nagasaki teacher led her students in reading and discussing a popular story about five children growing up together with the loving care and support of their parents. A small girl raised her hand. “These children are really happy, aren’t they?” she asked, her voice filled with melancholy. The teacher quickly remembered that the parents of this girl and many others in the class had died in the bombing, and she marveled that even she, who spent every day with them, could so easily forget the depth of their losses. During the lesson, some children would not look at the blackboard where the words “mother” and “father” were written. Others bit their lips, scribbled in their notebooks, or gazed blankly out the window.

Adolescents like Yoshida with visible disfigurements remained constantly vigilant of people’s stares, looks of disgust, and degrading comments, and many rarely ventured from their homes. Yoshida credited his mother’s love for keeping him going. She came to him one day and told him that she understood how he felt—more than he knew—and she asked him to listen to her for just a moment. “You can’t stay inside the house your whole life,” she told him. “I know you don’t want to do it. I know it’s sad for you. But do you think you could practice walking just around the neighborhood?”

“No!” Yoshida yelled at her. Eventually, however, he decided to take his mother’s suggestion and go walking outside—first to the shrine, three houses away, where he thought he wouldn’t run into many people. “The first day I walked a hundred yards,” he remembered. “The next day, one hundred and fifty yards. A little bit farther each time.” He avoided children because they stared at him without reserve. “I was too scary to look at, but they looked anyway.” Yoshida was crushed when he said hello to a pretty girl and she started to cry. One day, as he walked toward a group of mothers, he saw their expressions of disgust and revulsion before they turned their faces away and walked past him. Yoshida started to cry, but he kept moving forward. Keep calm, he whispered to himself, tears streaming down his face. Don’t look back. Don’t look back!

 • • • 

For physically able survivors, returning to work played a major role in their recovery, but finding a full-time job was particularly difficult, in part because few were available, and also because employers repeatedly rejected hibakusha out of fear of survivors’ current and future health issues. Many survivors resigned themselves to day labor as fishermen, farmhands, or construction workers. Even those without observable injuries began hiding their hibakusha status from current and prospective employers—and those with jobs did everything they could to keep them, showing up to work even when extremely ill.

For twenty-year-old Nagano, finding employment as a shop clerk allowed her to step out of her gripping loneliness at home. Later, she worked as an aide in the facilities department at Nagasaki Medical College. In the small wooden hut where staff designed the rebuilding of the college, Nagano made tea, did the filing, and helped with odd jobs.

Yoshida, now eighteen, felt so compelled to help support his family that he hazarded people’s derisive looks to work as a part-time manual laborer at his neighbor’s furnace shop. Eventually, he secured a full-time job in the warehouse of a small wholesale food company. During the first year, he was able to improve his abacus skills and study the kanji for each food item while staying out of public view. After that, Yoshida was assigned to work directly with customers. He tried to understand their feelings as they stared at him—You can’t make a good first impression without a good-looking face, he told himself—but every day was unbearable. “I cursed the war and the atomic bomb,” he said. “Why did my face have to be burned? Why hadn’t I been allowed a chance to protect myself?”

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Do-oh was twenty and in her fifth year sequestered inside her house when new hope finally appeared at her door. It was 1949, at the time of year, she remembered, that “the persimmon fruits started to develop color.” Her injuries still hadn’t fully healed, and her hair had not grown back; short, soft fuzz still grew in periodically, then fell out again. “I felt like giving up,” Do-oh remembered. “At about that time, an unfamiliar, foreign car arrived and parked in front of our house.

“‘I have come from the ABCC to take you there,’ the person told us. ‘Please cooperate with our research.’ I got into the car believing that I would be healed by them.” Driving away, Do-oh stared out of the car window at the city she had not seen since the bombing. She had no idea of the underlying purposes of the medical examination she would undergo that day or the intense international dispute in which she would play a small part.

Three years earlier, the United States had seized on what it saw as a critical and unique opportunity to conduct long-range scientific and medical research on hibakusha—which an Army Medical Corps senior researcher on atomic bomb effects had believed “may not again be offered until another world war.” To this end, President Truman had signed an order to establish the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), charged with studying atomic bomb survivors to determine how radiation exposure affected their health. U.S. leaders projected that the ABCC’s studies would offer the United States numerous military, scientific, and regulatory benefits—including greater understanding of the impact of nuclear weapons currently in development, support for civil defense planning for potential nuclear attacks on U.S. cities, and data for the reevaluation of international radiation dose limits for physicians, scientists, radiation workers, and patients. These goals inadvertently reflected how little, prior to the atomic bombings, U.S. scientists and military officials knew about the immediate or long-term impact of whole-body radiation, and they foretold how blatantly the ABCC would ignore the medical needs of the survivors. The choices the agency made in fulfilling its mission ignited a bitter, decades-long controversy between the ABCC and hibakusha, their physicians, and research scientists across Japan.

Tensions began early. On paper, the ABCC was established as a collaboration between the United States’ National Research Council and Japan’s National Institute of Health, but in practice the commission was predominantly funded and controlled by agencies of the U.S. government, and it operated inside a country under U.S. military occupation. After years of vitriolic wartime slurs by each country against the other, U.S. and Japanese scientists distrusted one another’s professional integrity and feared the ABCC’s research outcomes would be tainted by national bias: Americans were concerned that the Japanese would exaggerate radiation effects for political purposes, and the Japanese worried that the Americans would minimize radiation effects for their own political gain. Japanese doctors working at the ABCC appreciated the United States’ advanced scientific methodologies, but some felt disrespected by U.S. physicians’ lack of confidence in their medical skills as well as their ability to evaluate research. One American ABCC doctor wrote: “Just the thought of what the Japanese would do if they had free unrestrained use of our data and what they might publish under the imprimatur of the ABCC gives me nightmares.”

The imbalance of power at the ABCC was made worse by wage inequities between U.S. and Japanese physicians working there. The agency’s longtime policy to designate only U.S. physicians and scientists as directors of each city’s operations resulted in the majority of the ABCC’s staff—Japanese doctors, nurses, and support personnel, including many who had survived the atomic bombs and endured extraordinary losses—having to work under U.S. authority. Extreme insult arose when the United States took full possession of all of the ABCC’s research data, study outcomes, and specimens, in part to prevent other nations from gleaning technical information about the bombs that might advance their own nuclear weapons programs. Even Nagasaki and Hiroshima doctors treating hibakusha on a daily basis had no access to these critical findings that could have supported their diagnoses and care. Nagasaki physician Nishimori Issei reflected that “the ABCC’s way of doing research seemed to us full of secrets. We Japanese doctors thought it went against common sense. A doctor who finds something new while conducting research is obligated to make it public for the benefit of all human beings.”

 • • • 

In Nagasaki, the ABCC’s first offices were set up over a fish market on the wharf, and patients were initially examined at the temporary hospital at Shinkozen Elementary School. During the late 1940s into the early 1950s, thousands of survivors like Do-oh heard a knock at their door and saw an ABCC jeep and staff person waiting outside to transport them to Shinkozen. The ABCC had identified and located them by using the medical studies and informal surveys of hibakusha conducted after the war, and by talking with physicians and scientists, gathering hospital records, and enlisting the help of local police. Although the ABCC was not officially under occupation authority, in Nagasaki’s postwar climate, some hibakusha felt forced to participate because they perceived the ABCC as a function of the occupation and thereby an extension of the U.S. military. At Shinkozen, they underwent physical examinations and were asked a series of questions about their location at the time of the bombing, distance from the hypocenter, direction they were facing, and physical symptoms they had experienced since then. In keeping with the Japanese social custom of reciprocity, ABCC staff sometimes gave survivors small gifts and offered them a taxi ride home.

“We went inside the building,” Do-oh remembered. “I was told to put on a white hospital gown. There was not much of an interview—I think they just looked at my injuries and took photographs of them. There were foreign doctors there, too.” Do-oh had thought she would be given medical treatment—at least to help with her pain—but ABCC staff provided no treatment and no emotional support. “I went home hugely disappointed,” she explained. “As a young girl, I had been seen naked from the waist up and had taken the black cloth off my head in front of men. I felt something like rage.”

Do-oh was not alone. Although public opposition to the ABCC was suppressed by occupation censorship, within the highly sensitive medical, political, and economic climate in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, hibakusha anger toward the ABCC intensified. At a time when hibakusha were just beginning to come to terms with their identities as the only victims of atomic warfare in human history, the Americans who dropped the bombs imposed on them a disturbing new identity as research specimens for the U.S. government. Many survivors hated being studied by doctors from the country that had irradiated them. The ABCC also transgressed cultural boundaries with invasive and intimidating procedures, by examining young people like Do-oh in the nude, collecting blood and semen samples, and taking photographs of survivors’ atomic bomb injuries. Other social and economic oversights alienated survivors: Polished waiting room floors were slippery for women wearing geta; English-only magazines were placed in the waiting rooms; and the ABCC insisted that examinations take place during the day, resulting in loss of pay for those who worked. Even the word “examination” seemed objectifying to many.

The largest complaint, however, was that the ABCC conducted medical examinations without also offering medical care. What Do-oh and other hibakusha didn’t know was that the ABCC’s mission to conduct detailed studies of survivors’ radiation-related illnesses included a strict mandate to provide them no medical treatment. As hibakusha became aware of this directive, many felt even more dehumanized, and they experienced powerful feelings of being used by the United States as guinea pigs in a military experiment. Some also resented the ABCC’s no-treatment policy in light of the shortage of medicine and medical equipment available in Japan after the war, contrasted with the millions of dollars that poured into the ABCC. In the United States, activist Norman Cousins praised the ABCC’s work as both excellent and important, but he openly criticized the agency for what he saw as a “strange spectacle of a man suffering from [radiation] sickness getting thousands of dollars’ worth of analysis but not one cent of treatment from the Commission.”

The United States offered numerous reasons for its no-treatment policy. Early on, officials said that American physicians could not pass Japanese medical licensure exams because of the language barrier—but by 1951, 70 percent of doctors on ABCC staff were Japanese physicians who could have provided medical care. The United States also asserted that occupation policy did not allow American physicians to render aid to Japanese citizens, giving an inaccurate impression that the ABCC was under the occupation’s authority. Other arguments included that medical care was not a relevant activity within the scope of the ABCC’s scholarly scientific research, that the cost of providing care would be prohibitive, and that the ABCC’s provision of care to survivors would have a negative impact on local physicians by depriving them of the opportunity to administer these services to their own community (a position many Japanese physicians disputed). As late as 1961, U.S. authorities overseeing the ABCC maintained that offering medical care to atomic bomb survivors would oblige the United States to deliver care to every Japanese citizen injured during the war, which in return would require Japan to provide treatment to every American injured in battles with Japanese soldiers, including those wounded at Pearl Harbor. In putting forth each of these reasons, the United States failed to distinguish between other Japanese war casualties and hibakusha who were subjects of the ABCC’s long-term scientific study for U.S. military purposes.

Underlying every explanation was the highly charged concern that providing medical care to hibakusha—even while conducting studies on their medical conditions—could be interpreted as an act of atonement by the United States for using the atomic bombs, a position that was unequivocally rejected at every level of the U.S. government. The United States held tightly to this position despite the fact that in postwar Europe, the U.S. military provided medical care to former enemies under Allied occupation without any suggestion of responsibility for their injuries. So sensitive was this issue that ABCC directors rejected a hiring proposal to prioritize hibakusha as employees so as not to be perceived as atoning for the bombs by giving them preferential treatment.

Japanese scientists and early hibakusha activists also equated treatment to U.S. atonement, and hibakusha were caught between the polarized stances of the two governments, each wanting the other to claim moral, financial, and medical responsibility for the atomic bombings. As this fierce international tug-of-war dragged on, hibakusha continued to suffer and often die from illnesses related to their radiation exposure, and neither the barely solvent Japanese government nor the U.S.-directed ABCC provided financial or medical support. Out of compassion for their patients, some of the ABCC’s Japanese doctors occasionally broke policy and provided medical care—including chemotherapy and other protocols—both at the ABCC’s clinic and during house calls, where they could treat simple cases without notice or with the silent acceptance of their American supervisors.

 • • • 

The ABCC further inflamed survivors’ ill feelings by conducting autopsies on hibakusha who died while participating in its studies, which inadvertently reinforced the survivors’ perception that they were being used like laboratory animals for scientific purposes. Hibakusha sensitivities were exacerbated by the fact that autopsies were both foreign and invasive to Japanese family and community rituals, and because ABCC staff were dissecting their family members’ bodies for U.S. military and civil defense research, without any apparent benefit to other atomic bomb survivors. The ABCC’s Mortality Detection Network paid cash fees to Japanese medical providers in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to report hibakusha deaths as quickly as possible so that ABCC staff (called “vultures” by dissenters) could hurry to a deceased survivor’s bedside to request permission to perform the autopsy. Some families refused, but despite their discomfort, others consented, perhaps because of direct pressure by ABCC staff, because they felt they had no choice, or because they hoped for better understanding of their loved ones’ conditions.

In both cities combined, by the late 1950s, an estimated five hundred autopsies were conducted each year. Autopsy specimens of infants were stored in Nagasaki, but the tissues, slides, and body parts of older children and adults were extracted, examined, and quickly dispatched to the United States. Under the auspices of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the new governmental agency established to oversee research, production, and control over nuclear weapons and atomic energy applications, these specimens were classified as state secrets and cross-categorized by various divisions of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), where they were studied to understand the impact of high-dose radiation on the human body. After examination and data recording, the body parts and related records were stored in AFIP Quonset huts outside Washington, D.C., for ongoing research and later warehoused in a new building constructed to protect the materials from a potential atomic bomb attack.

 • • • 

Within this highly charged atmosphere, hibakusha found an advocate in thirty-three-year-old pediatrician James Yamazaki, the city’s third ABCC director. A second-generation Japanese American, Yamazaki had served as a U.S. Army combat surgeon in northern Europe while his family was interned in a War Relocation Authority camp in Jerome, Arkansas. He later spent six months in a German prisoner-of-war camp. After the war, he continued his medical training in the United States before being asked to serve in Nagasaki.

Dr. Yamazaki had been briefed on his assignment before leaving for Japan, but it was only when he arrived in Nagasaki in late 1949 that the magnitude of destruction and human suffering became real. He wandered through the wreckage of a Mitsubishi torpedo factory and saw the still-razed hypocenter area and the ruins of Urakami Church. “There was, of course, a missing dimension,” he later wrote. “The dead, the dying, the blistered survivors, and the victims in frantic flight were long since gone.”

Dr. Yamazaki saw how pervasive the distrust had become between the ABCC and Nagasaki’s medical professionals and survivors. As the only American doctor at the Nagasaki facility, and with limited Japanese language skills, he determined that one of his first goals would be to gain the confidence of both hibakusha and the Nagasaki medical community. To this end, after finding a new location for the ABCC’s clinic, laboratory, and offices, Yamazaki developed a strong collaborative working relationship with Dr. Shirabe Raisuke, now the director of Nagasaki Medical College Hospital. This relationship resulted in a mutually cooperative affiliation between the ABCC and the Medical College, which included the participation of Nagasaki medical students in the ABCC’s studies as part of their training and weekly lectures by Dr. Yamazaki on current practices in American medicine. Dr. Yamazaki held Dr. Shirabe in great esteem. “I was most struck by his eyes,” he remembered, “. . . that crinkled engagingly when he smiled or laughed. His geniality concealed the trauma of his bomb experience, the tragedy of his family.”

In his capacity as liaison between the ABCC and Nagasaki Medical College, Dr. Shirabe guided Dr. Yamazaki through the ruins of the Medical College, still mostly unrestored from four years earlier. As they walked, Shirabe quietly identified each building, described how it was affected by the bomb, and told Yamazaki the numbers of faculty, nurses, staff, and students, including one of his sons, who had been killed instantly. Inside a demolished laboratory, the two doctors stood on piles of rubble and peered out of a broken window into the valley below, where the hypocenter was located a half mile away.

On another occasion, Shirabe arranged what Yamazaki called an “extraordinary briefing” for him and American physicians from Hiroshima’s ABCC offices to hear from medical professionals who had experienced the Nagasaki bombing. In a small, partially demolished classroom, fifteen doctors, nurses, and support staff from Nagasaki Medical College Hospital told their stories of survival and their struggles to provide care to hibakusha after the bombing. Dr. Shirabe stood before charts and maps of Nagasaki, pointing out different locations and clarifying the range and scope of destruction throughout the city.

Several weeks later, Shirabe delivered to his new colleague the still-censored research study of the acute effects on eight thousand survivors that Shirabe had conducted four years earlier with the help of medical school faculty and students. It was difficult for Dr. Yamazaki to comprehend the extent, rationale, and impact of the occupation’s censorship of Japanese research on the medical aftereffects of the bombs. “They completed the study in 1946,” he explained, referring to Shirabe’s team. “Four years later, he was handing it to me—the first medical report our team was to receive covering that critically important population.”

Still, Dr. Yamazaki was barred access to numerous other studies carried out by Japanese research teams in the four years after the atomic bomb attacks, and later he discovered that even he—an American serving American purposes who had security clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission—had not been given access to early U.S. studies on the short-term effects of the atomic bombs. In fact, he knew nothing of their existence until shortly before he left Japan two years later. These reports, Yamazaki remembered, “would have been immensely helpful . . . as we groped our way toward establishing our research on the effects of the radiation.”

During his tenure in Nagasaki, Dr. Yamazaki directed a staff of 250 and supervised numerous studies of adults and children on topics including cancers, reduced vigor, changes in vision, abnormal pigmentation, hair loss, epidemiological changes, sterility, and shortened life span. As a pediatrician, he gave particular focus to two comprehensive studies involving Nagasaki infants and children—whom researchers expected to be the most vulnerable to radiation exposure. The first study tracked statistics on children who had been exposed to radiation inside their mother’s wombs, including fetal deaths and mortality rates for those who died while a part of the study.

Dr. Yamazaki felt compassion for these families’ losses, and he was attuned to their sensitivities about the ABCC’s conducting autopsies on their children. Under his direction, a new policy was implemented: In order to prevent grief-stricken parents from receiving a direct request from the ABCC, a Nagasaki midwife with a relationship with the family helped negotiate this difficult conversation. “With the quiet guidance of the midwives,” Yamazaki remembered, “the parents came to understand the potential importance of autopsies to all of them. The great majority gave their permission.”

This study also recorded the health and development of children who were exposed to radiation in utero and survived. One by one, mothers accompanied their five- and six-year-old sons and daughters to the ABCC’s clinic and recounted vivid memories of the bombing, the deaths of their family members, and their children’s premature and difficult births. They told ABCC staff about their confusion and anxiety over their babies’ physical and mental development and the discrimination and bullying their children had experienced—particularly after reaching school age, when their differences came into greater public view.

Dr. Yamazaki and his staff examined these children and diagnosed microcephaly, cardiac disease, incontinence, and severe mental and developmental disabilities, but they remained guarded in ascribing the children’s disorders to radiation exposure until their studies could definitively document cause and effect. Yamazaki recalled that even five years after the bombing, many mothers knew little about the potential effects of radiation on their children and had also been told by their family doctors that their children’s physical and mental challenges were “most likely caused by the malnutrition, trauma, and stress related to the bombing.” Years later, when they realized that radiation from the bomb may have caused their children’s conditions, they demanded to know why they hadn’t been told earlier. One mother, scared for her young son, said, “To think that the bomb reached into my womb and hurt him leaves me bitter.”

By the 1960s, long after Dr. Yamazaki had left, the in utero study cohort in Nagasaki and Hiroshima grew to 3,600 children, including their control groups. As these children grew older, the ABCC’s outcomes confirmed radiation exposure as the cause of most of the children’s health conditions, including high incidences of microcephaly and neurological impairments. The studies revealed the particular vulnerabilities of timing as it related to in utero radiation exposure. Children who had been exposed at eight to fifteen weeks after conception demonstrated significantly greater risk of developmental disabilities because fetal brain cells are more susceptible to radiation damage in this stage of pregnancy. In a Nagasaki substudy published in 1972, eight of nine children (89 percent) exposed before the eighteenth week of pregnancy were diagnosed with microcephaly—compared to two of nine children (22 percent) exposed to the same levels of radiation later in their gestational development. The ABCC periodically observed the children in this cohort through age nineteen and beyond. As young adults, these hibakusha continued to demonstrate reduced height, weight, and head and chest circumferences in addition to mental disabilities and decreased scores on intelligence tests compared with control groups.

Dr. Yamazaki’s second major study searched for potential genetic effects on children conceived after the bombing, critical to understanding the generational impact of radiation exposure. Begun in Hiroshima before Yamazaki’s arrival in Japan, the first step of this study had been to identify newborns whose parents were hibakusha. To do so, the ABCC had linked its study to Japan’s postwar food-rationing system, which provided extra rations to women in the last twenty weeks of pregnancy; that is, when expectant mothers arrived at city offices to enroll in the rationing program, they were directed to register their pregnancies with the ABCC. This arrangement was so successful that over 90 percent of women at least five months pregnant signed up for the ABCC study.

During the pregnancy enrollment process, the ABCC was able to collect personal information and medical data on the mother, father, and baby without providing information about the potential genetic risks from radiation exposure that the ABCC believed might exist for these children. In a questionnaire and in on-the-spot interviews at the time of registration, for example, each woman was asked to provide details of her reproductive history, including abortions, stillbirths, and miscarriages, as well as the baby’s due date and the name of the midwife who would attend the delivery. The ABCC also asked for information on both the mother’s and her husband’s atomic bomb experiences, including location, potential shielding, and symptoms of radiation illness they may have endured. How this information would be used—including the fact that the families’ data would go to the United States for military evaluation—was not revealed. Instead, each woman received a pamphlet that described the ABCC’s postbirth examination and stressed that mothers would be able to know their babies’ “true physical condition” and at the same time make “an important contribution to medical science.”

In what ABCC historian M. Susan Lindee calls “the largest epidemiological project of its kind up to that time,” over the six years from 1948 to 1954, the first phase of this genetics study comprised nearly seventy-seven thousand infants conceived after the atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In order to examine infants immediately after their birth, the ABCC established strong relationships with Nagasaki’s approximately 125 midwives and paid them to report each birth they attended, including a bonus for immediate notification of newborns with potential medical problems. Upon news of a birth, the ABCC sent a Japanese pediatrician and a nurse to the family’s home, where, with the midwife’s support, they conducted a physical exam of the baby and asked a series of questions relating to specific problems during late pregnancy and birth, including prematurity, birth defects, or neonatal death. When they left, the ABCC staff gave the mother a bar of mild face soap to use on the infant.

Between five hundred and eight hundred babies were examined in Nagasaki each month under Yamazaki’s supervision—an average of twenty-one per day. Within the first year of life, about 20 percent of the babies in the study were also selected randomly for follow-up examinations at the ABCC’s clinic to check for cardiac problems and developmental delays that might not have been evident immediately after birth. The enormous amounts of data from these examinations were carefully collected, verified, and transferred to punch cards for processing.

Mothers and fathers may have appreciated that their babies received a comprehensive medical examination and at least initial diagnoses of any serious health conditions, but Dr. Yamazaki observed that the ABCC’s home visits and follow-up examinations also stirred confusion and deep concern for the parents. “There was nothing any of us could do to alleviate the fear generated by our research,” he remembered. “The routine examination of each newborn child brought home to many families for the first time the fact that the survivors were still at risk. We had no answers with which to reassure them.” When Yamazaki returned to the United States in 1951, he understood the urgent need for further research in order to fully comprehend both the short- and long-term impacts of instant, whole-body radiation on the human body. “Some consequences,” he wrote, “might not be known until we had completed careful observations of the survivors over their entire lifetimes.”

 • • • 

To meet the need for in-depth knowledge of radiation’s long-term impact on hibakusha, the ABCC designed and implemented numerous additional studies, many of which continue today. Outcomes of these studies—which would not be published for many years—revealed, in most cases, direct correlations between the levels of radiation exposure hibakusha received and the severity of their illnesses and risk levels for cancer throughout their lives. The ABCC’s Life Span Study, established in 1958, has explored cancer occurrences throughout participants’ lives and documented their causes of death in order to evaluate excess cancer risk compared with nonexposed people. Ultimately, the study’s cohort increased to 120,000 subjects from both cities, and substudies have explored the effects of radiation on the immune system, gene analysis, and the underlying biological effects of radiation exposure that cause human illness and death. For survivors who were children at the time of the bombings, already statistically smaller in weight and stature, outcomes showed a higher risk than other adults for nearly every illness studied. In addition to the in utero study population, the ABCC has continued its lifelong investigation of potential genetic effects on children conceived and born after the bombings to one or both parents who were survivors. Studies have shown no observable effects on these children to date, but scientists will not draw conclusions until after they have studied these adults as they age.

All of this research has been possible because of the participation of tens of thousands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima survivors. Despite their political, cultural, and deeply personal concerns about the agency’s methods, they have chosen to take part in the ABCC’s studies for numerous reasons, including the provision of free medical exams and diagnoses even without medical care, a sense of admiration for the American facilities and scientific methodologies, and, over time, improved relationships between the ABCC and Japanese academic and medical institutions. Wada joined the ABCC’s Life Span Study as a way to support important medical advancements. Others found some meaning in their survival through their contribution to scientific knowledge of radiation exposure, which they hoped could help abolish nuclear weapons development throughout the world.

Like Do-oh, however, many hibakusha remained adamantly opposed to the ABCC. After her first and only visit to the ABCC clinic, Do-oh decided never to go again, choosing to forgo potential diagnoses or postmortem analyses of her conditions rather than offer her body, and her suffering, to U.S. data collection. For the next twenty years, the ABCC called and sent letters asking how she was, but she never responded. Only years later did she speak to her family about her reasons. “I refused to cooperate because of the way I was treated,” she explained. “I felt like an object being kept alive for research—and my pride wouldn’t allow this to happen.” She was also troubled by the agonizing and unbearable fear that her participation might in some way contribute to the development of an even more powerful nuclear weapon.

____

The ten-year state of war between Japan and the Allied nations that was declared after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor formally came to an end in September 1951, when representatives of Japan, the United States, and forty-six other Allied nations assembled in San Francisco to sign the Treaty of Peace with Japan. When the peace treaty went into effect in April 1952, the United States’ occupation of Japan drew to a close. In Nagasaki, over three thousand people gathered at Urakami Church for a special High Mass to commemorate this historic transition for their nation.

Japan was barely recognizable as the country whose relentless military aggression had ended only seven years earlier. The nation’s new constitution prohibited the government from arming itself except for purposes of self-defense. Seven Class A Japanese war criminals had been executed at the conclusion of the international Tokyo War Crimes Trials in 1948, including General Tojo Hideki, Japan’s prime minister who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. Almost 6,000 lower-level war criminals were also indicted, out of whom 920 were executed and more than 3,000 were given prison terms. As a means to preserve stability in postwar Japan, occupation authorities had exculpated the emperor of all responsibility for the war, but the emperor was no longer a divine leader, and the people of Japan were no longer his subjects. Many Japanese, including hibakusha, disavowed their nation’s militaristic past and their own former indoctrination as the world’s superior race. They were now citizens of a democratic state, free from direct military control for the first time in two decades.

After more than six years of nearly total disconnection from the world, Japan now had access to international news, and both Japanese citizens and foreign visitors could freely travel into and out of the country. The national economy was growing, and in many parts of the country, food and clothing were now accessible and affordable. The Japanese flag with its symbol of the rising sun again flew over the country. As it reclaimed its sovereignty, Japan entered a new stage in its history as a Westernized capitalist nation.

The occupation had ended, but few U.S. troops left Japan. Because Japan’s new constitution mandated a perpetual state of disarmament, Japan and the United States signed a second agreement by which the United States became Japan’s official military guardian. In exchange, the United States was allowed to maintain bases in Japan during and after the 1950–1953 Korean War, thereby keeping a large military presence in the Far East to monitor and suppress, if needed, Communist expansion by the Soviet Union, China, and Korea. In an ironic twist of history, Japan’s national protection now lay solely in the hands of the U.S. military.

All censorship restrictions were now lifted, allowing non-ABCC Japanese scientists, research institutes, and governmental agencies to finally publish their studies on postbomb damages and medical conditions. The most significant scientific studies released after the occupation were the summary report (1951) and the sixteen-hundred-page full report (1953) of the Science Council of Japan’s Special Committee on the Investigation of Atomic Bomb Casualties. For the first time, Japanese scientific and medical communities gained access to the detailed 1945 surveys, studies, and analyses conducted by Japanese physicists, engineers, and physicians. For hibakusha, however, any potential help these long-awaited reports may have provided had long expired.

Further, the Japanese public finally learned more about the damages, death, and suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombings and in the years that followed. Between 1952 and 1955, more than sixty articles and books were published on the atomic bombings. They included striking images of the atomic aftermath that Japanese photographers and filmmakers had illegally concealed during the occupation—eliminating any vague impressions the Japanese people may have had about the bombings and bringing them face-to-face with the terrorizing realities of the nuclear attacks. Yamahata Yosuke published Atomized Nagasaki, a selection of his photographs taken the day after the bombing. The Japanese Red Cross Society held an exhibit of atomic bomb materials at its headquarters in Tokyo. A Japanese media company released two Nippon Eiga-sha newsreels taken by filmmakers in the fall of 1945. A special edition of Asahi Graph, a Life magazine–style journal, was published on the seventh anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, devoting almost its entire issue to information about the development of the bombs, including graphic images of mangled buildings and burned and irradiated hibakusha in both cities. The edition sold out immediately and required four additional printings, for a total of seven hundred thousand issues read by millions in Japan and throughout the world. This coverage, along with other atomic bomb–related books and publications released during the same period, elicited compassion for hibakusha by Japanese across the country and gave birth to a sense of collective national trauma relating to the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

In the United States, too, more information on the bombings was released. In the early 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission published Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs, a six-volume report comprising the studies conducted collaboratively by Japanese and American physicians in the months following the bombings, including acute radiation effects on thousands of survivors. Few people beyond the AEC and related agencies had access to these findings, however—even Dr. Yamazaki did not see them until 1956. After seven years of knowing almost nothing about the bombings, the American public finally gained a better, albeit still limited, grasp of the bombs’ impact when Life magazine published photographs of hibakusha in its September 1952 issue. The seven-page feature story included ten of Yamahata’s photographs, one of which revealed images of bodies that had been hurled from a streetcar into a ditch at the time of impact. The Nagasaki section of the story also included writer Higashi Jun’s recollection of stepping on a scorched body in the predawn light and hearing a voice calling out to him for help.

The release of these images in the United States was historic, but in Tokyo, Dr. Shiotsuki Masao was outraged at the ignorance and utter foolishness of the U.S. media and the obliviousness of the American people regarding both their safety in the event of a nuclear attack and the medical support they would receive in its aftermath. “The other day while leafing through a popular U.S. magazine,” Shiotsuki wrote in 1952, “I came across a picture of a patient lying on a bed under clean white sheets being injected with some sort of fluid while a doctor and nurse in spotless uniforms stood by.” Under the headline, “Medical Attention Given to Victims of the Atom Bomb,” Shiotsuki remembered, the article described how “the finest medical facilities” were well prepared to provide care for bomb victims. “What kind of impractical, theoretical nonsense is this?” he railed. “Where in such a devastated city could one find a bed with such a soft downy mattress, such a healthy doctor ready and able to work, such a kindhearted and beautiful nurse? Where would medicine, bandages, or even a single sterilized needle be left preserved in good condition?”

The photo itself and Shiotsuki’s response to it illuminated the fact that even with John Hersey’s Hiroshima and the Life story depicting horrific devastation and death, U.S. policies of censorship and denial had succeeded in keeping Americans uninformed of the unimaginable power of atomic bombs and the ghastly consequences of whole-body exposure to high levels of radiation. In the meantime, the USSR had broken the United States’ monopoly on nuclear weapons, and as the Cold War was escalating between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States pushed for international control of atomic energy to ensure its use by other countries for peaceful purposes only—while simultaneously appropriating $3 billion to increase its capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Production and testing of atomic bombs burgeoned worldwide: By the end of 1955, the United States had stockpiled 3,057 nuclear weapons and tested 66, the Soviet Union had built 200 weapons and tested 24, and Britain had developed 10 nuclear warheads and tested 3. On average, these weapons were forty-eight times more powerful than the bomb used on Nagasaki.

Even after stories of hibakusha suffering emerged in the United States, President Truman never publicly acknowledged the human impact of whole-body, large-dose radiation exposure or expressed regret for using the atomic bombs on civilians. He came close, however, at a November 30, 1950, press conference, when he took a question about the possibility of using a nuclear weapon in Korea to end the deadly international conflict there. “There has always been active consideration of its use,” Truman responded. “I don’t want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.”

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“In the blink of an eye,” one Nagasaki survivor wrote, “a decade had passed.” The city and its people had outlived the long war; an atomic bomb; instantaneous and continuous losses of family, friends, and community; lack of adequate food and basic needs; isolation and censorship during the U.S. occupation; and years of severe medical conditions resulting from injury and radiation exposure. By 1955, the city’s postwar economy had grown, in large part due to contracts from the United States for Mitsubishi and other companies to produce ships, military supplies, and other products for the Korean War, played out just 168 miles from Nagasaki across the Tsushima and Korea straits. Increased numbers of nonvictims had moved into Nagasaki, returning the city’s population to prebomb levels.

In the older parts of the city less impacted by the bomb, commerce and daily life had somewhat normalized. Three movie houses exclusively showed Hollywood films, particularly Westerns and adventure movies. Even in the Urakami Valley, rows and rows of relief housing lined newly paved streets, and shops were now open to serve their local communities. The rebuilt and newly named Nagasaki University School of Medicine and its affiliated hospital had finally opened on their former sites. The hospital’s state-of-the-art medical equipment and care allowed the temporary hospital at Shinkozen Elementary School to close at last. Streetcars operated through most of the city. Hunger and deprivation had eased, and most people no longer scoured for food to survive.

But hibakusha still closed their eyes and remembered people’s skin peeling off, their whispered cries for help, the bodies of the dead burning atop cremation pyres that filled the city with the stench of death. While most remained alone and silent in their grief, some formed small groups to honor Nagasaki’s deceased and ensure their future remembrance. At the municipal level, the Nagasaki City Atomic Bomb Records Preservation Committee gathered artifacts and information as the first step toward the opening of an atomic bomb museum, and the annual commemorations of the atomic bombing in Nagasaki were unified into a single ceremony entitled the Memorial Service for the Atomic Bomb Victims and Ceremony to Pray for Peace. Every year since 1954, Nagasaki’s mayor has read a “peace declaration” on behalf of the city.

 

At the hypocenter site, the small cylindrical marker posted in the rubble in 1945 was replaced by a tall wooden pillar rising from a large mound of dirt, framed from behind by young trees. Down the side of the post, large, hand-painted kanji identified the marker as the hypocenter. Visitors could sit on a bench in front of the monument; to one side stood a large wooden sign in Japanese and English detailing the atomic bomb damages.

Nagano, her mother, and her older brother built a small family gravesite near the hypocenter where they placed Seiji’s, Kuniko’s, and her father’s ashes. Wada found purpose in beginning to plan a monument for the twelve mobilized students and more than a hundred streetcar drivers and conductors who died in the bombing—“to comfort the souls,” he said. To that end, he and his friends made a list of everyone who had died and where they had lived. If anyone in their families had survived, Wada tracked down their current addresses and visited them on weekends when he wasn’t working. “I went as far as Osaka, Kansai, and Okinawa to ask them how they were doing after they had lost their daughters and sons.” About a third of the families turned him away, unwilling to talk about the atomic bomb and the loss of their loved one. Others, however, invited Wada into their homes and asked him to tell them anything he knew about their son or daughter on the day of the bombing. It took Wada more than ten years to complete all the visits and organize the detailed notes he kept on each conversation.

The people of Nagasaki commemorated the tenth anniversary of the atomic bombing with new memorials, dedications, and acts of remembrance. The new six-story Nagasaki International Culture Hall opened on the hillside five hundred feet above the hypocenter, and its entire fifth floor became a small museum displaying materials and personal items relating to the bombing. More than 220,000 visitors saw the exhibit that year. The Nagasaki Peace Statue was dedicated at one end of a large area of elevated land just north of the hypocenter—though some hibakusha objected to this use of donated funds, believing the money could have been better spent on survivors’ medical care. Created by Kitamura Seibo, a renowned sculptor and Nagasaki native, the thirty-two-foot-high statue situated atop a thirteen-foot-high stone base is a seated man facing the hypocenter. His raised right arm points toward the sky where the atomic bomb exploded, his left arm extends horizontally to symbolize peace, and his eyes are closed to symbolize prayer for those who died.

On the morning of August 9, large crowds assembled in front of the Peace Statue for the city’s formal commemoration ceremony. The mayor of Nagasaki and other dignitaries appealed for remembrance and peace, offering flowers at the base of the memorial. A plane flew overhead, releasing flowers to remember the dead. A group of hibakusha orphans stood in front of the Peace Statue, and at 11:02 a.m.—the moment the atomic bomb had exploded a decade earlier—each child released a dove into the sky. That night, fireworks lit up the sky as a procession of children carrying paper lanterns moved toward the Urakami River. They attached the lanterns to thin wooden boards, placed them in small boats, and used string to pull the boats down the river like a train, creating a trail of flickering light.

At a time when much of the city’s destruction had disappeared from public view, visual evidence of the bombing lingered silently in the night. On the knoll above the hypocenter near the new Peace Statue, the stone foundation of Urakami Prison protruded aboveground to outline the shape of each demolished building. Damaged stone pillars of the former Urakami Church stood upright in the far northeastern corner of the Urakami Valley. In the hills just south of the hypocenter, a single-legged torii archway balanced eerily at the top of a stone staircase, ten years after one of its immense cement support columns was blown away, still directing people to the intimate, tree-covered Sanno Shrine.

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At the periphery of her city’s recovery and remembrance, Do-oh emerged from hiding. Year after year, she had sat alone in her room, asking herself over and over again what she should do with the life she had been given. Eight years after the bombing, she finally knew that it was time to transcend her atomic bomb experience and somehow create a new life for herself.

But while her injuries had healed and the immediate pain of the glass shards embedded in her body had eased, Do-oh’s hair had still not grown back. Desperate to overcome her shame and reclaim her life, she wore the black kerchief her mother had made for her and stepped outside her house. Like Yoshida, she stayed close to home at first, taking short walks only in her immediate neighborhood. Later she heard that people called her “the girl with the triangle cloth.”

Do-oh’s father decided that she should go to dressmaking school so she could eventually support herself and have a good life. The commute to the school required Do-oh to venture farther from home. One day on her way home, she saw a fatigued, middle-aged woman sitting on a straw mat on the ground with a young child strapped to her back. “Could you give me something?” the woman begged. “Anything is fine.”

Do-oh dropped some coins into her box and was overwhelmed by the sad and lonely sound they made. What kind of life had this woman had? she wondered. Did she lose her husband in the war or the atomic bomb? On her way home, she imagined what it would be like to live like this woman and was awakened to the crucial necessity of her own independence. She quickly found a part-time job as a kitchen worker making takoyaki—grilled dumplings with octopus. Some months later, she was hired as a Nagasaki representative for a cosmetics company.

For the first time since before the bombing, Do-oh felt alive again and began envisioning a future for herself. She decided that she wanted to live an authentic and full life—for herself and for her friends who had died. Reconnecting to her love of fashion, Do-oh focused her vision on cosmetics as a way to help young hibakusha women whose faces were scarred and burned.

She wanted to push herself and test her potential. She wanted to leave her hometown and move to a bigger city. Making a rare choice for a single Japanese woman, Do-oh requested a transfer to her company’s head office in Tokyo—“the place for fashion,” she said, “the place for anything.” Her application was accepted, but Do-oh’s parents adamantly objected to her leaving. “Your body is injured,” they said. “At some point, you might become ill again. We can easily foresee your experiencing hardships there.” Do-oh was furious, and in another act of social defiance, she told her parents that she was going to Tokyo despite their wishes. Before she left, she rented a room in Nagasaki to practice living on her own, and she worked at the cosmetics company’s local shop and took odd jobs to save money. In 1955, her hair finally grew back enough for her to remove the black kerchief from her head.

She was free. On the day of her departure, Do-oh, now twenty-six, wrapped her clothes in two furoshiki, said good-bye to her family, and boarded a train for Tokyo. The trip took a day and a half. Her goal was to try to use the life she had been given. “I felt like I’d already died once, so if it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t have lost anything.” From inside the slow, coal-burning train, Do-oh watched the city, her childhood, and her atomic bomb experiences disappear in the distance. “Going to Tokyo was the true starting line of my life,” she said. “I bet against myself that I would win.”