CHAPTER 7

AFTERLIFE

Twenty-one-year-old Mizuta Hisako had studied hard to complete her training as a Nagasaki tour bus guide—and out of a pool of twenty applicants, she was thrilled to be one of only seven to be hired. Japan’s economic boom of the late 1950s had begun to propel the nation out of its postwar collapse, and in Nagasaki, increased foreign trade and the thriving shipbuilding industry had helped the local economy surge. International hotels and restaurants crowded the downtown area, many with signage in both Japanese and English. Television towers rose high above Mount Inasa, and simple eight- and nine-story apartment and office buildings dotted the cityscape. In winter, remembered one of the ABCC’s leading geneticists, William J. Schull, “Nagasaki’s major shopping area rang with the sounds of Christmas carols, and images of Santa and his elfin helpers were to be found in both of the department stores.”

As Nagasaki emerged as a modern metropolis, tourists began to discover the city. At Nagasaki Peace Park, just north of the hypocenter area, peace monuments donated by nations throughout the world began arriving and were placed around the park’s perimeter, and visitors were often greeted by a brass band. Near the giant Peace Statue, survivors who otherwise could not work due to paralysis, crippling injuries, or illness operated the popular “hibakusha store,” selling atomic bomb souvenirs, handmade Mother Mary dolls, Japanese noodles, and drinks.

Hisako’s uniform was ready, and she was just about to start her new job when one of her superiors at the city transportation office approached her. He suggested that she meet a man named Wada who worked for the same agency in the streetcar division. He had also approached Wada. “Mr. Wada,” the man had said, “Mizuta-san is a nice girl. Why don’t you marry her?” Hisako told the man that she was working and had no desire to get married yet, but he insisted that she at least allow the introduction.

In Japan, marriage and children were societal expectations, key milestones in a young man’s or woman’s successful transition to adulthood. Most marriages were arranged through omiai—formal interviews between the potential bride and groom, often accompanied by their parents. These meetings were arranged by an older relative, a senior employee at work, or an elder in the families’ social networks who could vouch for both parties and praise their virtues as good marital candidates. Families accepted or rejected prospective marriage partners based on various criteria, including social standing, appearance, economic stability, health, and the ability to bear healthy children.

Hibakusha—even those with economic and social status and with no visible injuries or illness—were routinely rejected as marriage partners because of widespread fears about radiation-related illnesses and possible genetic effects on children. “A lot of rumors circulated back then that hibakusha were carriers of serious diseases,” Wada recalled, “or that if two survivors got married, they would have disabled children.” Consequently, countless survivors hid their survivor status prior to marriage; some also made sure their spouses never found out. One woman kept her past a secret over the course of her entire marriage, destroying government notices related to her hibakusha status as soon as they arrived in the mail. Another was forced to abort her child and leave her marriage when her husband and his family discovered she was a hibakusha.

Wada and Hisako knew each other’s faces, but they had barely spoken before they met at a Chinese restaurant. Neither spoke of their identities as hibakusha. Since 1946, Wada had never spoken to anyone about his atomic bomb experiences, and he did not want to risk doing so now; at age thirty, he wanted to find a wife and marry quickly so that his grandparents could know their great-grandchildren.

Hisako balked at the potential arrangement. She didn’t have anything against Wada, but it was customary for young women to stop working after they married, and Hisako wasn’t ready to quit her new job before she’d even started. Her aunt, however, insisted that she accept Wada and marry him. “Women need to marry someone at some point anyway,” she told Hisako, implying that it was best for a woman to marry when asked. The aunt had cared for Hisako’s family after the bombing, so her words carried particular weight. “Since it was my aunt’s order,” Hisako explained, “I had to do it.”

Although they might have guessed, it was only after their wedding that Wada and Hisako learned for certain that each was a hibakusha. The third of five children, Hisako had been a third grader at Zenza Elementary School in 1945. Her father was away at war. In one of the conventional bombing attacks on Nagasaki, her mother and older brother had been seriously injured, and the entire family had moved from their Urakami Valley home to her aunt’s house on the outskirts of the city. A week later, the atomic blast destroyed Hisako’s home. She had been at school only a mile from the hypocenter but was protected inside a bomb shelter. Her older sister, however, had been walking toward the city and suffered whole-body burns. For ten days, Hisako and her family lived in a bomb shelter and cared for her sister, who was wrapped in cotton gauze bandages, before leaving Nagasaki to live with relatives in northern Kyushu. When her father came home from the war in September, the family returned to Nagasaki to rebuild, but they were so poor that for a long time their house had no roof.

After Wada and Hisako’s wedding in 1957, Hisako got pregnant immediately—“a honeymoon baby,” she called her first child. By this time, hibakusha were terrified by widespread rumors and media coverage about potential genetic effects and infant malformation caused by parental exposure to radiation. No matter how explicitly the ABCC tried to reassure survivors that their radiation exposure would have no measurable genetic effects on their children, young married couples and their families never stopped worrying. When Hisako went to her first prenatal doctor’s visit, a staff member told her that because she and Wada were hibakusha, it would be better that they didn’t have children. The misinformed doctor warned them that there was some medical probability that their baby would be deformed. “These words,” Wada remembered, “stabbed at my wife’s heart.”

They turned to a different doctor—a physician at Nagasaki University Hospital who conducted research on the medical effects of the atomic bomb. Although he did not deny his colleague’s comments, the second doctor reassured them that even if their children were born with medical problems, they would be able to take care of them and raise them well. Grateful but still worried, Wada and Hisako waited for their baby’s birth and were immensely relieved when their daughter was born without any of the rumored conditions. Two more healthy daughters followed over the next few years.

Wada and Hisako, along with Wada’s aging, authoritarian grandmother, moved into a new house at the base of a hill in a northwest Urakami Valley neighborhood. Wada drove a streetcar for several years, then worked in his company’s administrative office, where, over time, he was promoted to manager, section chief, then department chief. He spent many weekends planning the details of a memorial for his lost colleagues.

But he rarely spoke about the atomic bomb. “When you talk about it, it brings back memories,” he said. “I didn’t talk about it even to my children.”

“I’m sure they knew,” Hisako added, “although we didn’t tell them directly.”

“It’s not just that I didn’t talk about the bombing,” Wada explained. “I did not want to talk about it. I didn’t talk about it because I didn’t want to.”

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By the time of Wada’s wedding, Nagano had already been married for seven years. She had begun thinking about marriage in 1949 after she turned twenty, but every time she brought a man she liked home to meet her mother, her mother rejected him. “She intensely opposed anyone I dated,” Nagano recalled. “Eventually I learned that she would never accept someone I liked.” Under the strain of unrelenting guilt, Nagano thought she should do whatever her mother said, regardless of her own feelings. What her mother wanted was for Nagano to marry a cousin who was also a hibakusha.

“He was my cousin by adoption, not by blood,” Nagano explained. “My mother told me I should marry him because we felt sorry for him since he had lost his family in the bombing. I really didn’t want to, and I rebelled—I left home and went to a friend’s house in Isahaya and stayed there overnight without telling my mother where I was. There were no cell phones back then, or even any telephones, and my mother went to all my friends’ houses and searched for me all night long.” When Nagano returned home and realized how much her mother had worried, she decided never to do anything like that again.

Nagano married her cousin in 1950. She was twenty-one. Despite having no romantic feelings toward her husband, she persuaded herself to find a way to like him because she knew they would have children. After their wedding, Nagano’s new husband moved into Nagano and her mother’s tiny residence in Shiroyama-machi, originally built as relief housing. Nagano’s mother now owned the unit after the city transferred ownership of these dwellings to the hibakusha occupying them. Eventually, Nagano and her husband moved to their own single-room, 150-square-foot accommodation on the same street.

Nagano stopped working after she married. Her first child, a son, was born in 1951, and over the next ten years she gave birth to two daughters as well. “We were fortunate,” she said, “that all three of them were fine.” As rumors persisted about serious health issues for children of hibakusha, however, Nagano took her children for frequent medical checkups and was hypervigilant to every cold, fever, or other illness they experienced. To accommodate their growing family, Nagano and her husband added rooms to the bottom floor of their house and built a second level. They lived there for eighteen years until their son took his college entrance exams.

For nearly their entire married lives, Nagano and her husband never spoke about what they had suffered. “It was too overwhelming,” she explained. “We didn’t want to talk about it because if we did, we would start to cry.” In 1972, after twenty-two years of marriage, her husband finally broke his silence. At Nagano’s older brother’s isshuki—the ceremony commemorating the first anniversary of his death—her husband told Nagano that on the morning of the bombing, his father had finished his night shift at the Mitsubishi Ohashi weapons factory and returned to their home—across the street from Shiroyama Elementary School and a third of a mile from the hypocenter. He had eaten breakfast and rested with his wife and younger son. That morning, Nagano’s husband was working inside the Mitsubishi torpedo factory where his father had worked the night before—the same factory where Do-oh was at the time of the bombing. Out of twenty-six laborers in his area, he was the only one to survive, possibly because he had crawled under a desk.

“My husband told me that he found the ashes of his father, mother, and younger brother lined up on the floor of their house where they were sleeping,” Nagano remembered. He never found his sister’s remains because he didn’t know where she was in the city when she died. After he told Nagano his story, the two never spoke about the bombing again. Like countless other hibakusha, they lived a split life: On the outside, they worked, got married, and had children. On the inside, their self-imposed silence helped contain their grief, guilt, and devastating memories of the bombing. Living this divided life allowed them to move on.

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Taniguchi could not accept the duality of his life as a hibakusha. He was a good-looking, hardworking young man, but beneath whatever clothes he wore, the physical scars from the bombing caused him constant pain, and his anger—toward both Japan and the United States—brewed just beneath the surface of his silence. In the early 1950s, as Taniguchi tried to create a normal life, he found himself at the edge of a nascent activist movement that would give him a way to integrate his atomic bomb experiences into his everyday life.

He started gently, talking with his friends at work about his memories of the bombing, his three-and-a-half-year hospitalization, and his current medical conditions. Still, Taniguchi always kept his injuries hidden from their sight. Even in the hot summer, he wore long-sleeved shirts to cover the scars on his arms, and a shirt when he went swimming in the sea—not only to protect his damaged skin from the sun, but also to avoid unwanted stares. “I didn’t want people to see my scars,” he remembered. “I didn’t want them to gawk at me with weird expressions on their faces.”

One day, however, at a company-sponsored swimming outing, a younger coworker urged Taniguchi to take off his shirt—not to worry about what people thought because everyone there already knew about his burns. In an early moment of public activism, Taniguchi decided to remove his shirt and allow his peers and their families to see the raised, reddened scars covering his back and arms, and the long, deep indentations in his misshapen chest. “I felt a little embarrassed, so I covered myself a bit with a towel. I was hoping people would understand why my body was like this. I wanted them to know about the war and the atomic bomb.”

Taniguchi could not have known how quickly his desire for public awareness would be granted: Within a year, the United States would test the world’s first deliverable hydrogen bomb—an event that would ignite international outrage, give birth to Japan’s first nationwide campaign for the elimination of nuclear weapons, and bring national attention to the haunting realities of high-dose radiation exposure on hibakusha.

The nuclear test took place just before dawn on March 1, 1954, at the United States’ Pacific Proving Grounds, located at the northern edge of the Marshall Islands, a 750,000-square-mile region in the South Pacific dotted with more than 1,200 tiny islands with a total combined landmass of only 70 square miles. The hydrogen bomb exploded on Bikini Atoll, a narrow, 3-square-mile crescent-shaped series of minute coral islands around a large lagoon. The bomb’s force equaled fifteen million tons of TNT—almost seven hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

The blast instantly gouged a crater in the island a mile wide and two hundred feet deep. All vegetation on the atoll was destroyed. Within seconds, a fireball nearly 3 miles across rose 8 miles above the ocean, filled with tons of extracted sand, crushed coral, and water. Within ten minutes, the mushroom cloud’s diameter spanned 65 miles. U.S. forces had cleared a 60,000-square-mile danger zone around the test site, and residents of Bikini Atoll had already been evacuated years earlier for a 1946 U.S. nuclear test there. The bomb’s blast, however, was twice as powerful as scientists had anticipated, and along with an unpredicted shift in wind direction, radioactive fallout ultimately spread more than 7,000 square miles outside the danger zone. Two hundred and thirty-nine islanders, including children, elderly adults, and pregnant mothers, were exposed to radiation on four atolls more than eighty miles east of Bikini. Many developed symptoms of radiation illness. Twenty-eight American meteorological staff were also exposed as they observed the test from an island 155 miles east of the blast.

For Japan, the impact of what nonproliferation advocates call “the worst radiological disaster in the United States’ testing history” began on March 14, when a Japanese fishing vessel called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) pulled into its home port at Yaizu, 90 miles south of Tokyo. Two weeks earlier, on the morning of the hydrogen bomb test, the boat had been trawling for tuna about a hundred miles east of Bikini Atoll, outside the authorized exclusion zone. Most of the twenty-three-man crew were on deck and saw the bomb’s flash, followed by a huge explosion. Afraid of what they couldn’t understand, they quickly reeled in their nets to escape the area. Within three hours, a white radioactive powder—what the Japanese later called shi no hai (ashes of death)—began falling from the sky. Within two hours, the white ash covered the boat and the men on board. The deck, they remembered, was covered “thickly enough to show footprints.”

When the Lucky Dragon arrived at Yaizu after a two-week, 2,500-mile journey, all twenty-three crew members were severely ill with radiation-related symptoms. Two were in such serious condition that they were taken immediately to Tokyo University Hospital, while the other twenty-one were first hospitalized in Yaizu, then transferred to Tokyo. Japan was outraged at the victimization of their citizens by a third U.S. nuclear weapon and infuriated that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) denied Japan’s request for details about the weapon tested there and the nature of radiation released—information Japanese scientists felt was critical for treating the victims. Contradicting years of refusal to provide medical care to survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both the ABCC and the AEC offered to treat the Lucky Dragon victims. Japanese scientists, however, rejected the offer, not wanting the fishermen to become subjects of another postbomb U.S. military study. American officials were allowed only limited examinations of the victims. Over the next months, many of the Lucky Dragon fishermen developed jaundice and other liver disorders, which doctors suspected but could not definitively link to the men’s radiation exposure.

The Lucky Dragon’s tuna load tested positive for contamination, and although it was destroyed, a radiation panic spread throughout the country. For the first time, Japanese people outside of Nagasaki and Hiroshima feared the human effects of radiation toxicity that had haunted hibakusha for nine years. As weeks passed, other fish coming from the South Pacific—contaminated or not—were deemed too risky to consume and were discarded. Fears intensified when higher-than-normal levels of radiation were detected in ground and rain samples at various locations across Japan, presumed to have been caused by some combination of the Bikini test and five other U.S. hydrogen bomb tests conducted in the Marshall Islands within the next two months. In September, the national scare heightened further when the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator, Kuboyama Aikichi, died from infectious hepatitis believed to have resulted from blood transfusions he received to treat his radiation exposure.

The remaining Lucky Dragon crew members were released from Tokyo hospitals in 1955. Public alarm faded, and examinations of tuna and fishing boats ceased. By that time, anti-American sentiments and citizen opposition to nuclear weapons and testing had escalated into a full-scale national movement. Polls showed that over 75 percent of Japanese people opposed all nuclear weapons testing “under any circumstances.” The National Diet adopted resolutions for international control of atomic energy and the abolition of nuclear weapons, and the governing bodies of nearly every city and rural community in the country passed local antinuclear resolutions. Government and private science councils were established to further study the human and environmental effects of radiation exposure and explore potential methods for reducing atomic bomb injuries in the future. A group of housewives in Tokyo began a neighborhood signature drive that quickly developed into a national nonpartisan coalition of school and youth groups, medical associations, trade unions, and businesses that held rallies across the country and gathered thirty-two million signatures—approximately one-third of Japan’s population at the time—for a petition against hydrogen bombs.

Stirred by these impassioned protests and Japan’s new pacifist identity, the city of Hiroshima organized the First World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in 1955 to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the atomic bombings. After an opening-night event that drew 30,000 people to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, approximately 1,900 people—including 54 citizen delegates from other nations—participated in the conference inside Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall. Due to seating limitations, another 1,100 conference participants listened to the speeches through loudspeakers outside the building.

For the first time since the August 1945 bombings, a national spotlight shone on the conditions of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some hibakusha did not appreciate that it had taken ten years and the irradiation of Japanese fishermen in the South Pacific for their country to turn its attention on them. Others, however—exhausted after dealing with persistent illnesses, discrimination, arduous care of sick family members, and the slow and silent struggle to rebuild their lives—welcomed the opportunity to be seen, at least briefly, and to be included in a national movement to ban nuclear weapons. A small number of hibakusha from both cities used this national stage to tell their personal stories and fervently appeal for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Momentum swelled, leading to the Second World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Nagasaki in 1956. “It was a powerful and determined movement,” recalled Hirose Masahito, a high school teacher who served on the Nagasaki conference’s steering committee. “Shop owners donated their money, goods, and services for the conference,” another hibakusha remembered. Women’s groups led the White Rose Campaign, making cloth roses, selling them for a small sum, and donating the proceeds to the conference. Throughout the city, people pinned roses to their shirts and blouses. “Ban the Bomb” signs could be seen at every turn.

On August 9, 1956, the Nagasaki conference convened in the gymnasium of East Nagasaki Senior High School, the largest venue in the city. Three thousand people participated, including thirty-seven representatives of other nations and international organizations. One of the most celebrated moments came when twenty-seven-year-old Watanabe Chieko, paralyzed in the bombing by a falling steel beam that crushed her spine, was carried to the podium by her mother. Held in her mother’s arms, Watanabe appealed for hibakusha to transcend their suffering and shame to fight for the abolition of atomic and hydrogen bombs. “I called up my anger toward the atomic bomb,” she remembered, “anger which had been bottled up inside me for eleven years. I was filled with joy, and all the distorted thoughts, the emptiness and despair hidden inside me were gone.” Conference participants applauded vigorously, many of them in tears. For the first time, Watanabe reflected, “I discovered a purpose in my life.”

Survivors and citizen activists from across Japan also gathered during the conference to establish local and national antinuclear and hibakusha support groups, including the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations (Nihon Hidankyo), Japan’s first unified national hibakusha membership organization. In its founding declaration, Nihon Hidankyo proclaimed: “Now, eleven long years after the atomic bombing . . . we who were not killed at that moment are finally rising up. . . . Until now, we have remained silent, hidden our faces, and remained separate from one another. But now, no longer able to keep our silence, we join hands at this conference in order to take action.” Members set visionary goals to support bans on nuclear weapons, advocate for national health care support, and establish vocational training, educational programs, and financial support programs for hibakusha living throughout Japan.

National press coverage of the conference allowed the Japanese people to finally hear the voices of Nagasaki hibakusha, and international conference participants spread the word abroad about survivors and their conditions. A Japanese antinuclear activist expressed his shock over the many adversities hibakusha had endured for more than ten years without government support. An American pastor who had attended the event told conference organizer Hirose Masahito that he had thought that everyone in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had died from burns and radiation exposure—so he was surprised to find out that hibakusha even existed.

Revelations like these emboldened small numbers of survivors in the newly born hibakusha movement to speak out and let their stories be heard. Like Watanabe, they felt a new and transcendent purpose for their lives: From now on, they would share their memories as a means to help people affected by the bombs and to fight for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Yamaguchi Senji was one of these early activists. Fourteen years old at the time of the bombing, Yamaguchi was digging a ditch outside the Mitsubishi Ohashi weapons factory and sustained extensive burns across the right side of his arms, chest, neck, and face. When the city of Nagano invited hibakusha representatives to speak to local antinuclear activists, Yamaguchi stood at a lectern inside the city library. In front of a standing-room-only crowd, he told his story in public for the first time. “There was dead silence as I spoke,” he remembered. “Everyone listened attentively to my story. . . . Sometimes I heard people sobbing.” Overcome with emotion that people finally understood what he had suffered for so long in silence, Yamaguchi began crying, too—then he spontaneously took off his shirt to fully expose the keloid scars spread across his upper body.

Taniguchi’s work schedule had prevented him from attending the Nagasaki conference, but buoyed by accounts of young hibakusha speaking out, he, too, decided to venture beyond his friends at work and tell his story to people he didn’t know. His first public speaking engagement was at the invitation of the Japan Telecommunication Workers’ Union, an experience that inspired him to speak again whenever he could. During this period in his life, he continued to suffer intense pain and fatigue. At one particularly desperate moment, when Taniguchi contemplated ending his life, a critical shift in his perspective occurred. He sensed a significance to his survival even as it came with great suffering. “At that moment,” he remembered, “I realized that I must live on behalf of those who died unwillingly.”

Taniguchi joined a small group of young men, including Yamaguchi and later Yoshida, who had begun gathering informally in the early 1950s to share their experiences. All of them had been children or teenagers at the time of the bombing and had suffered severe injuries, burns, radiation-related illness, and loss of family members. The group provided the support and camaraderie the men needed to speak at a deeply personal level about their medical conditions, ongoing physical pain, discrimination, and jobs. They shared with one another bits of information they heard from their individual doctors about how radiation exposure was affecting their bodies. A similar group of young hibakusha women, including Watanabe, had also been meeting to discuss their postbomb challenges. Together they knit and made zoka (artificial flowers) as a way for their physically disabled members to earn money from home.

The two groups merged in 1956 to become the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Youth Association. As nonnuclear nations across the globe raced to produce their first nuclear weapons, and as the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain tested increasingly more powerful weapons aboveground, in the oceans, and hundreds of miles above the earth, this small group of survivors forged deep friendships and determined that they had no choice but to stand up individually and collectively to inform all who would listen about the horrendous realities of nuclear weapons. Taniguchi’s commitment to this group and the larger antinuclear movement grew. “Unless we bomb victims ourselves tell what really happened,” he thought, “how can others know the suffering engendered by war and the horrors of the atomic bomb? It is our responsibility to gather our courage and bear witness to what we experienced.”

 • • • 

As his political awareness intensified, Taniguchi turned twenty-six and began thinking about marriage. His grandmother, too, now ill and confined to bed, was anxious to see him married and well cared for before she died. For Taniguchi, however, the same hibakusha identity that empowered him as an activist minimized his chances for marriage, especially because of his extensive injuries and scars.

Taniguchi’s grandfather prepared a list of prospects. One by one, his family and marriage brokers told the truth about his hibakusha status and injuries to prospective wives and their families. Taniguchi was rejected again and again. Some women were kind in their refusals; others were harsh. “How can you imagine that I would marry someone with your injuries?” they said. “You can’t even look forward to a long life!” Taniguchi was disheartened. Unbeknownst to him, his family decided to minimize his conditions in their next discussion with a potential wife.

Taniguchi’s aunt (surname Osa), had a friend with an unmarried daughter named Eiko, whom Osa was convinced would be a fine and caring wife for her nephew. In her midtwenties, Eiko lived in the small fishing village of Togitsu, north of Nagasaki. When she was a child, her father had taken their family to live in Japanese-occupied Korea. Her two older brothers were killed in action in the Pacific War, and as a teenager Eiko had contributed to Japan’s war efforts by repairing soldiers’ uniforms. After the war, she and her family returned to Togitsu and were stunned to see the extent of Nagasaki’s destruction. Eiko finished school and helped farm her family’s quarter-acre plot, which provided them food and a small income.

Osa paid a visit to Eiko’s farm, where she promoted Taniguchi’s strengths. She told Eiko and her mother that the scars on Taniguchi’s arms and legs were barely visible and that he had undergone restorative surgery on his face to repair scar tissue. She did not mention that his facial scars had been caused by long-term bedsores, that his arm was permanently injured, or that his back was a large mass of scar tissue and his chest was covered with deep indentations. To follow up on her visit, Osa took Taniguchi to the small restaurant where Eiko worked part-time as a cook. They first observed Eiko in the kitchen without making their presence known, then Osa called Eiko to their table to meet her nephew. To Eiko, the fully dressed Taniguchi looked no different from any other man. In time, she declined the proposal without giving a reason. Osa was persistent, however, and finally persuaded Eiko to change her mind.

Taniguchi and Eiko were married on March 19, 1956, at his grandparents’ house, where they met each other’s families for the first time; Taniguchi’s father, older brother, and sister had traveled from Osaka for the occasion. After the ceremony, Taniguchi and Eiko drove together to City Hall to register their marriage, then returned to the house where Taniguchi’s friends joined them for a celebration. From her bedside that night, Taniguchi’s grandmother thanked Eiko for marrying her grandson and taking good care of him. Her words piqued Eiko’s curiosity because they echoed similar statements of concern and gratitude she had heard from Taniguchi’s family and friends throughout the day.

Taniguchi had suspected that Eiko had not been told about the burns on his back, and his anxiety grew as the time she would learn the truth drew closer. The couple spent their first night at his grandmother’s house, where they slept in separate beds. The next day, however, they traveled by bus to a rural mountain inn in Unzen, about thirty-five miles east of Nagasaki, for a short honeymoon. That evening in the Japanese ofuro (bath), Taniguchi and Eiko sat on stools opposite each other to wash their bodies before entering the deep tub to soak. Taniguchi quietly asked Eiko to wash his back. Then he turned around. “She had thought that I was like other people,” he said. From behind him, Eiko began to weep, and she didn’t stop crying through most of the night and the following day. Taniguchi was afraid that she would leave him.

On the morning of the third day, the two departed for home. Taniguchi’s family was waiting anxiously, doubting that he and Eiko would return as a couple. To everyone’s amazement, however, Eiko stayed with her new husband, putting aside her initial anger at his aunt for holding back the truth of his injuries. She later told Taniguchi that she had realized that if she left, he would have no one else to take care of him.

His grandmother died less than two weeks later. Taniguchi and his grandfather wheeled her tiny body on a cart to the city crematorium, and later the family carried her urn to a Buddhist temple in Nagayo, just north over the mountains from Nagasaki, to store her ashes at their family’s gravesite. Taniguchi and Eiko lived with his grandfather in the house in which Taniguchi was raised. The damaged tissue across his back remained a source of constant pain.

Within three years, he and Eiko became parents to a son and a daughter. Taniguchi continued to tell his story in public, but he never spoke with his children about the bombing and how he survived. As was typical in Japanese family life, though, he often bathed with his young children, so at an early age they, like their mother, became accustomed to his patchy, scar-covered back and arms, and the deep hollows in his chest.

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Potential marriage partners were right to worry about survivors’ long-term health conditions. Even ten years after the bombings, hibakusha were experiencing excessive occurrences of numerous medical conditions, including blood, cardiovascular, liver, and endocrinological disorders; low blood cell counts; severe anemia; thyroid disorders; internal organ damage; cataracts; and premature aging. Many survivors suffered multiple illnesses at the same time. Countless others experienced a generalized, unexplainable malaise—later nicknamed bura-bura (aimless) disease—with symptoms including overall poor health, constant fatigue, and, according to survivors’ physicians, “insufficient mental energy to carry on their work.”

Cancer rates rose again. Childhood leukemia rates had peaked between 1950 and 1953, but since then, adult leukemia cases had increased beyond normal levels, a situation that would not change for decades. By 1955, other cancers had also begun to occur at rates far higher than for non-hibakusha. Thyroid cancer incidences rose in the 1960s, and within the next five years, stomach and lung cancer rates escalated. Incidences of liver, colon, bladder, ovary, and skin cancers, among others, also increased. Women exposed within three-quarters of a mile from the hypocenter were 3.3 times more likely to develop breast cancer than the general population; those who had been exposed as children were at highest risk. Without a reliable means to assess their own risk, survivors remained constantly watchful of every physical symptom they developed, dreading the insidious effects that the bomb’s invisible and omnipresent radiation might inflict on their bodies.

Riding the swell of antinuclear protests and world conferences, hibakusha activists turned to this critical issue of the atomic bombings’ unique and ongoing medical effects. Most of their conditions were not covered by Japan’s national health insurance plan. Further, a clause in the San Francisco Peace Treaty barred Japan from suing the United States for damages. Taniguchi, Yamaguchi, and others began a long and contentious fight for domestic health care laws to provide financial support for hibakusha medical expenses.

They had no shortage of data to support their petitions. Tens of thousands had died from their injuries and radiation exposure after the official fatality count for the end of 1945. Thousands more remained ill. In the late 1950s and 1960s, physicians and scientists at the rebuilt Nagasaki University School of Medicine and other local and national institutions had continued comprehensive studies of many hibakusha medical conditions. The city of Nagasaki established a municipal tumor registry to store thousands of radiation-related specimens from surviving and deceased hibakusha for ongoing research. Between 1959 and 1967, Dr. Shirabe alone authored or coauthored six studies on the characteristics and treatment of thermal burn scars, thyroid and breast tumors, thyroid cancers, and keloid scars. The ABCC in both cities amassed immense quantities of hibakusha medical data from its population-based studies. Combined, the Japanese and ABCC studies clearly demonstrated a correlation between survivors’ estimated radiation dosages and their risk for various cancers—conclusions that would be confirmed by decades of continued studies. Verifying what survivors already knew, the data provided evidence of the overwhelming need for ongoing, specialized hibakusha medical care.

At the local level, the city of Nagasaki coordinated with the Japanese Red Cross Society to construct the 81-bed Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Hospital, which began operations in 1958 with specialized departments including internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, gynecology, and ophthalmology. In its first seven years of operation, the hospital served 2,646 inpatient and 41,858 outpatient survivors; by 1977, it had expanded to 360 beds. Other facilities, too, opened to provide hibakusha medical support as well as job training, housing, and senior care.

Still, medical facilities and social service organizations had not yet caught up with the continuing health risks of whole-body radiation exposure—and even if they had, most hibakusha could not have afforded the care they required. To address these concerns, as early as 1952, groups of Nagasaki citizens had established hibakusha support groups and initiated widespread fund-raising campaigns to provide physical checkups and treatment at no cost or for a prorated fee for survivors experiencing financial hardship. The mayors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima also sent a petition to the National Diet appealing for medical care for survivors. In response, the Japanese government allocated modest funds from its 1954–1956 budgets to various medical institutions to cover hibakusha surveys, medical research, and publication of study outcomes.

In 1956, Nagasaki’s small group of activists, including Taniguchi and Yamaguchi, established the city’s largest peer-run hibakusha organization, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council (Hisaikyo). In addition to advocating for the elimination of nuclear weapons, Hisaikyo members fought for recognition of hibakusha medical conditions, national aid to cover their health care costs, and services to support survivors’ self-reliance. A similar organization was founded in Hiroshima. Survivor activists in both cities went door-to-door to collect donations for hibakusha health care relief and traveled to Tokyo to meet with Diet members and the prime minister to tell their stories and impress on them the need for a universal hibakusha health care law. “At last, an organization to voice our demands had been created,” Yamaguchi remembered. “We proposed that since the Japanese government started the war, it should take responsibility for the victims of the bombings. That’s what we wanted.”

Their first victory came within a year. In 1957, the Japanese government passed the Atomic Bomb Victims Medical Care Law, providing funding for semiannual medical examinations for officially designated hibakusha—defined as anyone who had been within city limits at the time of the bombings, those in areas where black rain fell, children affected by in utero radiation exposure, and rescue workers and others who came into the city within the first two weeks. The law also provided treatment for a few sanctioned radiation-related illnesses such as leukemia.

But the government’s stringent requirements for official hibakusha designation were discouraging to many hibakusha. In addition to a written application, survivors were required to submit either a certified statement by a public official or a photograph proving their specific location at the time of the bombing—both of which were immensely difficult to obtain. Alternatively, but equally challenging, applicants could submit written certification from two different people “excluding blood relatives to the third degree” swearing to their location at the time of the bomb. If no other proof was available, survivors were allowed, under oath, to submit written statements of their locations at the time of the bombing—but they still needed to find someone “who actually met the applicant somewhere in the city, or saw him or her at a relief station inside or outside the city, or fled with him or her to a safer place immediately after the bombing” and was willing to testify in writing to these facts. Despite these daunting requirements, by the end of the first year, 200,984 Nagasaki and Hiroshima hibakusha were issued a passport-size techo, a booklet that identified them as eligible for benefits. “One little handbook,” Yamaguchi remembered. “But how much suffering we had had to go through before we could get it. . . . I gripped that A-Bomb Victims Health Book firmly in my hand.”

For Taniguchi and others, however, Japan’s early hibakusha health care law was profoundly inadequate, leaving thousands without support. Even after completing the problematic application process, hibakusha had to request consideration for claims relating to a condition on the government’s list of sanctioned diseases. Their personal accounts and backup documentation—including medical records and estimated radiation doses (if available)—were reviewed by a government panel of experts who applied a strict formula to determine the “probability of causation” that radiation was the likely cause of their conditions. Few were approved. Activists contended that many more diseases than authorized by the medical care law could be linked to radiation exposure, including psychological conditions and an overall weakening of the body from damage to the blood, bone marrow, or organ tissues that caused secondary diseases and disorders. Delayed recuperation from disease or illness also resulted in increased medical costs and loss of wages.

Government officials resisted activists’ efforts to expand benefits, fearing potentially huge expenditures to cover hibakusha medical care and potential implications of Japan’s war responsibility. Hibakusha activists also believed that Japan evaded increasing survivors’ benefits in order to avoid alienating the United States as a key economic and military ally. All Japanese citizens should endure the sacrifices of the war equally, officials argued, and the provision of compensation to hibakusha for conditions other than those directly proved to be radiation-related would require similar compensation to victims of incendiary bombings across the nation. These assertions contradicted the government’s own 1965 survey of techo holders, which statistically confirmed higher occurrence rates for hibakusha medical conditions and disabilities compared with victims of traditional bombings. Families with a member suffering an atomic bomb–related physical disability incurred medical costs 3.5 times higher than the national average.

Four key issues complicated the government’s deliberations to increase hibakusha health care benefits. The first was the need to determine accurate radiation doses for survivors in order to define parameters for eligibility and show that any current or future health conditions were the likely result of radiation exposure. Technologies to accurately measure radiation doses in the human body, however, did not exist; instead, U.S. and Japanese scientists developed tentative dosimetry systems to estimate what an individual survivor’s radiation dose might have been. For the first system, introduced in 1957, scientists used complex calculations from the ABCC—in consultation with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and data from the Nevada atomic bomb test site—to analyze survivors’ locations and distances from the hypocenter at the time of the blast, their positions relative to neighboring structures, and the direction they were facing. For those who had been indoors at the time of the bombings, scientists evaluated the size and location of the houses or buildings they had been in, their orientation to the hypocenter, and the individual’s distance from any windows. Based on further studies, an updated measurement tool was introduced in 1965.

These dosimetry systems were far from perfect in determining individual hibakusha radiation doses. Rather than being able to rely on controlled experiments, scientists had to use information provided by survivors’ memories twelve years after experiencing an extreme traumatic event. Dosage assessments for survivors who had been in locations outside the scope of the ABCC’s various studies could not be determined. Even with the best estimates available, scientists could not assess how each organ in each individual survivor may have been affected differently, the degree to which high levels of radiation attenuated over time within the body, or when or what kind of long-term effects would appear for any single individual. “Consequently,” Taniguchi explained, “there are no complete conclusions about the side effects from the atomic bomb. No matter what anyone says, I don’t know if sometime in the future my body will develop symptoms linked to my exposure to radiation.”

Another challenge to the government’s determination of eligibility for benefits related to residual radiation exposure—a possibility for Nagasaki residents who had been in Nishiyama-machi, where black rain fell, or who had entered the hypocenter area in the hours and days after the bombing to carry corpses, assist with medical relief, or search for family members. Studies in Nishiyama-machi, for example, showed residents’ leukocyte levels were higher than normal, and at least two cases of leukemia were documented by 1970. No further adverse medical effects appeared after the mid-1970s, but some researchers remain cautious, believing that such effects could still surface at a future time. Innumerable adults and children who had come into the city after the bombing had reported immediate symptoms, including high fevers, diarrhea, and hair loss, similar to hibakusha who had been in the city at the time of the blasts—and countless experienced various medical conditions in the months and years that followed—including tumors, liver disorders, miscarriages, various cancers, and other illnesses with no identifiable causes. Many died at early ages from conditions their families attributed to radiation exposure.

Scientific studies have been unable to provide firm estimates of these survivors’ residual radiation absorption because calculations require the evaluation of many complex factors that are difficult to accurately assess based solely on a survivor’s memory—including the person’s age, date of entry, length of time spent near the hypocenter, and the nature of their activities. Recent studies, however, indicate potential “significant exposure” for those in the hypocenter area within a week’s time, findings that scientists are working to replicate and verify. Even without scientific proof of their radiation exposure, activists were able to negotiate agreement from the Japanese government to increase health care coverage for people who entered areas within 1.25 miles of the hypocenter of either city within two weeks of the bombings. The United States maintains its early postwar assessment that induced radioactivity near the hypocenters was minimal and did not cause harm.

The third complicating factor in the government’s ability to address survivors’ health care demands related to hibakusha living overseas. This included both Japanese and Korean, Chinese, and other non-Japanese hibakusha who had returned to their home nations or immigrated to other countries, all of whom had suffered from cancers and illnesses at the same rate as hibakusha in Japan. From the early years of the health care law, Japanese hibakusha living abroad were eligible for benefits, but only if they came back to Japan for treatment. In far greater numbers, thousands of foreign nationals who had survived the bombings and returned home after the war did not become eligible for health care support until 1978—and even then they were required to travel to Japan for treatments covered by the law, an impossible endeavor for all but a few. Hibakusha in East Asia often lived—and died—in impoverished rural areas totally isolated from doctors with any knowledge of the atomic bomb or its radiation effects. Many were discriminated against for their visible injuries, lack of skill in their native languages, or for being perceived as “pro-Japanese” by virtue of their having lived in Japan during the war. Their suffering was often ignored because their compatriots approved of the atomic bombings as events that had led to their liberation from Japanese rule. Some Korean hibakusha returned to Japan illegally to seek medical care or to search for two witnesses to support their eligibility for health care coverage, only to be deported without consideration of their atomic bomb–related conditions. Hibakusha activists in other nations, including the United States, worked for years with advocates in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to address, with incremental success, their atomic bomb–related medical needs.

Finally, the Japanese government had to determine health care eligibility for the tens of thousands of foreign (primarily Korean) hibakusha who had remained in Japan after the war. After years of wartime abuses followed by the atomic bombings, these hibakusha faced widespread anti-Korean sentiment in Japan and were legally barred from Japanese citizenship—even those who had fought for Japan during the war or had been born in Japan after their parents were forcefully relocated there. Like other hibakusha, they experienced employment and marriage discrimination. A 1965 treaty between South Korea and Japan barred Korean hibakusha from pressing for reparations against the Japanese government. Many became destitute due to their high medical costs and the absence of extended families to turn to for support. In the words of Kim Masako, a Korean survivor who was twenty-four years old at the time of the bombing, “It is not good we have two home countries.”

Korean hibakusha organized in 1967 to fight for recognition, medical care, and compensation. After eleven years of petitions and court battles, Japan amended its hibakusha health care law to allow foreign-born survivors living in Japan to apply for the same health care benefits as Japanese survivors. By this time, however, hospital records and other required documentation from the 1940s were impossible to obtain. The new law also required that at least one of their witnesses be Japanese, a further barrier for Korean hibakusha because in 1945 most Koreans had lived and worked separately from the mainstream communities in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Ryong Pak Su, one of an estimated ten thousand to twelve thousand Korean survivors of the Nagasaki bombing, explained, “All my neighbors died of the bomb. How could you bring them? Bring a ghost?”

 • • • 

Exasperated but undeterred, Taniguchi, Yamaguchi, and a small number of other young Japanese and foreign hibakusha activists continued to file petitions and lawsuits, lead sit-ins, meet with parliament members, and conduct nationwide campaigns to solicit citizen support for comprehensive surveys on hibakusha medical and economic conditions. Even as they struggled with their own medical challenges, they fought for complete health care support for all hibakusha—no matter what their nationality, health status, or distance from the hypocenter. They believed that full health care coverage and monetary compensation would signify the Japanese government’s resounding acknowledgment of the terrifying, invisible, and long-term realities of atomic bombs. They often linked their health care efforts with their fight to eradicate nuclear weapons within their lifetimes. In a speech at a 1980 rally, Yamaguchi declared, “Our demand for the immediate enactment of a law for relief of all Hibakusha is not only a Hibakusha demand, but also the demand of all people in Japan, and of the whole world, for ‘No More Hibakusha!’”

Over time, their activism resulted in multiple expansions of health care coverage to include previously denied hibakusha. Microcephaly was officially recognized as an atomic bomb–related disease, and later, compensation was granted to support microcephalic survivors’ nonmedical living expenses. The distance from the hypocenter was increased for special cases based on physical examinations. New diseases were approved for coverage, and limited support was provided for nursing care, burials, and health maintenance and living allowances for survivors with particularly severe radiation-related illnesses. Still, both within and beyond Japan’s borders, government support came too late for many survivors, including those who died before their cancers or other illnesses were designated as radiation-related conditions, and those who found it impossible to find two people to verify their location at the time of the bombing. Many survivors—in some cases even those with cancer—never applied out of continuing fear that self-identifying as hibakusha would result in discrimination for themselves or their children.

For his part, Taniguchi spent his days off from work helping hibakusha understand the law, assemble the required documentation, and complete their applications for health care handbooks. He did this even though he didn’t need coverage for himself. His now-privatized company, Dendenkousha (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation), provided medical benefits to employees who were injured while working at the time of the bombing. To receive his company benefits, however, Taniguchi had to prove that his injuries had resulted from the bomb, so he returned to Omura National Hospital to try to find his medical records. After a long search with the help of hospital staff, Taniguchi entered a storage area and found a single file containing his records—more than forty pages of notes by his Omura doctors and nurses, all in German (the language used in Japan at the time for medical terminology). Each entry detailed his medical condition, test results, and treatments. Scattered line drawings of his body showed the locations of his burns and the holes in his chest.

Taniguchi’s was the only hibakusha medical record there. Rumors had circulated that other hibakusha records had been burned or relocated somewhere in Japan, but no one could say for sure what had actually happened to them. Taniguchi is convinced that the U.S. government took them either to the ABCC or back to the United States, and that his record was left behind only because he had still been in the hospital at the time. Taniguchi took photographs of his wounds, attached them to a photocopy of his Oˉmura medical record, and submitted them to Dendenkousha. He was approved for benefits, which meant that all of his examinations, surgeries, and treatment for atomic bomb–related injuries and illnesses were paid for by his company until his retirement.

Taniguchi was fortunate to have coverage, because his medical needs persisted, requiring regular trips to the hospital for blood tests and multiple surgeries. In 1960, doctors extracted an intensely painful skin cancer growth on his back, and for a while his pain diminished. A year later, at the invitation of East Germany, he traveled to Berlin for surgery on his left elbow to increase mobility of his arm. While he was there, Taniguchi spoke publicly about his experiences and showed his audience a collection of postbomb photographs. After three months, he was diagnosed with a chronic blood disorder and surgery was deemed impossible. Taniguchi returned home, his condition unchanged.

A new, much tougher and larger growth appeared on his back in 1965, and Taniguchi began losing strength. “It always felt like I was lying on a soft futon that had a rock in it,” he remembered. “It was so hard that when a surgical knife was put to it, it dulled the blade to the point that it couldn’t cut anymore.” After numerous surgeries, the tumor was finally removed, but Taniguchi was unable to sustain his job delivering telegrams, so he was transferred to an office job within the company. Every summer, he felt a constant dull pain in his back, “a terrible heaviness,” he said. Every winter he was perpetually cold because his body could not retain warmth. He remained extremely thin because he could eat only small amounts of food; anything more triggered a painful whole-body sensation—the feeling that the thin, tight skin covering his wounds was going to split open.

____

When Do-oh left Nagasaki in 1956, she had willed herself a new life, far removed from her home, her family, and her city’s nuclear devastation. In order to succeed, the twenty-six-year-old chose to conceal her hibakusha status. She was again in hiding, but this time, Do-oh drew on her sense of purpose to construct a new and powerful identity that allowed her to overcome, at least in part, the harsh memories of her adolescence.

After a thirty-six-hour train trip, Do-oh had arrived in Tokyo and proceeded to a tiny, two-hundred-square-foot apartment with no kitchen that her company, Utena, had located for her. She purchased a rice cooker, a bowl, and chopsticks—and to store her food, she carried home two apple crates from a neighborhood vendor. Her apartment was close enough to Utena’s offices that she could walk to work—and on her first day, Do-oh had passed through the company’s large main gate, straightened her posture, and directed herself to her assigned division of six hundred low-level workers. She felt she had to work twice as hard as others to overcome her handicap. “Then I could be like other people,” she thought. “I worked like crazy. . . . I asked them to give me all the work no one else wanted to do.”

At home, Do-oh made her own clothing—sophisticated and chic. She wrote letters to her family, and once a year, she made the long trip home to see them. Her father often teased her, saying that he’d always wished she had been a boy—meaning, perhaps, that she had a strong personality and he would have liked to banter with her about things he wouldn’t otherwise have talked about with women. When he died in 1961, Do-oh paused beside his coffin. “I felt that life is very fragile,” she recalled. “People are born alone and die alone.”

She returned to Tokyo and continued to take on hard tasks, living out an internal crusade to demonstrate what she could achieve. Her efforts were rewarded with promotions. When she was transferred into the public relations department, Do-oh’s campaign region included nearly all of the main island of Honshu north of Tokyo, requiring that she travel by train and bus to villages so remote that she was surprised any cosmetics store would even exist there.

Every August, national media coverage of atomic bomb commemorations that often focused on hibakusha disabilities and radiation-related diseases reinforced Do-oh’s vow of secrecy about her past. She always wore long sleeves in public to hide her scarred arms. To avoid any questions about her health, she tried never to miss work, even when she was ill—a choice that resulted in her collapsing from exhaustion and high fever nearly every New Year holiday. Sometimes she wanted to give up. “When I wavered in my determination to succeed, or when I had a hard time,” she remembered, “I reproached myself for this weakness. . . . I could not afford to spoil myself. These were battles against myself. I felt no regret afterwards because they helped me cultivate courage.”

Do-oh was in her midthirties—well past a Japanese woman’s typical marriageable age—when she was invited in 1965 to meet a potential husband, a man who worked for a stock market company. Until then, she had turned away from the idea of marriage, but at that moment, she was feeling tired and uneasy about her future. She agreed to the meeting.

At first glance, Do-oh liked how the man looked. He made a strong initial impression. He asked her where she was from.

“Nagasaki,” she answered, knowing what his next question would be.

“Did you experience the bomb?”

Do-oh paused. She did not want to marry someone by lying. “Yes,” she answered, “hibaku shimashita [I experienced the bomb].”

A tension rose between them, and Do-oh sensed that this man did not want to marry a hibakusha. To preempt what she anticipated as his rejection, Do-oh turned down further discussions with him and quietly resolved never to marry. As she grew older, she reflected on the unconscious influences that guided her to this significant decision: She had feared having a deformed child, she explained—and at a very personal level, her haunting memories, sense of interior contamination, and pressing guilt for stepping over people’s bodies in the Mitsubishi factory had diminished her sense of confidence with people outside of work.

Letting go of the possibility of marriage and children, Do-oh adjusted to what she called her “good life.” She worked long hours—and in a workplace filled with beautiful women, she established a strong personal image of elegance and style. She searched for her own life mission that could fill the void of never becoming a mother and found renewed purpose in striving to fulfill her maximum potential. “If I was a flower that couldn’t bloom,” she thought, “then at least I wanted to bloom in my mind. At least I wanted to have a brilliant mind.”

After seventeen years at Utena, in 1973, forty-three-year-old Do-oh became the first woman executive in the company’s sixty-year history—a remarkable feat by any account, but particularly in a culture of male dominance in which only an estimated 8 percent of the entire female workforce in Japan held professional or managerial positions. Within the huge Japanese cosmetics industry, there were only three women executives: one at Shiseido, one at Kanebo, and Do-oh at Utena. The story of her promotion appeared in national newspapers and magazines, and she was interviewed for television newscasts. In her new position directing a staff of 350 and supervising the training of new employees, Do-oh was able to purchase a small house in an area beyond central Tokyo, near a station that allowed her to take a limited express train to and from work each day. “It was my small castle,” she remembered, “proof of my life and the results of my efforts. . . . I was thankful for this reward.”

In private, Do-oh composed haiku and tanka, developing a practice of reflection that allowed her to dwell on the world around her with a sense of wonder. One evening, on her way home from a business meeting in Hokkaido, she peered out the window of the plane. The sky was dull and overcast—“a field of black clouds,” Do-oh called it. When she looked up, however, the sky above her was clear and blue, with scattered white clouds tinged with red and orange as they reflected the setting sun. “It was so beautiful that I cried,” she remembered. “That glorious world moved me.” Although she did not believe in God, she imagined that perhaps there did exist “a refuge or heaven beyond my view.” In that moment, Do-oh relaxed, temporarily, from the constant strain of proving herself to the world.

____

By the early 1960s, many of the Urakami Valley’s obvious signs of atomic destruction had faded. The mountains to the east and west that were stripped of vegetation and houses nearly twenty years earlier were green and lush, with new residences scattered all around. Students filled the restored classrooms at Shiroyama and Yamazato elementary schools, and new, wider roads accommodated increased automobile traffic. Hypocenter Park was enlarged and lined with Japanese cedars, and in one corner stood the last remaining sections of the crushed brick wall and original bell tower of Urakami Church. Against the protests of Catholic and other hibakusha organizations that sought to preserve the church ruins as a symbol of the destroyed city, Nagasaki officials had ordered the wreckage to be torn down. In its place northeast of the hypocenter stood a new reinforced concrete church with two ninety-five-foot-high bell towers—sixteen feet higher than the former structure—paid for by donations from Japanese and U.S. Catholic groups. In 1962, the church was consecrated as a cathedral and became the seat of the bishop for the Archdiocese of Nagasaki—although due to a shortage of funds, the cathedral’s stained-glass windows were not yet installed, and the walls and ceilings remained unfinished.

Unlike those of his city, Yoshida’s visible atomic bomb injuries did not fade with time. He had undergone multiple surgeries on his mouth intended to increase his ability to eat, but he still could not open it wide enough for anything but tiny pieces of food. He had held buckets of sand for thirteen years to straighten his curled fingers, but his hands still cramped frequently and he couldn’t control his fingers curling back into fists. The flesh on the tops of his hands bulged and cracked each winter, causing extreme pain. His facial disfigurement elicited constant stares.

After years of anguish and constant reminders of his hibakusha identity, in the early 1960s, Yoshida made a choice to be happy. He realized that no matter how much he worried and fretted, he could never erase the experience of nuclear war or get back the face and body he used to have. “I resolved to make the best of the situation,” he explained. Turning away from the deep sense of gloom that had pervaded his thoughts since the bombing, he began identifying positive aspects to his life, starting with the many people who had helped him over the years even as they, too, had suffered.

Every morning, Yoshida applied medical ointment to the transplanted skin on his face and headed to work at the wholesale food company. Over time, he began stepping out of the safety of the warehouse and visiting small shops to take their orders. He played on his company’s early morning baseball team and gained a reputation as a fast runner and a strong hitter; at one point—even with the limitations of his swing because of his rib injuries—Yoshida had the highest batting average on the team. At his company’s family sports days, he ran three-legged races with his coworkers. In early acts of public activism, he served as secretary-general of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Youth Association and was one of thirty-seven hibakusha who contributed to its testimony collection, Mou, iya da! [We’ve Had Enough!]. People thought of him as very akarui (bright).

Yoshida gradually became comfortable talking with everyone around him, and he was known for his congeniality and lifelong friendships. He was stubborn, judgmental, and bossy—he hated arrogance, unions, and hibakusha who talked about their political views—and his vocal criticism of others often challenged or embarrassed his family and friends. But at parties, he drank beer and sake and entertained people with bad puns and imitations of famous singers. Photographs show a dapper young man looking straight into the camera—very cool—and in a radical change from earlier years when girls had cried at the sight of him, Yoshida became extremely popular among many young women, none of whom seemed at all concerned by his scarred face and black ear patch.

Even with his great popularity, Yoshida’s disfigurement impeded his chances to marry. When he was thirty, his mother made a call on his behalf to a distant village outside of Nagasaki to discuss his possible marriage to her sister-in-law’s daughter, Sachiko. Yoshida was delighted, especially because Sachiko had already seen a photo of him, so he knew that she wouldn’t be shocked when they met. They went on one date—to a movie—but Yoshida had already made up his mind: “I asked her if she wanted to marry me and she said she would. I was pretty lucky!”

They married in 1962. In their early years together, they lived with Yoshida’s mother, who often criticized Sachiko, causing strain in their marriage because Yoshida often took his mother’s side—perhaps out of filial loyalty, and also because he felt he owed his mother his life.

In the months and years that followed, Yoshida and Sachiko spoke only once about his experiences on the day of the bombing. Many years later, she told him that though they had been sleeping in the same bed every night, in those early days of their marriage she hadn’t been able to look at his face because of his injuries. “I cried,” Yoshida remembered. “I had a face that my own wife couldn’t look at.” Eventually, though, he learned to shrug it off. “No matter what I do, even if I cry or scream, my face won’t get better,” he said. “And compared to back then, I think I became a really good-looking guy! I think whoever tries to laugh at himself first will win the game. Yes. That’s why I’m always smiling.”

When his two sons, Naoji and Tomoji, were young, Yoshida spent as much time as he could with them, playing catch, going swimming, and taking them everywhere he went on his days off. Contrary to the choices of many hibakusha parents, he told his sons about his atomic bomb experiences as soon as he thought they were old enough to understand. Over and over, he taught them not to hide from the truth if anyone asked what had happened to him.

But the boys didn’t oblige. Every time they brought friends home, one child or another would look at Yoshida and blurt out, “Your father has a black face!”—and Naoji and Tomoji would fall silent.

“My sons didn’t say anything,” Yoshida said. “So I would explain to the children what had happened to me. I showed them a photograph of myself from elementary school, before I was injured, to help them understand.”

One day at Tomoji’s school, everything changed. During a break in the all-school sports day, the children in Tomoji’s class were sitting with their parents in a circle on the ground eating lunch together, when some of the children began staring at Yoshida. One boy called out to Tomoji, “Tomo-chan! Your father has an awful face, huh!”

Oh, my God! Yoshida thought. It would have been better if I hadn’t come!

But this time, Tomoji spoke up for his father. “My daddy was hurt by the atomic bomb,” he told his friend. “It’s nothing scary!”

“I felt so grateful to my son,” Yoshida recalled, recounting every detail of that day and every word his son uttered on his behalf.

“I was saved,” he said. “I was saved by my son’s words.”