CHAPTER 8

AGAINST FORGETTING

Forty-one-year-old Taniguchi was glancing through the pages of a summer 1970 Asahi Graph when suddenly he stopped and fixated on a two-page color photograph of himself from 1946. This was the magazine’s special edition commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the atomic bombings, and there he was, lying facedown on a bed inside Omura National Hospital, his back and arms raw and infected, his shorn head resting against crumpled bedsheets, and the lower half of his face darkened in shadow. He leaned in closer to read the tiny print of the photo’s caption. It described where the boy in the photo had been at the time of the bombing and informed readers that despite the severity of his injuries, he had not only survived but was also now married with two children. Visceral anguish coursed through Taniguchi’s body. For months, he could not shake the impact of seeing that amplified photo or the memories it brought back of unrelenting pain every moment of every day for more than three years.

Remarkably, this and other color photos featured in Asahi Graph’s 1970 special edition were the first color photographs of postbomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki ever seen in Japan. Asahi Graph had gained access to them as the result of one of several rigorous new campaigns by a small number of hibakusha activists to reclaim postbomb film footage, photographs, autopsy specimens, and medical records still held in the United States. Over the next two decades, as the Showa era came to a close and the twentieth century neared its end, the number of Nagasaki hibakusha who began writing their stories and speaking about their experiences surged. At the same time, a new battle erupted in the United States over how the atomic bombings would be remembered and how—or if—the experiences of hibakusha would become part of the United States’ historical narrative. It was during this time that Wada, Yoshida, Do-oh, and Nagano would find their public voices and begin speaking out.

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In their first act of reclaiming their histories, hibakusha activists petitioned the United States for the return of black-and-white 35 mm film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. These films—nineteen reels shot and edited by Japanese filmmakers—had been shipped to the United States and warehoused at military facilities for more than twenty years. After numerous Japanese appeals to the United Nations, the National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. ambassador to Japan, in 1967, the United States finally sent copies of the footage back to Japan.

The earliest moving images of the aftermath of the atomic bombings had at last come home. Ten of the nineteen reels of edited film (approximately eighty-five minutes in total) contained grainy but powerful footage of Nagasaki in late 1945 and early 1946, including twisted steel girders of collapsed factories, bent smokestacks, the ruins of Urakami Church, and demolished bridges, schools, and homes. Human death, injury, and radiation-related illness were only hinted at in images of human skulls and bones in the ruins, adults and young children lying on mats inside Shinkozen Elementary School being treated for burns across their bodies and faces, a woman with the patterns of her kimono fabric burned into the skin on her shoulders and back.

Much of the reclaimed footage aired on Japanese television in 1968, but prior to the broadcast, the Japanese government removed all evidence of human suffering. Officials claimed to have made this choice out of respect for the survivors and their families, but outraged activists believed the cuts were made to minimize the potential negative impact on Japan’s economic and military relationship with the United States. In either case, this erasure of graphic images triggered memories of postwar censorship and sparked demands for the film to be rebroadcast in its entirety. The government refused, even after the twelve surviving hibakusha whose images appeared in the film gave written permission for their images to be aired.

Ironically, black-and-white footage showing human suffering was seen in the United States before it finally aired in Japan. Erik Barnouw, a film professor at Columbia University, had heard about the controversy from a Japanese colleague and decided to obtain a copy of the original silent footage from the National Archives. He was so moved by what he saw and distressed at the secrecy and censorship surrounding the film that he produced a sixteen-minute English-language documentary titled Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945. The film premiered in early 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, followed by a national broadcast on public television in August and airings in Canada and Europe. Later that year, Japanese public television bought the rights and aired the film in Japan, eliciting a huge public response—though Watanabe Chieko noted that “without the sounds of screaming voices,” the terror of the bombing was greatly diminished.

As far as the Japanese knew, all U.S.-held postbomb footage was now back in Japan, including the short clips of color footage from which Asahi Graph created the still photographs of Taniguchi and others for its twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Eight years later, however, Taniguchi’s photo and a series of serendipitous events led to the discovery of an additional ninety thousand feet of USSBS color footage of postbomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A group of Japanese antinuclear activists led by Iwakura Tsutomu had spent years amassing thousands of photographs of the postbomb cities from individuals and collections across Japan, and in 1978, they selected several hundred for publication in Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction. The first color photo to appear in the book was an image of Taniguchi’s burned back, again enlarged and spread across two pages. Later that year, Iwakura and his group mounted a selection of the book’s photos, including Taniguchi’s, and took them to New York City for an outdoor exhibit several blocks from the United Nations headquarters. American passersby frequently admonished the Japanese team to “remember Pearl Harbor.” Former lieutenant Herbert Sussan, who had filmed Taniguchi in 1945 as part of the USSBS team, saw the exhibit. Astounded to set eyes on the photograph of young Taniguchi at Omura National Hospital, Sussan quickly turned to Iwakura—and as he told the story of his connection to the photo, Sussan unwittingly revealed the existence of the full USSBS color footage.

The original film was now declassified and stored at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, and Iwakura’s team was able to obtain permission to purchase a copy. Due to the film’s length, however, the cost was exorbitant, so they returned to Japan and launched a nationwide fund-raising campaign. After an estimated three hundred thousand individual Japanese donors contributed small amounts totaling over $100,000, the team was able to purchase the film. In 1981, thirty-six years after the bombings, eighty-one reels of postwar color footage taken by American USSBS filmmakers were shipped back to Japan. At least eighteen reels included color footage of postbomb Nagasaki, far more intense and evocative than their black-and-white counterparts.

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Another emotional controversy for hibakusha activists was the United States’ postwar seizure and control of hibakusha autopsy specimens. It was commonly known by Japanese scientists that both in the fall of 1945 and for more than twenty years after 1948, U.S. researchers and ABCC scientists had surgically removed the body parts of deceased adults, children, infants, and miscarried fetuses. The specimens had been stored in five-gallon jars of formaldehyde solution or cut into smaller segments for preservation in blocks of paraffin wax. These, along with postmortem records, photographs, and diseased tissue slides, had been shipped to the United States, where they were cataloged and warehoused in an atomic bomb–proof archive outside Washington, D.C., for sole use by the U.S. military.

Impassioned negotiations for their return took place in two parts: Starting in the early 1960s, activists campaigned for the return of ABCC specimens that had been collected and shipped to the United States after 1948. The ABCC quickly ordered the repatriation of these materials to quell negative public relations generated by the controversy and also to alleviate the agency’s ongoing budget pressures by eliminating the need to store the materials in the United States. By 1969, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology had dispatched fifty-six shipments containing a total of twenty-two thousand specimens, including whole or partial brains, hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, eyes, and other organs. In Nagasaki, the specimens were stored at Nagasaki University School of Medicine.

Claiming they were still classified materials, the United States refused to return the other collection of body parts and specimens, amassed in the fall of 1945 by U.S. and Japanese teams studying the effects of the atomic bombings. These specimens became a bargaining tool in an early 1970s negotiation between Japan and the United States that provided for their repatriation in exchange for Japan taking over majority leadership of and greater financial responsibility for the ABCC. The final agreement, overseen by Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei and U.S. president Richard Nixon, allowed both nations to achieve their goals: For the United States, the ABCC became a new private, nonprofit foundation under Japanese law, renamed the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF). Equally funded by both countries, the RERF carried forward all studies initiated by the ABCC. In turn, the Japanese won the right to elect a Japanese physician as the first chairman of the RERF’s new binational board, and Japanese scientists would now share in the design and implementation of the agency’s research. Twenty-eight years after the bombing, Japan had gained significant control of the medical research conducted on survivors’ bodies, allowing the RERF the opportunity to shed much of its negative reputation among survivors. Once the agreement was finalized in 1973, all remaining hibakusha body parts held in the United States were sent back to Japan. Combined with the earlier shipments, a total of more than forty-five thousand pathology specimens, slides, medical reports, and related photographs were repatriated to the cities where the men, women, and children from whom they were seized had died. For hibakusha, this meant that the body parts and records of their deceased family members were finally where they belonged.

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In 1970—the same year Taniguchi’s photo appeared in Asahi Graph—forty-one-year-old Uchida Tsukasa walked through Hypocenter Park, now hidden from the main thoroughfare by a row of trees. A short distance away was the site of his childhood home, where Uchida’s father and three siblings had been incinerated in the nuclear blast. Uchida was sixteen then; after the war, he and his mother had lived in the ashes and rubble of their former home, where he had collected shards of burned roof tiles and kept them in a box that he still had twenty-five years later.

Uchida stood in front of the hypocenter memorial, haunted by the invisibility of his former life. The hard-fought repatriation of postbomb film footage, color photographs, and hibakusha body parts provided critical documentation of the bomb’s physical destruction and internal decimation to people’s bodies. But what about his neighborhood—Matsuyama-machi—in the heart of the Urakami Valley, directly below the bomb’s blast point? What about the estimated three hundred households and 1,865 people here who had been in their homes and workplaces, approximately 90 percent of whom died? Who were they, what kinds of lives had they led, and who would memorialize them and the parts of the city that had been instantly annihilated when the bomb detonated in the sky above them?

Fueled by persistent sadness and outrage, Uchida launched a “restoration” project that called on survivors’ memories to re-create the former layout of Matsuyama-machi and collect data on the people who had died. It was Uchida’s hope that instead of disappearing “into the darkness of history,” each individual adult and child could be known and remembered. His plan captured the community’s attention, and within months, the Association for the Restoration of the Atomic-Bombed Matsuyama-machi Neighborhood was formally organized. Chaired by Uchida and supported by Dr. Akizuki, Dr. Shirabe, and others, the group set out to create a map of every street, building, family, and individual who had lived in the area prior to the bombing.

Neighborhood members scoured cemeteries and examined gravestones to record the names of those who died on the day of the bombing and immediately after. Teams of volunteers interviewed or sent out letters to every survivor they knew and every survivor those survivors knew, asking them to draw detailed maps of their former streets, list the names and causes of deaths of their family members, and document everything they knew about the fates of anyone else in the area. With the support of local and national media coverage, responses poured in from thousands of survivors and family members of deceased hibakusha in Nagasaki and across the nation. Uchida and his colleagues collected and cross-checked the data. One house, family, shop, and ration station at a time, they filled in a comprehensive map of Matsuyama-machi, rendering back into historical existence the immediate hypocenter area and nearly all of the people who had lived and worked there.

The project quickly expanded to include all neighborhoods within two kilometers (1.25 miles) of the hypocenter—and in 1971, the city of Nagasaki established a municipal office to promote and oversee survey activities throughout the Urakami Valley. Dr. Akizuki cofounded the Yamazato-machi Recollection Committee where his hospital stood, an area particularly difficult to document because of the Korean laborers and medical school students who had lived in temporary housing there. Despite added challenges, including destroyed school registrations and employment records and a lack of accurate data on certain buildings and families, by 1975, the average completion rate for each neighborhood was 88 percent. In total, nearly ten thousand households were added to the prebomb maps, and 37,512 men, women, and children who had lived in them were reliably verified. Dr. Shirabe, now retired, helped collect, edit, and publish final reports on several of the neighborhoods’ efforts. Fukahori Yoshitoshi, a medical administrator at Dr. Akizuki’s St. Francis Hospital, collected families’ personal photos of their pre- and postbomb neighborhoods to be included in the public records. By the project’s conclusion in 1976, Uchida and his teams had fulfilled a strong sense of duty to both the deceased and the living by restoring the memory of their neighborhoods. Uchida fervently hoped that the efforts of so many people would help clarify “the true extent of the atomic bomb experience.”

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While the mapping project was under way, Dr. Akizuki came to believe that the hibakusha reclamation movement would remain unfinished until as many survivors as possible shared their individual stories and people throughout the world were able to grasp the human experience of nuclear war. He had already written significant segments of his own story, prompted by a visit in 1961 from a Japanese novelist who asked Akizuki what the bombing had been like. “Sixteen years after the bombing,” Akizuki remembered, “this was the first time someone had asked me about the details of my experience.” Instead of showing the writer his notes on the bombing and its aftermath, Akizuki described what it was like to be an atomic bomb physician who remained physically and mentally depleted—“like a living fossil who can’t forget the past . . . who had never been able to mentally recover from witnessing hell.”

From that day forward, Akizuki felt responsible for writing about his experiences and the people who died at his hospital and neighboring districts. Due to poor health and his daily work as a physician and hospital director, it took him three years to complete his first memoir, Nagasaki genbaku ki: Hibaku ishi no shogen [The Nagasaki Bombing: A Surviving Doctor’s Testimony], detailing the first two months of his postbomb life.

But Akizuki knew that this book and those by other hibakusha told only a tiny portion of what had happened on the day of the bombing and in the years that followed. Standing at a window of St. Francis Hospital, he would stare out at the Urakami Valley and see what he described as “a double image”—the rebuilt, modernized quadrant of his city, overlaid by images of blackened bodies scattered everywhere. So many people had died. No one knew their stories. As time and Japan’s economic advances erased all signs of the war, hibakusha stories were disappearing—forgotten as if they didn’t matter. By this time, most people in Japan spoke about the atomic bomb only around the anniversaries of the bombings—a phenomenon one hibakusha likened to goldfish sellers who by tradition peddled their fish only during the summer. Many Japanese misperceived the effects of the atomic bombings to be no different from conventional bombings. At a 1968 atomic bomb exhibit in Tokyo, Dr. Akizuki was further dismayed when he observed that Hiroshima had become such a singular symbol of the atomic bombings that few people were familiar with Nagasaki’s story. Compared with the numerous books about Hiroshima, not one about Nagasaki was displayed. Back home, his wife, Sugako, remembered him repeatedly saying, “It’s not good. It’s not good.”

To generate an expanded written record of the Nagasaki hibakusha experience, Akizuki and several of his colleagues established the Nagasaki Testimonial Society in 1969. By this time, many hibakusha had felt discouraged and left Japan’s antinuclear movement due to political infighting between activist groups that had split over ideological differences as Japan’s political parties had aligned themselves with Soviet or U.S. interests. Other hibakusha had withdrawn from the movement because they felt some groups were manipulating their experiences for political gain. In his desire to create a new organization with a united and inclusive stance, Dr. Akizuki invited all hibakusha to tell their stories, regardless of their political affiliations or engagement with the antinuclear movement. Akizuki envisioned that the collective voices of a hundred thousand survivors could lead to the worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons, and he entreated Nagasaki survivors to “speak out about the realities of being a hibakusha” on behalf of all humanity.

Hundreds of hibakusha responded to his initial call. They scribed their memories to honor their loved ones, articulate their fears about their own futures, promote their hopes for peace, or simply because they were aging and wanted the next generation to know the truths that only they could tell. Some revealed their hibakusha status for the first time in order to augment the government’s incomplete surveys of survivors’ conditions. Others wrote as a personal protest against Japan’s reluctance, as a U.S. ally, to condemn the atomic bombings. For others, writing their stories was a way to counteract a gradual renewal of militaristic nationalism in Japan, exemplified by incidents of textbook censorship that minimized information or images of the negative impact of war, including the horrors of the atomic bombings. Akizuki’s colleague Yamada Kan, an outspoken critic of Dr. Nagai—whom he called the “uninvited representative” of the Nagasaki survivor community—supported the testimony movement in part to collect enough non-Catholic survivors’ stories to outweigh Nagai’s pervasive message that Nagasaki hibakusha were spiritual martyrs.

In 1969, as the Vietnam War raged in Southeast Asia, the Nagasaki Testimonial Society published its first annual volume of Nagasaki no shogen [Testimonies of Nagasaki]. For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the bombing the following year, the journal featured Taniguchi’s color photo on its cover. By 1971, Testimonies of Nagasaki had more than tripled in size. Sugako often prepared dinner for Akizuki and the editorial team as they worked late into the night at the Akizukis’ home. Over a thousand radio and television broadcasts of hibakusha stories followed, as did numerous other testimony collections, including those by members of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Youth Association, Nagasaki hibakusha teachers’ associations, and the Nagasaki Women’s Society. Local factory workers circulated their own journals of testimonies, and Nagasaki poets published the magazine Hobo [Scorched People].

To further the reclamation of hibakusha materials still held in the United States, the physically weak Akizuki and his wife joined a small team of Hiroshima and Nagasaki officials traveling to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to search for USSBS and other U.S. postwar records on the atomic bombings. After ten days, the group carried home photocopies of the documents they had located; after translating them into Japanese, they were able to read the contents of some of the detailed USSBS reports for the first time and learn how the United States had documented the effects of its air attacks on Japan. Disturbed by the reports’ cold, technical details of U.S. incendiary and atomic bomb strategies and their dearth of information relating to human suffering, Dr. Akizuki deepened his commitment to the testimony movement to support a more complete historical record. Over the next decade, the Nagasaki Testimonial Society published ten volumes of Testimonies of Nagasaki, including personal narratives by Korean survivors and former Allied prisoners of war. Akizuki published his second book, Shi no doshinen [Concentric Circles of Death], as well as a third memoir in 1975. With the support of numerous individuals and organizations, the Nagasaki Testimonial Society had succeeded in creating a comprehensive written record of survivors’ experiences. This, Dr. Akizuki felt, was why God had allowed him to live.

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Akizuki’s passionate yearning for visibility and greater public understanding was a reflection of how invisible hibakusha still remained in the public eye, both domestically and overseas. Behind the veil of Japan’s economic recovery, many hibakusha in the 1970s still lived in poverty and experienced multiple debilitating medical conditions. More than 10 percent of all survivors were unemployed, a rate 70 percent higher than non-hibakusha. Those with low or no incomes led particularly precarious lives, especially those who were ill and elderly survivors who lived alone and struggled to feed and bathe themselves. In utero–exposed children were now thirty years old; those with milder symptoms worked at odd jobs, but those unable to function independently lived in mental institutions, separated from their families. Thyroid, breast, and lung cancer rates had peaked, but stomach and colon cancer rates for hibakusha remained high, as did leukemia, with reported cases of multiple deaths within the same family. Unexplained illnesses or deaths of hibakusha and their children kept many hibakusha on edge about long-term radiation effects. Those with visible injuries and scars were often turned away from public baths. For younger survivors now in their forties, junior and senior high school class reunions were sad reminders of how many more friends died each year.

Hibakusha pressed forward with little psychological support; Japanese psychologists and social workers were not yet experienced in the diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, and hibakusha health care benefits did not cover the atomic bombings’ psychological effects. Many survivors still flinched at a sudden flash of light or when they heard the sounds of fireworks, sirens, or airplanes flying overhead. Others experienced recurring nightmares that triggered memories of the nuclear attack and its aftermath. One woman clung to the memory of her husband by keeping the blood- and oil-stained gloves he had worn at the time of the bombing on the family altar in her home. Aging parents of in utero–exposed children, often impoverished and struggling with their own illnesses, feared for their children’s futures. In the words of one father, “I can’t close my eyes as long as this child is alive.”

But Japan was now a Westernized nation with enviable economic growth, intent on leaving its past behind. Even after Nagasaki’s successful reclamation and testimony movements, and even after the city produced a documentary film using the returned black-and-white footage and over 1.2 million people visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum in 1975 alone, survivors’ current conditions remained at best at the periphery of public awareness. In other countries as well, few people appreciated the long-term consequences of the atomic bombings. A group of foreign mayors visiting Nagasaki for the thirtieth anniversary ceremonies revealed their lack of understanding when they visited a photo exhibition about the bombing: Stunned by the images before them, some of them asked the exhibition curators if the photographs were real.

In the United States, both ignorance of the effects of the bombings and celebration of the bombs’ use remained common—and nuclear weapons, now far more powerful than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were generally perceived as an inevitable reality. Civil defense campaigns taught that with a combination of community preparedness and individual integrity, nuclear attacks were survivable—a message unsupported by hibakusha narratives, which were rarely heard. In 1976, a U.S. group called the Confederate Air Force (CAF) performed an air show in Texas before an audience of more than forty thousand people. In the finale, a tribute to those who brought the Pacific War to its close, Paul Tibbets—the lead pilot of the Hiroshima mission—flew a B-29 overhead. As the narrator’s voice over loudspeakers proclaimed that the bomb had ended “some of the darkest days of America’s history,” a device detonated on the ground beneath the plane to generate a rising mushroom cloud. When news of the air show reached Japan, both hibakusha leaders and the Japanese government vehemently protested. U.S. officials formally apologized to Japan, and the CAF canceled this portion of the show at future sites. Neither U.S. newspaper accounts of the controversy nor Tibbets himself acknowledged that the simulated bombing omitted the mass destruction and grotesque deaths and injuries suffered by the men, women, and children beneath the atomic clouds.

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Against this backdrop of inadvertent ignorance and intentional minimization, hibakusha activists pushed to find new ways to awaken the world to the true impact of nuclear weapons. Locally, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum expanded its outreach education programs, and the city published a comprehensive, five-volume Nagasaki genbaku sensaishi [Records of the Nagasaki Atomic Bombing and Wartime Damage], a detailed narrative of the immediate destruction, deaths, injuries, and long-term effects of survivors in their city. With the support of the Science Council of Japan and consultants including doctors Akizuki and Shirabe, a team of thirty-four Japanese scientists and scholars collaborated to create the meticulously researched 504-page Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, including hundreds of figures, photographs, and tables. Published in 1981 in Tokyo, New York, and London, copies of the English edition were sent to the heads of state of every nuclear-armed country as well as to the secretary-general and executive members of the United Nations, representatives from each UN member nation, and leading health and antinuclear organizations around the world. Taniguchi, Yamaguchi, and other representatives of local and national hibakusha organizations spoke out across Japan for the abolition of nuclear weapons. They also published numerous essays and articles, were interviewed by the foreign press, and appeared in documentary films about the bombings. Taniguchi often took off his shirt to reveal his present-day scars, providing images that filmmakers juxtaposed with photographs and footage of his back in the first months after the bombing.

Activists pressed to magnify their antinuclear influence internationally. In 1977, more than four hundred Japanese and over seventy delegates from approximately twenty countries gathered in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo to unify and focus their efforts in advance of the first UN Special Session on Disarmament. One of their key strategies was to effectively illuminate the “irrationality” of atomic bomb development with survivors’ personal stories, scientific evidence on how the bombs destroyed human life, and statements of support by political and military leaders throughout the world. They also drafted a resolution to make the word hibakusha an internationally recognized term. Taniguchi and hibakusha activist Watanabe Chieko flew to Geneva in 1978 to address the International NGO Conference on Disarmament—“the first time,” Watanabe remembered, “that atomic bomb survivors had spoken in person on the international political stage.” Later that year, five hundred members of the Japanese delegation flew to New York to formally petition the United Nations to lead the world in the abolition of nuclear weapons. The delegation’s spirits were buoyed when they read the UN’s official post-session declaration, which echoed their deepest wishes for international understanding of the dangers of nuclear weapons and appealed for their total elimination.

Despite his chronic medical problems—or perhaps because of them—Taniguchi always showed up wherever he was needed in the fight to abolish nuclear weapons and expand hibakusha health care eligibility and benefits. He had multiple surgeries on his back to cut out reappearing tumors, some of them precancerous, and to remove scar tissue in the middle of his spine in order to graft new skin in its place. Doctors recommended a complete replacement of the skin on his back, but Taniguchi hesitated, unsure he could survive such a radical procedure. “Scientific knowledge has progressed enough to develop highly sophisticated missiles,” he reflected with some bitterness, “but there is no cure for my illness.”

Between medical procedures, he traveled to antinuclear conferences across the world, chain-smoking his way to universities, churches, and local forums throughout Western Europe and in Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, China, and Korea. In North America, he traveled to Canada and nine U.S. cities, including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.—often appearing at numerous events in a single city. “Nuclear weapons do not protect mankind from danger,” Taniguchi told his audiences, rarely making eye contact. “They can never safely coexist with humans.” He acknowledged Japan’s wartime aggressions and the absence of his nation’s apology for initiating the war, then—with subdued but detectable anger—he condemned the atomic bombings as scientific experiments on tens of thousands of innocent people in residential areas for which Americans had not shown remorse. Taniguchi had long realized the power of his most famous photograph to communicate the impact of nuclear war, and despite his aversion to looking at it and reliving the suffering it held for him, he had the photo printed on his business cards, and he frequently projected it onto a screen above him or held an enlarged copy mounted on poster board as he spoke. “I am not a guinea pig,” he insisted. “You who have seen my body, don’t turn your face away. I want you to look again.”

Taniguchi did not deceive himself about the practical, large-scale impact of his efforts. Throughout the world, he faced constant reminders of how little—if anything—people knew about the atomic bombings and survivors’ ongoing conditions and how erroneous their limited knowledge often was. Despite numerous complex international treaties that limited certain kinds of nuclear tests and weapons development, reduced stockpiles, and defined the world’s nuclear weapons states as the United States, the Soviet Union, China, France, and the United Kingdom, Cold War tensions persisted. In the 1970s alone, 550 nuclear tests were conducted worldwide, and nuclear stockpiles increased by nearly 40 percent, heightening the threat of nuclear war, if only by the sheer number of weapons that existed. By 1981, the world’s stockpiles totaled 56,035 weapons, 98 percent of which belonged to the United States and the Soviet Union. Every time a nuclear weapons test occurred somewhere in the world, survivors in Nagasaki felt a rush of chilling memories mixed with anger and despair. “Clever and foolish people have not changed at all since that August 9,” Dr. Akizuki remarked, disparaging the countries who conducted these tests. “What is sad is that they are still making the same mistake more than a quarter of a century later.” What kept Taniguchi going, despite constant pain and the discouraging realities of nuclear weapons development, was his sense of responsibility to all those whose voices, unlike his, that had been silenced—“hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to say what I’m saying, but who died without being able to.”

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Pope John Paul II’s 1981 visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki raised international awareness of the two cities and invigorated Japan’s antinuclear movement. “War is the work of man,” the pope declared in Hiroshima, countering Dr. Nagai’s view that atomic bombs were acts of God. Men who wage war “can also successfully make peace.” At Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral, the pope ordained fifteen priests, including two Americans, and in an open-air stadium near the hypocenter, he conducted a public Mass for forty-five thousand people in the falling snow. He also spoke at Martyrs’ Hill, where twenty-six Christians were executed in 1597. During his visit to the Megumi no Oka (Hill of Grace) Nagasaki A-Bomb Home, a nursing home facility for atomic bomb survivors, many elderly survivors who had never spoken about their experiences began telling their stories. The pope challenged the status quo among nuclear powers by calling on them to take responsibility for their role in the threat of nuclear annihilation, and he encouraged Japan’s Catholic hierarchy to engage more actively in peace efforts. Although many Catholic hibakusha still hesitated to speak out, for others, the pope’s message transformed their visions of themselves from sacrificial lambs quietly suffering the will of God to potential contributors to the cause of global peace. For these men and women, speaking out became a realization of God’s wishes.

Inspired and bolstered by the pope’s words, Akizuki and his wife traveled to the United States again in 1982, with a Japanese delegation carrying a second petition to the United Nations. The petition, signed by 28,862,935 Japanese citizens, demanded that the United Nations heighten the priority of international antinuclear measures and tell the world the truth about the destruction and human suffering caused by nuclear weapons. In a preliminary meeting with UN officials prior to the General Assembly, Akizuki spoke in nervous English to communicate his antinuclear message. He and the Japanese contingent then led an estimated 750,000 peaceful antinuclear protesters from forty nations in a march through midtown Manhattan, culminating in a massive Central Park event featuring speeches by U.S. and international disarmament leaders and performances by Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, James Taylor, and Linda Ronstadt.

Yamaguchi had fallen sick and was unable to participate in the rally. The following day at the United Nations, however, he stood on the podium before more than sixty heads of state, foreign ministers, and delegation leaders, and gave what he felt was the speech of his lifetime. “What I wanted to do in my speech was to reproduce the horror of August 9th,” he recalled. “I wanted everybody to understand the hell we lived. That was all I was thinking of.” He held up a photograph of his keloid-scarred face. He asked listeners to look at it closely. He pleaded for the United Nations to lead the antinuclear effort to preserve the human race. “As long as I continue to live I will keep on appealing!” he boomed. “No more Hiroshima! No more Nagasaki! No more war! No more hibakusha!”

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“When you talk about it,” Wada would say, “it brings back memories. I couldn’t see the usefulness of speaking about what happened.” It was a sentiment in some part shared by Do-oh, Nagano, and Yoshida. Having raised their children, retired, and mourned the death of parents, grandparents, and siblings, the four of them would find deeply personal reasons to break their silence. In the 1980s and 1990s, their choices to become visible and speak out, and the sense of meaning and purpose that ensued, came to represent a rebirth of sorts—the beginning of a third life.

Wada decided to speak out in 1983, when he held his first grandchild in his arms. “I saw her little clenched fists, and I suddenly remembered the tiny baby I’d seen two days after the bombing, lying burned and blackened on the ground along the streetcar tracks. That baby’s fists were clenched in the same way. If an atomic bombing happened now, I thought, my granddaughter would end up like that baby. I had to start talking about it so that people don’t use such a bomb again.”

Wada sought out Dr. Akizuki, who, at sixty-seven, was retired as director of St. Francis Hospital in 1983 and had joined forces with Nagasaki’s mayor to found and direct the new and visionary Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace (NFPP). Established as a joint private and municipal organization, the NFPP’s many antinuclear projects include a hibakusha speakers’ bureau. Beyond survivors’ written testimonies, Akizuki believed that their oral testimonies could powerfully communicate the impact of the bomb to the people of Nagasaki, Japan, and the world as a means to achieve their common goal: the abolition of nuclear weapons and the protection of future life on earth.

The NFPP’s first cohort of speakers included Taniguchi and Uchida Tsukasa, the leader of the Urakami Valley mapping project. After Wada’s meeting with Dr. Akizuki, he joined them. When he told his atomic bomb stories to schoolchildren, he tried to always begin by joking with them to help them laugh and relax. Gradually, he would begin speaking about the war and the atomic bombing. “I suffered less hardship than others,” he explained, “so instead of talking about my personal experiences, I connect my stories to the photos the children have seen in the museum—and I insert jokes and puns when I see their faces are getting too serious. I do everything I can so the children will think about what is needed now for us not to repeat this horrible event.”

Wada retired in 1987 after forty-three years with the Nagasaki Streetcar Company. He and Hisako built a home in the northwestern hills of the Urakami Valley, and Wada finally realized his dream to build a memorial to the fallen streetcar drivers and conductors. He and his colleagues from work solicited support from the streetcar company and many individuals, and the city gave its permission to use a small spot of land in Hypocenter Park. Wada helped oversee the memorial’s design and construction using stones from a bombed-out station platform and actual sharin (wheels) from Nagasaki’s wartime streetcars. “When I stand here,” Wada said in front of the memorial, “I remember those times and cannot laugh or smile.”

 • • • 

In 1985, Yoshida was forced to retire early from the wholesale food company when he became ill with pancreatitis. His supervisor hadn’t wanted him to leave permanently, so after a ninety-day hospitalization, Yoshida proudly returned to his company on two occasions to help the staff accurately determine gross and net prices of their products. His semiretirement took an abrupt turn when his wife, Sachiko, developed breast cancer that metastasized to her bones. After completion of her cancer treatments, she contracted pneumonia in the hospital and wasn’t expected to survive. At her request, Yoshida brought Sachiko home, where he fed, bathed, and cared for her every day. “We thought she would be all right because she had the cancer removed,” he said. “I wanted to take her to Hokkaido. I told her I would take her there when she got better. But we were too optimistic. She never got better and died six months later. She was fifty-one.” Overwhelmed with grief, Yoshida nearly fainted at Sachiko’s funeral. Previously, he had rarely gone to his family gravesite; after her death, he went often.

Yoshida had known Taniguchi and Yamaguchi from the 1950s, when he was a part of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Youth Association. Though he had admired them as pioneers in speaking publicly, he—like Wada—had remained silent. “I was shy to be in front of people, especially women. Everyone looked at me like this”—he grimaced—“I didn’t like it.” One day, however, Yamaguchi approached Yoshida to ask if he could take his place at a talk he was scheduled to give to junior high school students visiting Nagasaki. Yoshida agreed—but when he arrived at the site and saw all the students staring at him, he immediately regretted it. Unraveled by the students’ fear of making eye contact with him and what he thought was their revulsion, Yoshida stood before them and told his story. Some students began crying, and when Yoshida looked up at them, he nearly burst into tears himself. Afterward, many of the children expressed their appreciation to him. Yoshida, however, was so shaken by the experience that he returned, momentarily, to silence.

But not for long. In his ongoing process of accepting his disfigurement, Yoshida again came to terms with the fact that he could not change what had happened to him or how he looked—and he decided no longer to let his shyness get in the way of speaking out for peace. In 1989, he joined the NFPP.

“This is what I say to children,” he explained. “‘Have you ever looked up heiwa [peace] in the dictionary?’ They never have! They’ve never looked it up because we don’t need to know what peace is during peacetime. ‘Let’s look it up together,’ I say to them. ‘Our greatest enemy is carelessness. We need to pay attention to peace.’”

 • • • 

“What will you do after your retirement?” Do-oh’s friend asked her in Tokyo, concerned that Do-oh, unlike most Japanese women, had no children to rely on as she got older. As usual, Do-oh saw things differently. “You are pessimistic about my life because you are seeing things in an ordinary pattern,” she told her friend. “I have no regrets about my life. With a lot of effort and strong will, I’ve acted on my beliefs every step of the way. I did not trouble others and I took care of myself. I am very proud of myself.”

After thirty years of arduous work and achievement, fifty-five-year-old Do-oh retired from Utena and decided to take a break and rest for a while. But instead of feeling happy, she felt lonely, “like I was being pushed to the far corner of society.” She worried that a radiation-related disease might be lying dormant in her body, ready to appear as she got weaker with age. Her sister suggested that she come back to live in Nagasaki, but Do-oh was hesitant. “Nagasaki was where I was allowed to live,” she remembered, “but Tokyo is where I lived.”

Still, Do-oh found herself walking alone through the stimulating streets of Shinjuku among “crowds of blank and silent people” she didn’t know. One day on the train, a woman standing isolated and lonely mirrored Do-oh’s fears for her own future. It was then that she decided to move back to Nagasaki while she still had strength.

She prepared to sell her house in Tokyo and began designing her future home in Nagasaki with a Japanese-style room for her aging mother that looked out over a yard. Her plans were interrupted, however, when her mother became ill and was hospitalized. Do-oh rushed to Nagasaki, where she helped care for her mother and encouraged her with the vision of their new life together. On a cold December day, Do-oh noticed a rainbow outside the window—a rare sighting in winter—and propped up her mother to see it. “It’s very beautiful,” her mother replied, speaking her last words before she died the next day.

Returning to Tokyo, Do-oh felt “empty, as if I had my heart taken away.” Remembering her mother’s appreciative and supportive letters, Do-oh was tormented with guilt for doing so little for her mother during her life except to send money and gifts from Tokyo. Depleted of energy, she would leave her house and walk aimlessly through the streets. “I tried to listen to the faint voice of reason telling me to pull myself together, but I could not control my pain.”

Do-oh returned to Nagasaki in 1989, one year too late to fulfill her dream of living with her mother. Of her parents and six siblings, only she and her younger sister were still alive. Do-oh built her new house and set up her family’s Buddhist altar in the room she’d planned for her mother. Whenever she left the house, she spoke out loud to her mother’s photo on the altar, saying that she was leaving and asking her to watch over the house while she was gone. Although her mother couldn’t answer, Do-oh’s sadness was lifted by her mother’s image smiling back at her.

Unlike the barely recovering city she had left thirty years earlier, Nagasaki was now modern, even prosperous. Most hibakusha still remained quiet about their experiences, but in ways Do-oh could have never imagined in 1955, the number of hibakusha activist organizations and the amount of support for survivors’ social, economic, and medical needs made it possible for her to reconsider her own silence. A hibakusha consultation center at the Nagasaki University School of Medicine offered medical examinations and counseling to more than sixty thousand survivors each year. The city regularly hosted antinuclear, peace, and atomic bomb–related medical conferences and symposia. A national controversy had ignited in 1988 when Nagasaki’s outspoken mayor, Motoshima Hitoshi, broke a cultural taboo and publicly held Emperor Hirohito accountable for his role in the war. Right-wing militarists working to rearm Japan were irate, and in 1990, one of them attempted to assassinate Motoshima by shooting him in the back. The mayor survived, and crowds in Nagasaki rose up in protest over the violence against him.

In another news-grabbing event, Nagasaki hibakusha were outraged in 1989 when a U.S. warship docked at their port. For decades, people across Japan had vehemently protested the arrival of U.S. ships believed but not proven to be carrying nuclear weapons—which would have breached Japan’s policies not to possess, produce, or allow nuclear weapons into the country. Protesters’ suspicions about past ships had been confirmed earlier that year when newly uncovered reports revealed that in 1965, the USS Ticonderoga had lost a plane, its pilot, and a hydrogen bomb when the plane accidentally rolled off the ship en route to a Japanese port where it later docked. Consequently, when the USS Rodney M. Davis entered Nagasaki Bay purportedly carrying nuclear weapons, activists including Yamaguchi gathered in Peace Park holding photographs of their deceased family members and panoramic photos of the city after the bombing. When the ship’s captain and some of his crew arrived to present a wreath before the giant Peace Statue, Yamaguchi felt his body shaking and experienced traumatic flashbacks of the bombing. After the captain laid the wreath at the base of the statue and left, a reporter accidentally knocked the wreath to the ground. Yamaguchi and other hibakusha spontaneously raced over to it and began trampling on it. The incident made national headlines, and Mayor Motoshima—who had refused to escort the ship’s captain to the memorial—officially apologized to the U.S. ambassador to Japan for the protesters’ actions. The ambassador reportedly adhered to U.S. policy by neither confirming nor denying the existence of nuclear weapons on the warship.

Do-oh marveled at the survivors who so unabashedly revealed themselves in public—and for the first time in her adult life, she felt free to disclose her hibakusha identity. An escalation of nerve pain from the glass shards still embedded in her body motivated her to action: Do-oh enrolled in a five-week community class at Nagasaki University called “The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb and Its Influences.” Side by side with sixty other adult students, she finally learned about the immense power and the human effects of the atomic bomb.

For Do-oh, it was Matsuzoe Hiroshi, a former classmate and longtime member of the NFPP, who encouraged her to speak out and tell her story. Unbeknownst to Do-oh, Matsuzoe had been at Dr. Miyajima’s house on the night of the bombing when Do-oh’s parents carried her into the yard. Years later, Matsuzoe—by then a famous Nagasaki artist and sculptor—painted a watercolor of that scene: In the foreground, dozens of people are sitting or lying on the ground, their bodies blistered and bleeding. A mother nurses her infant son. Another cradles a lifeless toddler in her arms. Young Matsuzoe himself appears in the painting, standing injured next to an adult who seems to be comforting him. On the veranda, Do-oh is lying facedown on a table surrounded by six adults. Wearing a white lab coat, Dr. Miyajima is treating the injuries at the back of her head. Do-oh’s parents are standing at the other end of the table, their arms outstretched to hold down her legs and feet as she thrashes in pain. Matsuzoe called it a jigokue (a picture of hell).

He never imagined that Do-oh had survived. One day in 1985, Matsuzoe was reading the newspaper when he came upon an article about Do-oh and her rise to executive leadership in Tokyo. Thrilled and in disbelief, Matsuzoe wrote to Do-oh, describing his memories of that night. He enclosed a photocopy of the painting.

For Do-oh, reading Matsuzoe’s letter and seeing his artwork stirred deep memories of the bombing and years of physical anguish and hiding—and she felt an immediate sense of reconnection with a friend she hadn’t seen in forty years. They reunited in Nagasaki, and when Matsuzoe learned about Do-oh’s professional experience speaking in front of large audiences, he persuaded her to join the NFPP and begin speaking about her atomic bomb survival.

In 1994, five years after she had returned to Nagasaki, doctors diagnosed Do-oh with breast cancer. That year, a new cumulative study based on eighty thousand deceased hibakusha indicated their rate of leukemia deaths was thirty times higher than normal levels and showed elevated rates of breast, lung, colon, thyroid, stomach, and four other cancers. Other studies documented higher-than-average rates of multiple primary cancers in a single survivor and late-onset cardiovascular, circulatory, digestive, and respiratory diseases. RERF reports stated that all females and anyone exposed at a young age at the time of the bomb were at significantly higher risks of cancer in their lifetimes.

Do-oh’s heart pounded when she heard her diagnosis, but she quipped to her doctor, “So this means that now I won’t be able to enjoy fashion?” Once alone, however, Do-oh was consumed with anxiety. It’s finally come. She looked back on the bombing, her injuries, her lost youth, her fear of marriage, and her thirty years in Tokyo. And now, my breast, she thought. The ghost of the atomic bomb still haunts me. She felt robbed of the ordinary life she had finally achieved in Nagasaki, and she feared the upcoming loss of her figure, in which she had always taken pride. As cancer “started building a nest” in her breast, she was overwhelmed that she could no longer live a life shaped by her own will.

But Do-oh reawakened to her own power. Having smoked most of her life, she now quit. When tests revealed two tumors, she ranted at them, calling them greedy. After her mastectomy, she cried often and easily, even as she felt deep gratitude for the care of her nurses. She kept a journal, prayed for the elimination of nuclear weapons, and vowed, over and over, to become a more generous, loving, and self-reflective woman. When her treatment was complete, doctors declared Do-oh cancer-free. “I was allowed to live,” she would say, vowing to stay alive until she was seventy-five. That, she thought, would mean she had triumphed over the bomb.

 • • • 

Nagano did not speak out until after the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing in 1995. Six years earlier in 1989, her husband was injured in a car accident; he remained hospitalized for eleven years and never recovered. Nagano moved into a rental house near the hospital so she could be there every day—and when her mother, too, was hospitalized at a different facility for various health issues, Nagano eventually had her mother transferred to her husband’s hospital where she could accommodate both of their needs.

All of her life, Nagano’s mother had waited for the tomuraiage, the rite honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Seiji’s and Kuniko’s deaths—a significant event in Buddhist tradition when families gather at the gravesite for the ceremony to honor their deceased relatives. “We call it the fiftieth anniversary,” Nagano explained, “but actually, we usually have the ceremony in the forty-ninth year, so for us that meant 1994. My mother felt she couldn’t die until she participated in that commemoration for Kuniko and Seiji.”

The day finally came, but Nagano’s mother had been diagnosed with liver cancer and was too ill to attend. Nagano and her son oversaw the ceremony. “At family gravesites,” Nagano explained, “the cabinet door where the ashes are stored typically remains closed. At this ceremony, though, the monk recites a special chant, and we open the door to let fresh air in, so that our deceased family members will be happy.”

Nagano and her son opened the cabinet door and removed the lid from her older brother’s urn. His ikotsu (cremated remains) were white and pinkish, as she had expected. Those of her father, who had died three years after the bombing, were a mixture of black and white. When they opened Seiji’s and Kuniko’s ashes, Nagano shivered. “They were makkuro—totally black! They were white when we cremated them, but when we opened them, they were pitch-black.” The ashes of Nagano’s husband’s family who had died in the bombing were black, too. Her son felt sick. The monk told them that the ashes of twenty thousand unidentified hibakusha kept in a crate at the temple had also turned black. “Again—” Nagano remembered, her voice hushed. “Again, we grasped that nuclear weapons damage people’s bodies all the way to the bone.”

As the monk spoke at the service, Nagano reflected on her life. It’s been fifty years. What have I been doing, being sad for fifty years? It was finally time to free herself from grief and guilt—not to forget her sad memories, but to change, to do something that could help others. Soon after that, Nagano read a newspaper article about hibakusha who spoke to schoolchildren about their experiences. Here was something she thought she could do.

Nagano submitted a brief summary of her experiences to the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace and was invited to join. By 1995, she was making her first speeches while her husband and mother were still hospitalized. Reading from a script, she recounted her memories but never mentioned the circumstances of her brother’s and sister’s deaths. “What I had done was so terrible, I could not bring myself to talk about it. It was too much for me to handle.”

Nor could she have known what her decision to speak out would mean to her mother. One day, a nurse at the hospital spoke to Nagano’s mother commending Nagano for speaking out. When Nagano arrived to visit later that day, her mother suddenly broke the fifty-year emotional silence that had separated them.

“I want you to do your best telling students how horrible the atomic bomb was,” she told Nagano. “Take care of yourself, and do your best.”

Nagano was stunned. It was the first time Nagano’s mother had ever been happy for her, the first time in her life that she felt she had done right by her mother.

A few days later, her mother turned to Nagano again. “E-chan,” she said, using her nickname for Nagano. “E-chan, gomen ne [I’m sorry].”

Tears streamed down Nagano’s face. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she answered. “It should be me who apologizes to you.”

Her mother reached out for her hand, and they cried together. Nagano stroked her mother’s swollen, yellowish skin, apologizing again and again for breaking her promise and bringing Seiji and Kuniko back. The relief she felt was indescribable. “After fifty years, my mother had finally forgiven me.”

Nagano’s mother died a few days later, without suffering, as if she were going to sleep.

____

As Taniguchi, Wada, Yoshida, Do-oh, and Nagano found deep purpose in speaking publicly about their experiences and illuminating the realities of nuclear war, a fierce debate erupted in the United States over the inclusion of hibakusha stories in a national exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. In 1988, curators of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington, D.C., had begun planning an exhibit to spotlight the Enola Gay as an important historical artifact for its role as the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Later titled “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War Two,” the exhibit was designed to honor the service, sacrifice, and memories of Pacific War veterans and also to inform the public about the effects of the bombings on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and about their role in igniting the Cold War—which Smithsonian curators believed were important parts of the Enola Gay story.

The scope of the NASM’s exhibit was based in part on research conducted by a new generation of U.S. scholars who, starting in the 1960s, had used newly declassified World War II documents to reassess the complex issues around the atomic bombings of Japan. Among numerous areas of study, these researchers had reexamined U.S. motives for using the bombs and their effectiveness in ending the war. Their inquiries often challenged the orthodox atomic bomb narrative put forth by Stimson, Truman, and others—that the bombs were a military necessity, had saved a million American lives, and had been used as the only reasonable means to end the war. “No one denies that these policy makers desired to hasten the war’s end and to save American lives,” historian John Dower concluded, “but no serious historian regards those as the sole considerations driving the use of the bombs on Japanese cities.”

These investigations revitalized questions among scholars about the morality of dropping the bombs on Japanese civilians, but they had little impact on the American public. The government’s official narrative, along with Americans’ continued anger over Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, mistreatment of Allied POWs, and atrocities in Asia, had long ago conjoined to create a powerful and multifaceted mythos about the atomic bombings that still pervaded the American consciousness. Inflated claims of the potential number of American lives saved by the bombings and the bombs’ definitive role in ending the war were so ingrained in public thought and culture that many people still perceived the bombs as virtuous instruments of peace.

Even into the 1990s, most Americans had little knowledge of hibakusha experiences of nuclear war and its aftermath. In the 1960s, articles in Time and U.S. News and World Report led readers to believe that no increases in cancer rates had occurred in Nagasaki or Hiroshima. The U.S. government suppressed information about harm caused by nuclear fallout to those living and working in areas downwind of its nuclear weapons test sites, which eliminated an opportunity for heightened awareness of the human effects of large-dose radiation exposure. At the height of Cold War anxiety—when the controversial made-for-television movie The Day After (1983) portrayed a gruesome nuclear attack on a U.S. city and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War declared that U.S. civil defense procedures could not provide adequate protection from radiation exposure—most Americans still framed nuclear war as a terrifying potential event rather than a past actuality with historic and scientific value.

To create an exhibit that increased understanding and explored varying perspectives on the atomic bombings, curators at the National Air and Space Museum designed a series of connected galleries that would guide visitors through an abbreviated history of the Pacific War—including the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan’s aggression throughout the Pacific theater, the making of the atomic bombs, attitudes and debates around the decisions of how and where to use them, and Japan’s surrender position in the summer of 1945. The exhibit was to have concluded with information on the delivery of the bombs, their impact on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their role in ushering in the nuclear age. The exhibit was intended to simultaneously celebrate the end of a horrific war and—while refraining from drawing conclusions about the morality of the bombs’ use—remain compassionate to those who experienced the bombings.

NASM’s director, Dr. Martin Harwit, visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki to meet with their mayors, museum curators, and RERF officials to discuss the exhibit and negotiate which artifacts and photographs might be included. Japanese officials were most concerned that the exhibit accurately document, and in no way minimize, the horrific effects of the bombs’ heat, blast, and radiation, and the injuries, illnesses, and psychological impairments hibakusha suffered. Nagasaki artifacts proposed for the exhibit included a broken wall clock stopped at 11:02; the shadow of a clothesline imprinted on a fence; the head of an angel from a fallen statue at Urakami Church; melted ceramic roof tiles, coins, and bottles; and an infant’s burned clothing. Several of Yamahata’s early Nagasaki photographs were in negotiation, including one of an injured mother breastfeeding her child and another of a blackened corpse. Short statements from thirteen Nagasaki hibakusha—including Taniguchi and doctors Nagai and Akizuki—were also chosen for display.

But a commemorative exhibit attempting to span the stark differences between wartime memory and meaning on both sides of a conflict would prove impossible to achieve. Many U.S. veterans who had fought an enemy as vicious and tenacious as Japan believed that a national fiftieth anniversary exhibit should only celebrate their victory and commemorate their courage. The presence of historical analysis of the necessity of the bombs or evidence of hibakusha suffering would distort and even vilify their valor and sacrifice in the final months of the war, they claimed, and would also devalue the lives of soldiers who would have died in a U.S. invasion of Japan. Similar to how the ABCC’s provision of medical treatment to survivors could have symbolized atonement, for World War II veterans, the inclusion of survivors’ stories in the Smithsonian exhibit amounted to an undeserved apology for dropping the bombs to end a war that Japan had so brutally begun with its attack on Pearl Harbor.

The exhibit’s initial design and narrative draft were released in early 1994, after which a committee of ten U.S. historians and scholars identified some imbalances and inaccuracies for the museum staff to address. Before revisions were made, however, the 180,000-member Air Force Association, which had close historical ties to the NASM, initiated a national protest; it was later joined by the 3.1-million-member American Legion. Fueled by media coverage supporting their views, these and other veterans’ organizations accused the museum of “politically correct curating” and called the exhibit un-American. They declared a singular correct view of the bombings as having ended the war and saved lives, demanded the removal of hibakusha images and testimonies, called for more context about Japan’s atrocities, and asserted that the exhibit should evoke American pride in its victory rather than shame for its use of the atomic bombs. Veterans also insisted on the elimination of any component of the exhibit that raised a moral question about the bombings. In a Time magazine interview, exhibit curator Tom Crouch reflected that the exhibit’s critics had a “reluctance to really tell the whole story. They want to stop the story when the bomb leaves the bomb bay.”

Nonetheless, curators revised the script four times to respond to many of the veterans’ concerns over balance and accuracy. They removed historical documentation of several leading U.S. officials’ opposition to or doubts about the bombs’ use, including General Eisenhower’s postwar claim that he had expressed his opposition to using the bomb to President Truman in July 1945. They also added more information and photographs about Pacific War conflicts, Allied casualties, and Japanese atrocities, and made subtle changes in language to reduce perceptions of sympathy toward the Japanese. The most explicit photos of dead and burned hibakusha selected for the exhibit were cut, including twelve of the grimmest images from Nagasaki. Nearly all hibakusha personal testimonies were deleted—including those by doctors Akizuki and Nagai—as was a majority of the planned final section of the exhibit on the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. Many historians believed the museum went too far in trying to accommodate veterans’ views; their most serious concerns arose when curators seemed ready to acquiesce to veterans’ demands to honor Secretary of War Stimson’s claim that the bombs saved a million Americans lives despite documentary evidence to the contrary.

Ironically, Japan experienced similar controversies over its own fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the war’s end. New research in Japan had exposed details of the country’s previously veiled wartime history—including Japanese soldiers’ slaughter and rape of civilians during their invasion of China and other Asian countries, and their extreme brutality during the Pacific War. These revelations stirred passionate debates over Japan’s own accountability, the emperor’s culpability, and how the war would be remembered by future generations. Nagasaki itself became the center of a national controversy when it opened the newly rebuilt Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum in 1996. In response to Japanese critics’ long-standing complaints that its exhibits had focused solely on hibakusha suffering without critical wartime context, the museum planned to expand its scope to include documentation of the Nanjing massacre, Japan’s experiments with biological weapons on humans, and its seizure and sexual exploitation of women of other Asian nations as “comfort women” for the Japanese military. The proposed exhibit created a furor among conservative Japanese nationalists, however, who protested and made anonymous threats to museum curators and museum staff. The museum subsequently modified the exhibit, eliminating, among others, photographs of Chinese civilians brutally murdered by Japanese soldiers and of starving and beaten Allied POWs in the forced eighty-mile Bataan Death March.

At the National Air and Space Museum, the curators’ revisions to the exhibit script did not satisfy critics’ concerns. The veterans’ opposition caught the attention of several U.S. congressmen, who also began to publicly denounce the planned exhibit. By September 1994, the U.S. Senate had passed a nonbinding resolution that called the script “revisionist and offensive to many World War II veterans,” asserted the Enola Gay’s role in “helping to bring World War II to a merciful end,” and resolved that the exhibit “should avoid impugning the memory of those who gave their lives for freedom.” Four months later, in early 1995, the Smithsonian announced the cancellation of the planned exhibit and its accompanying catalog, to be replaced with a display of the Enola Gay’s enormous fuselage and brief explanations of the plane’s role in dropping the first atomic bomb and Japan’s surrender nine days later.

Reactions in the United States and Japan were expectedly mixed. U.S. veterans who had opposed the exhibit overwhelmingly approved its cancellation. Senator Ted Stevens (R-Ala.) concurred, condemning any reframing of the official narrative as “a constant erosion of the truth” and the exhibit as “a view of the events . . . that is contrary to the memory of those who lived through the war.” At the same time, some veterans expressed reservations about the exhibit’s closing. “Even if it is true that the atomic bombings saved thousands of Americans,” veteran Dell Herndon wrote to the editor of the Whittier Daily News in California, “it is our patriotic duty to acknowledge the results of those bombs.”

NASM director Harwit resigned in protest, and fifty U.S. historians signed a letter to Smithsonian secretary I. Michael Heyman decrying factual errors and omissions contained even in the final streamlined exhibit. Japanese prime minister Murayama Tomiichi made a short statement saying that the decision to close the exhibit was “regrettable.” Nagasaki’s mayor Motoshima, however, was outraged. He responded to the news by first apologizing to those who were killed and hurt in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and for Japan’s invasion of numerous Asian nations. “But do you tell me,” he went on, “that, because of this aggression and these atrocities committed by the Japanese, there is no need to reflect upon the fact that an unprecedented weapon of mass destruction was used on a community of noncombatants?”

Hibakusha experiences had again been excluded from the official atomic bomb narrative in the United States. Americans’ ignorance about the atomic bombings and their human effects remained intact: A 1995 Gallup poll showed that one in four Americans did not know that the U.S. had dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and even fewer comprehended the scope of the destruction. In 1995, author Jon Krakauer took a step to fill this void by traveling to Nagasaki and writing a piece about the city’s atomic bomb history. In “The Forgotten Ground Zero,” distributed by Universal Press Syndicate to newspapers throughout the United States, Krakauer briefly chronicled Yoshida’s experiences at the moment of the atomic blast and in the months and years that followed. Describing Yoshida, he wrote: “In left profile, he appears unmarked by the blast. From the other side, however, the story of the apocalypse is writ large on Yoshida’s countenance: The entire right half of his face is a matrix of purplish scar tissue and disfigured flesh.” Krakauer closed the article with a quote from Yoshida explaining his feelings toward Americans. “At first I hated Americans for what they did to me,” Yoshida said. “I didn’t understand how any nation could use such a cruel weapon on human beings. But in my old age, I have learned that holding a grudge does nobody any good. I no longer hate Americans. I only hate war.”

In response, a letter to the editor of the Seattle Times from Olive V. McDaniel Nielsen, World War II veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, echoed veterans’ earlier outcries over the Smithsonian exhibit: “Poor Nagasaki! Poor Hiroshima!” Nielsen wrote. “If there had been no Pearl Harbor, there would not have been a bombed-out Hiroshima and a bombed-out Nagasaki. . . . How nice that [Nagasaki survivor Katsuji] Yoshida no longer hates the U.S. for what the atom bomb did to him. Does he ever wonder how many Americans still remember what his country’s planes did to Pearl Harbor?” Her letter captures the nearly insurmountable tensions between veterans’ animosity toward a former enemy and historians’ scrutiny of multilayered wartime events, particularly when the military of one country caused great harm to civilians of an enemy nation in the name of the greater good.

At a June 1995 press conference for the opening of the scaled-down NASM exhibit, Smithsonian secretary Heyman responded to a question about why he had omitted the realities of the atomic bombs’ unprecedented destruction and human suffering. His answer: “I really decided to leave it more to the imagination.”

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For members of the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace, human imagination alone was incapable of grasping the true impact of the atomic bomb. Across Japan, a general antinuclear sentiment prevailed, but it was the hibakusha activists who believed that only by grounding the unimaginable in the specifics of human experience could people around the world comprehend the effects of nuclear war—a single bomb, instantaneously destroying a city and its population, and invisible, deadly radiation penetrating the bodies of those who survived. To fulfill their imperative, these men and women who chose to speak out persisted in openly claiming the hibakusha identities imposed on them as teenagers fifty years earlier. They chose to relive excruciating memories and opened themselves to alienation from family members, harsh judgment for publicly airing their anguish, and right-wing Japanese citizens’ untrue labeling of them as liars or communists. Speaking candidly about their personal experiences provided each a unique opportunity to influence a world they saw as both obsessed with nuclear weapons and fundamentally ignorant about their real-life consequences. They were kataribe—storytellers in the centuries-long Japanese tradition by which selected individuals pass on historical information to their fellow citizens and future generations.

“We are now trembling at the thought of an all-out accidental nuclear war,” Dr. Akizuki declared. “In my view the evil of nuclear weapons . . . has transcended all other issues.” As the impassioned leader of the kataribe movement, Akizuki narrated one of the leading documentaries on the atomic bombings, published new hibakusha testimonies, and traveled to Europe and the Soviet Union to advocate, often before large crowds, for the elimination of nuclear weapons. In a personal meeting in Rome, Akizuki gave the pope documentary films about the atomic bombing and messages from the mayors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In his speeches, he had the rare quality of being able to express fully the truth of his own city’s suffering while also profoundly apologizing for Japan’s aggression and offering deeply felt sympathy for the immense harm his country had inflicted on others.

Still, no matter how much he advocated for hibakusha voices to be heard or how strongly he appealed to nuclear powers to stop their production of nuclear weapons, Akizuki could never shake the sadness and despair he had felt since the moment of the bombing. Into the early 1990s, the weakened, white-haired doctor clipped every newspaper article on the atomic bomb he could find and placed them in scrapbooks. “I think it’s my duty to read them. I put them by my bedside, but often I’m exhausted and fall asleep without looking at them. I know I’ll do the same thing again, but still I continue clipping and pasting. Sadly, I’m an atomic bomb doctor.”

One fall evening in 1992, Dr. Akizuki was returning home after presenting at an International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War conference in Nagasaki, when the cold night air triggered a severe asthma attack. “My husband always carried his inhaler,” Sugako remembered. “But he didn’t have one that day. His mind was on the conference.” An ambulance rushed Akizuki to the hospital, but his brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long. He lay unconscious in room 401 of St. Francis Hospital, the same room where he had treated patients after the bombing and in the decades since. Surrounded by gifts and flowers from family, friends, and colleagues across Japan, Sugako cared for him day and night for years, often placing her face next to his and talking softly to him as if he were conscious. When visitors came to pay their respects, Sugako brought in Akizuki’s favorite seasonal meals and asked others to eat them for her husband. “Since he worked very hard,” she said, “now God has told him to take a rest for a while.”

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The strength of Dr. Akizuki’s vision and direction allowed the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace to thrive during his absence, both before and after Nagasaki’s 1995 public commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings. NFPP administrator Matsuo Ranko oversaw kataribe bookings and monitored their presentations to help them improve. Her work was not without the challenges of individual hibakusha personalities. Do-oh and Yoshida, for example, wanted to tell their stories in their own way, without listening to her feedback. “I am a hibakusha, and you are not,” Yoshida told Matsuo. “You cannot understand our suffering.” Do-oh felt the same way when Matsuo tried to advise her on how to better construct her speeches to help students not only feel the effects of nuclear war but also think about the causes of both the war and the atomic bombing.

“Do-oh-san and Yoshida-san were very proud,” Matsuo remembered. “They didn’t like taking advice from someone like me who was younger and without firsthand experience of war or the atomic bombing. It took a long time to get there, but eventually they understood. When the children listened eagerly to their presentations and wrote them letters of thanks, both of them were so happy and moved. Many of the children said they would work hard to prevent another war.”

In contrast to the vast majority of the more than two hundred thousand Nagasaki survivors who never spoke publicly about their experiences, forty hibakusha—including Yoshida, Do-oh, Wada, and Nagano—made up the NFPP’s core group of kataribe. Taniguchi joined them at times, while also working with several other activist organizations. Within the seemingly hopeless circumstances of thousands of nuclear warheads deployed across the globe, nuclear nations continuing to manufacture weapons, and new nations racing to develop them, this small group of hibakusha refused invisibility. Against cultural norms, they remained willing to tell their personal stories to adults and children at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, in schools and universities across the country, and at local, national, and international conferences and events. Their mandate was to speak with neutrality, without promoting any political or religious agenda. With a sense of urgency as they approached the final years of their lives, they used their unique personalities and experiences to help audiences resist official narratives and vague impressions of the bombings and grasp the human cost of nuclear weapons. Their goal was clear: that Nagasaki remain the last nuclear-bombed city in history.