CHAPTER 9

GAMAN

Gaman: Enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity

Every morning at five a.m., Wada wakes up after six hours of sleep and pauses to look out his window at the expanse of the Urakami Valley that stretches all the way to the bay. After washing his face, he heads to the kitchen, waits for the newspaper delivery, and has breakfast—misoshiru (miso soup), rice, and various dishes Hisako prepares. On days when he has speaking engagements, he dresses in coordinated slacks, a dress shirt, a tie, and a wool or tweed jacket. Since he no longer drives, Wada walks everywhere, laughing with appreciation that at his age, his legs still work.

“In 1945, there were no cars or gas or oil—so everyone walked,” he says. “You could see the mountains from everywhere.” Now, from certain vantage points, tall buildings block his view of the mountains. Some things haven’t changed, though: The Urakami and Nakashima rivers flow into Nagasaki Bay, centuries-old Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines still stand in the older sections of the city, and on early spring mornings, fog rolls in from the sea, blanketing the city. Nagasaki is still a Mitsubishi town, with factories rebuilt on two of the company’s former sites and massive shipyards that produce some of the world’s largest commercial ships and destroyers, the latter in defiance of Nagasaki’s declaration as a city of peace.

Little else remains of the city Wada knew in 1945. He walks down narrow streets through his neighborhood crowded with Japanese-style homes, apartments, and condominium buildings. Following a path along the Urakami River, he passes schools, parks, and grocery stores filled with fresh produce, meats, fish, canned goods, and sweets. He crosses Ohashi Bridge and strides past the former site of Do-oh’s Mitsubishi factory, near the streetcar stop where he would have died if another streetcar hadn’t derailed that morning, resulting in a change in his route. Today, cars and trucks speed by him on the Urakami Valley’s main thoroughfare, lined with storefronts, cafés, and offices. Wada passes a pachinko parlor just as someone exits, so he can hear the loud music and whirring of small metal pinballs racing through the machines inside. Color-coded streetcars still run along the same routes he drove before the bombing, their wires connected to cables overhead, though now an automated voice announces upcoming stops, and machines collect the fares. As the streetcars pass, Wada mentally calculates their speed.

Farther south, too, the city is barely recognizable from Wada’s childhood. The circular observatory atop Mount Inasa provides an expansive view of the East China Sea and the islands off the coast of Kyushu. Below, large vessels, smaller boats, and city cruise liners dock at Nagasaki’s port in view of waterfront shops and restaurants. The modern Nagasaki Station is surrounded by multistory office buildings, department stores, and hotels. Just north of the station on Nishizaka Hill is the Site of the Martyrdom of the Twenty-Six Saints of Japan, with a long wall of life-size bronze statues and a memorial hall with religious artifacts passed down through Nagasaki’s complex Catholic history of freedom and forbidden practice. Approximately sixty-seven thousand Catholics now reside in Nagasaki Prefecture, attending services at Urakami Cathedral and other churches scattered throughout the city, prefecture, and surrounding islands. Chinatown in the old city thrives. At night, the central district of Shianbashi is filled with packed clubs. Along the main north-south street through the city, a small Ferris wheel on the roof of a department store lights up the skyline.

In the southernmost region of the city, tourists frequent Glover Garden, perched on a hill overlooking the bay—the nineteenth-century home and gardens of Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant who established trade between Nagasaki and Britain. Dejima, the tiny fan-shaped residential and commercial island built in 1636 to segregate the Dutch East India Company traders from the rest of the city, has been restored to replicate its seventeenth-century design—a reminder that during Japan’s two hundred years of national isolation, Nagasaki was the only Japanese port open to the West. Now foreigners are so common in Nagasaki that they are barely noticed except by schoolchildren, who frequently stare at them at bus stops or from across the aisle inside streetcars.

Veiled from view from the main road through the Urakami Valley, the bombing and its aftereffects are meticulously and elegantly remembered at Hypocenter Park, Peace Park, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, and the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. In Hypocenter Park, enclosed by lush green trees that block the sounds of traffic, a tall, black granite cenotaph points upward to the spot a third of a mile overhead where the bomb detonated. In front of the memorial, a large stone box holds a microfilm list of victims’ names. Concrete concentric circles ring the monument. Scattered through the park are numerous smaller monuments, including one for the thousands of Korean slave laborers who died in the bombing. Against the banks of the small Shimonokawa River, which runs through the park, postbomb soil from the hypocenter area is encased in glass, revealing eerily preserved pieces of melted glass and fragments of tile, ceramic dishware, and bottles.

If you know where to look, lesser-known reminders of the atomic bomb are tucked away within the concentric circles of the bomb’s reach. Behind the rebuilt Shiroyama Elementary School, atop a hill west of the hypocenter, the cherry trees planted in memory of students who died in the bombing have now matured. Bomb shelters dug into the hillsides around the perimeter of the school are now filled in with dirt or covered by boards or chain-link fencing. At the corner of the school closest to the hypocenter, a five-thousand-square-foot section of the original building now serves as a small gallery of atomic bomb artifacts and Hayashi Shigeo’s 1945 photographs of the annihilated city.

Behind the enormous, U-shaped Yamazato Elementary School north of the hypocenter, three 1940s-era air raid shelters carved out of the hillside are preserved where countless teachers, children, and neighborhood residents fled and died. Down the hill is the tiny hut where Dr. Nagai lived during his final years; next door is a small gallery and library of the physician’s books, photographs, and personal possessions. Scorched statues of Catholic saints stand in the front garden of Urakami Cathedral, and one of its original fifty-ton domes still lies embedded in the hillside where it fell seconds after the blast.

At the base of Mount Kompira southeast of the hypocenter, Nagasaki University School of Medicine and its affiliated hospital host multiple organizations that serve hibakusha medical needs, document historical and current studies on radiation-related medical conditions, and provide the public with data on nuclear weapons stockpiles across the world. Nagasaki’s famous one-legged stone torii gateway still perches, blackened and erect, at the hillside entrance to Sanno Shrine. Up the hill, two scarred camphor trees—once considered dead after the bomb’s blast and heat had severed their trunks and branches and scorched them bare—are now more than twenty feet in circumference and rise fifty-five and sixty-nine feet high, their massive branches reaching out in all directions, creating a thick green canopy over the walkway leading to the shrine.

Except for those like Yoshida who cannot hide their disfigurement, most of the approximately fifty thousand aging hibakusha living in the Nagasaki area remain invisible to the public eye. Many avoid the hypocenter district altogether because of the terrifying feelings that still arise. Others agonize that their family members’ bones lie beneath today’s bustling roads, buildings, and memorial parks. Some bow their heads in silence as they pass by in their cars or by train.

The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) was introduced in Japan in the 1990s and came into public awareness as a psychological condition after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, but counseling remains culturally foreign and rarely available. Images of hideously burned people reaching out for help are permanently engraved in many survivors’ memories. One woman feels like she’s going insane because she can’t forget the voices of small children and their mother buried beneath their collapsed house screaming for help. Another has never eaten a pomegranate since watching—and smelling—one of her family members being cremated on top of wood from a pomegranate tree. For many, silence has remained the only way to survive.

Do-oh, Nagano, Taniguchi, Wada, and Yoshida remain among the select few who keep alive the public memory of the atomic bomb. Each year, the NFPP’s forty kataribe make nearly 1,300 presentations in 137 Nagasaki schools, plus many more for students visiting Nagasaki on field trips. In addition to Taniguchi’s U.S. travels, Wada, Nagano, and Yoshida have also traveled to American universities to tell their stories—Wada at Westmont College in California, Nagano at Oberlin College in Ohio, and Yoshida at DePaul University and Northwestern University in Chicago. Nagano was scheduled to depart Oberlin for a day of sightseeing in New York on the morning of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Unable to return home for nearly a week, she was terrorized by the images on television, not only because of their horrifying content but also because she initially misunderstood her interpreter and thought that Japan and United States were again at war.

This terrifying event notwithstanding, Nagano, Yoshida, and Wada are proud of the dialogues they were able to create with American students. They were frequently asked about Pearl Harbor and whether they, as atomic bomb survivors, hate Americans. In response, all three apologized for their country’s attack on Pearl Harbor and told their audiences that the war had been between countries, not people. At the same time, they challenged students to think about the morality of the atomic bombings. “I don’t blame the United States,” Wada told his audience, “but I want people to understand what the nuclear bombs do. We can’t have another atomic bomb experience.”

Since 1995, numerous books, exhibits, and documentaries about the bombings have been released in the United States. Many are from Nagasaki, including Yamaguchi Senji’s memoir Burnt Yet Undaunted; former ABCC physician James Yamazaki’s book Children of the Atomic Bomb; an exhibit of Yamahata Yosuke’s photo collection with an accompanying book and film in English; and U.S. Marine Corps photographer Joe O’Donnell’s Japan 1945—a collection with several photos of postbomb Nagasaki, including his gripping black-and-white image of Taniguchi’s back. While speaking in the United States, however, Wada was shocked to discover how many American college students knew only about the Hiroshima bombing; they hadn’t learned—or didn’t remember—that Nagasaki had been bombed as well. “The voice of Nagasaki,” he says, “has still not reached the world.”

Back home, Wada speaks forty or fifty times a year, mostly in the fall and spring when most of Japan’s school field trips are scheduled. Energized by talking with young people, he keeps changing his presentations to stay relevant to new generations of children. “When I was younger, I wanted to stand up for what was right, but I could not,” he explains. “Now, if there’s one thing I can do to protect our children, even if it’s hard, I will do whatever I can to help.”

Wada falls asleep easily each night, although a few times a year, his sleep is interrupted by nightmares of Hotarujaya Terminal crashing down on top of him. In the morning, he opens his window and looks out over Nagasaki, marveling that the city before him was built out of the atomic ruins. “One person can’t do anything, but if many people gather together, they can accomplish unimaginable things,” he says. “If it’s possible to rebuild this city out of nothing, why isn’t it possible for us to eliminate war and nuclear weapons, to create peace? We can’t not do it!”

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On a sunny April afternoon in 2011, Nagano arrives by taxi at a large hotel halfway up Mount Inasa to speak to a group of junior high school students from another part of Japan. They gather in a small meeting room, the students’ chairs facing front—the boys seated on one side of the aisle, the girls on the other. Nagano sits at a table facing them, wearing a pale pink blazer and deep red lipstick. Her auburn hair is thinning.

She adjusts her mike. “Konnichiwa [hello],” she says to the students, slowly and clearly. “Thank you for taking the time today to listen to my story.”

Three years after becoming a kataribe, Nagano was finally able to tell her audiences about Seiji’s and Kuniko’s deaths and her fifty-year isolation from her mother. At first, Nagano cried as she recounted these stories and spoke of her lifelong sadness and guilt; now her voice cracks only slightly. During busy school field trip seasons, Nagano often speaks two or three times a day, and she has traveled to cities all over Japan. “I never imagined I would do something like this,” she says. “But I feel it is my responsibility to tell the truth. If people understand how terrifying the atomic bomb is, my survival and my witness to this experience will have had a purpose.”

Speaking to the students at the Inasa hotel, Nagano begins with her life before the war—what it was like to be mobilized to work in the airplane parts factory, how lonely she was when her younger brother and sister were sent away for safety, and how determined she was to bring them back. She describes the moment of the flash—“pikaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”—and her feeling of dread as she raced toward Nagasaki in near darkness to find her family. She recalls the scorched people wandering through the ruins with skin from their arms hanging down to the ground, and dead bodies everywhere she turned. The students listen intently as she describes seeing her father. “By total coincidence, I ran into him on that bridge!” she says, her voice rising to a high pitch. “I was so lucky!”

Nagano’s eyes tear up and her voice shakes as she speaks about cremating Sei-chan in a scorched field. In Japan, most students would sit politely even if they weren’t interested, but these boys and girls are just a few years younger than Nagano was at the time of the bombing, and they are riveted. “We gathered some wood scraps, laid Sei-chan on top of them, and burned his body,” she says. “I watched it with my own eyes.” She recounts Kuniko’s death and cremation in the village of Obama. “I brought them back from Kagoshima. It was my fault that they died. I still think I should have died instead of them—and wonder why I have to live this long.”

Nagano tells the students about her mother’s icy silence and their ultimate reconciliation, about her shock at seeing about her brother’s and sister’s blackened ashes, and about being in the United States on 9/11. She leans forward and pulls them into her focus. “Please treasure your families and friends,” she says. “You were born in an era of peace. Please treasure it.”

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“I was a young girl, healthy in both mind and body,” Do-oh writes in her opening to an autobiographical essay. “I was someone who talked with friends about our dreams and burning hopes. But in one instant the atomic bomb capsized my life.” She directs her anger at the “stupidity of war . . . as a scream from the Showa era.”

In the early 2000s, Do-oh stands tall before a large group of students and teachers, dressed in an elegant black brocade jacket and skirt she made when she was in her thirties. A hand-painted gold blouse peeks through at the breastbone. She wears small diamond earrings, and her black hair is pulled back into a stylish twist. Do-oh speaks directly, without hesitation, expressing her shame over Japan’s atrocities in China and her government’s silence about it. She describes the day of the bombing, her injuries, and her parents digging up young sweet potatoes, cooking them, and feeding them to Do-oh as her final meal. She speaks with great feeling about her agonizing decade of isolation inside her house. Do-oh presses the young people in her audience to think beyond economics and money and focus on deeper values. “We need to understand how to live with heart,” she says. “The twenty-first century has got to be the century of sensitivity.”

A few girls in the audience cry as Do-oh draws them into her story. Do-oh urges them not to waste their abilities and implores them to try to find their own independence and life purpose. “I want to be strong, like her,” one girl comments afterward.

For a while, Do-oh’s speaking engagements were interrupted by health problems. After surviving breast cancer in the 1990s, Do-oh suffered two strokes that left her face partially paralyzed and her body unable to feel hot or cold. Even as she recuperated in the hospital, however, she painted and composed a collection of tanka. “For the birds and for me,” she wrote, “when the will to live rises up / even in the midst of turmoil / the unmovable mountain laughs.” Once ambulatory, Do-oh rejected her hospital gown and walked the hallways in an elegant navy cotton robe made from yukata (summer kimono) fabric. “‘If you don’t become yourself, who will become you?’” Do-oh declared, quoting a line from her favorite Japanese poet. “It’s delightful, don’t you think? This is what guides my life.”

Extensive rehabilitation therapy gave Do-oh the strength to continue serving as a kataribe. The small pieces of glass still lodged in her back remain sensitive to the touch and unpredictably painful when she moves in certain ways; her doctors want to remove them, but Do-oh refuses, afraid that the shards are too close to the spine. She appears in dozens of television, radio, and print interviews, speaking on behalf of those whose bodies she had stepped over to escape the darkened, collapsed Mitsubishi factory—and for her two school friends who died. When Do-oh gives presentations for school groups, students and teachers often gasp at her striking style—beautiful fabrics, bold colors, and eyeglasses to coordinate with whatever she is wearing—and her unique fashion sense frequently stirs negative comments by some of her kataribe peers. “Children who come to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum for presentations are very curious about what kind of people hibakusha are,” NFPP kataribe coordinator Matsuo Ranko says. “Then Mrs. Do-oh comes out in a bright red dress, long, manicured nails, and big earrings. Or a cheetah print. Jaw-dropping outfits. Other kataribe came to me and asked me to talk with Mrs. Do-oh to get her to tone down what she wears.”

Do-oh was indignant. “Why?” she retorted when Matsuo broached the subject with her. “Why is this fashion inappropriate? There is no rule that says hibakusha should all dress the same! I am a hibakusha! I am me!’”

Matsuo agreed. She went back to those who were complaining and told them what Do-oh said. “I’m not sure they were satisfied,” Matsuo says, laughing, “but I thought it was truly wonderful.”

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In 2009, U.S. president Barack Obama gave a major speech in Prague addressing the state of nuclear weapons in the world and the United States’ moral responsibility to lead disarmament efforts. “Today,” Obama said, “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Taniguchi and thousands of hibakusha throughout Japan felt more optimistic than they had in decades. “I am counting on this new President Obama,” Taniguchi said. “Although previous U.S. presidents never worked on reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons, President Obama actually presented a plan to approach nuclear weapons reduction. We have prayed for the day when we can say it was good for us to live this long.”

Within two years, however, Taniguchi’s hope for significant weapons reduction had deflated. He rails at Obama for continuing to modernize U.S. nuclear weapons for war readiness after receiving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his antinuclear stance. “What happened to that speech in which he called for a world without nuclear weapons?” Taniguchi demands. “Just how long is he going to continue these nuclear tests that trample on the feelings of hibakusha?”

As of December 2014, more than 16,300 nuclear warheads were stockpiled at some 98 sites in 14 countries across the globe—94 percent of which were controlled by the United States and Russia. Still, Taniguchi keeps fighting for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. He has protested against India’s 1998 underground nuclear weapons tests and more recent subcritical tests in the United States. In his late seventies and now into his eighties, he has participated in the United Nations’ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conferences, one of several focal points for his fight for the global reduction and eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.

Out of 193 United Nations member states, 190 have signed the NPT—only India, Israel, and Pakistan have not—making the NPT the most successful international disarmament agreement since the beginning of nuclear weapons development. The treaty, which came into force in 1970, binds signatory nations to an agreement that only the five current nuclear weapons states—the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—may possess nuclear weapons, and it mandates these nuclear nations’ ongoing commitment to the long-term goal of complete disarmament. By signing the treaty, all other countries have agreed to renounce current or future development of nuclear weapons. Since 1995, the NPT has required a majority of signatory nations to gather every five years to review the treaty’s technical aspects, report on compliance, and develop new strategies that all participating nations can agree upon to help achieve the treaty’s goals.

Taniguchi joined the Nagasaki delegations to the 2005 and 2010 NPT Review Conferences at the United Nations in New York. Standing before more than 400 representatives from approximately 150 nations, he testified about his injuries, the long-term effects of nuclear weapons, and the critical need for faster action in international disarmament. He held up the 1946 USSBS color photo of his raw, exposed back—now one of Nagasaki’s iconic images symbolizing the physical and emotional suffering caused by the atomic bombing—and he quietly implored his audience to take action. The 2005 Review Conference got bogged down in procedural disagreements, and no substantial action steps were agreed upon. The 2010 Review Conference, however, ended with the unanimous adoption of a plan to “speed progress on nuclear disarmament, advance non-proliferation, and work towards a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.” A two-month exhibition of atomic bomb photographs and artifacts opened in the main lobby of the United Nations. Photographs of Taniguchi, Yamaguchi Senji, and others lined the wall.

Taniguchi contains his unabated rage toward the Japanese government for attacking Pearl Harbor and for never satisfactorily apologizing. He seethes over the United States’ decision to use the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without understanding the extent of damage they would cause—especially to the human body—and the absence of official remorse. His anger is particularly triggered when he hears language that he believes distorts the truth about nuclear weapons. The phrase “peaceful use of nuclear weapons” for example, is often used by officials talking about how the atomic bombs ended the Pacific War or how, since then, nuclear weapons have deterred war. Taniguchi balks. “The word ‘peaceful’ is used to make everything acceptable,” he says. For Taniguchi, always exhausted from the physical pain he endures each day, there is only one meaning for the word “peace,” and it doesn’t include nuclear weapons. “The atomic bomb,” he says, “is the destroyer of peace.”

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“I’m as different now as clouds in the sky are to mud on the ground!” seventy-seven-year-old Yoshida declares in 2009, comparing himself to sixty years earlier. He zips through the hallways of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, often taking the stairs instead of the elevator. “The stairs are better for you!” he says, laughing, racing up to the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace’s third-floor offices for a meeting with staff. He carries snacks to give to his colleagues in case they missed lunch.

Always on a mission to promote peace, Yoshida meets with Japanese and foreign journalists or filmmakers reporting on survivors’ lives. He escorts them through the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, where over six hundred thousand people visit each year, telling his guests about his own experiences as they walk.

The museum’s first exhibit room captures life in Nagasaki before August 9, 1945. The next room, dark and cavernous, is filled with actual and re-created ruins of the city in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Yoshida quickly guides his visitors into the next gallery, past a time line of the Manhattan Project, the development of the bombs, and events leading up to their delivery. On his left, they see a life-size model of Fat Man and scientific descriptions of the bomb’s blast, heat, and radiation. Yoshida leads them through crowds of junior high school students to get to his destination: the long wall of photographs documenting survivors’ injuries and the human effects of the bombing.

Taniguchi’s famous color photo hangs here, as do the two photos of fifteen-year-old Yoshida’s crusted, scorched face taken in 1946 before and after his skin graft surgeries. He touches the black patch covering the spot where his right ear used to be. “After a while,” he says, “the swollen part here rotted and fell off. So there’s no ear here. Nothing at all—just a hole, alone.” He pauses, then grins slightly, changing the mood. “I’m okay now, but then I was completely messed up—such a handsome fellow that I was!” He happily points out that he often stands in front of these photos without anyone recognizing that he is the same person. “It’s helped me realize that my face is much better than it used to be,” he says, smiling broadly, no longer ashamed of the scars on his face and neck, the crookedness of his mouth and teeth, his shriveled left ear, or the black patch strapped to his head. “Every day I apply lotion on my skin,” he says. “And now, after more than sixty years, my face has finally improved this much!”

He does not mention that on certain days, his right hand cramps so badly he can’t open his fingers, and the skin still splits open sometimes, especially in winter, causing flesh to bulge out. Yoshida and his guests turn to walk through the final exhibits in the main hall, past Dr. Miyajima’s examination table on which Do-oh was treated on the night of the bombing. Glass cases are filled with melted coins and glass, blistered roof tiles, and a schoolgirl’s melted metal lunch box filled with scorched rice. In the next room, they pass an exhibit about Dr. Nagai, a display of hibakusha paintings and poems, and three small television screens mounted on the wall show videotaped hibakusha testimonies, including those by Yoshida, Wada, and Taniguchi. “Mine is number twenty-one,” Yoshida says without stopping. The museum’s final exhibit hall documents Japan’s war with China, the Pacific War prior to the atomic bombings, and the history of the nuclear age. Yoshida pushes on, ascending the spiral walkway to the museum lobby, seamlessly interrupting his conversation with his guests to bow slightly and say ohayo gozaimasu (good morning) to every person he passes, whether he knows them or not.

In the museum lobby, every wall is covered with artwork from schoolchildren across Japan and the world—most of them created with colorful origami cranes representing peace. Dozens more similar creations lean against the walls. A large bronzed map of the reconstructed prebomb neighborhoods in the hypocenter area, created with data collected by the Nagasaki restoration project volunteers in the 1970s, provides a visual of what instantaneously disappeared when the bomb exploded.

Off the main lobby of the museum is a corridor of meeting rooms where photo archivist Fukahori Yoshitoshi and his team of volunteers store a collection of more than three thousand pre– and post–atomic bomb photographs. Having gathered photographs for the Urakami Valley’s reclamation movement in the 1970s, Fukahori came to understand the power of photographs to evoke profound sensory responses to the bombings. In order to support the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and ensure that still images would become and remain a vital part of the historic record, he and five colleagues established a special committee to collect, catalog, and caption photographs of the atomic bombing and its aftermath from hibakusha throughout the city. Over time, they also received significant contributions from Japanese photographers of the Nagasaki atomic bombing and acquired five hundred photographs taken by U.S. Army personnel during the occupation. Many from this collection are on display in the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. In 2014, at the age of eighty-five, Fukahori traveled to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and brought back dozens of U.S. military photographs of postbomb Nagasaki that neither he nor anyone else back home had seen before.

Yoshida says good-bye to his guests and turns to the crowds of uniformed, talkative students lining up for tours and presentations in the museum lobby and on the sidewalks outside. He locates the group of students that is scheduled to hear his story that day, greets the head teacher, then races to the head of the line to hold the museum door open for the class, urging them inside until the last child has entered. “Now,” he says, beaming, “9.5 out of 10 children don’t cry when they see my face.”

By the mid-2000s, Yoshida was one of only a few Nagasaki kataribe who could be easily identified as hibakusha on sight. His disfigurement gives him a unique voice in addressing bullying and prejudice. “Your face, your eyes, your hair . . . these are your treasures,” he tells children. “Take good care of yourself.”

Yoshida jokes with his students that he is “as good-looking as Kimutaku,” a teen heartthrob in the 1990s. Now, however, Kimutaku—still a handsome actor in his forties—no longer evokes the humorous comparison Yoshida intends. The NFPP’s Matsuo Ranko suggested that he update the actor he compares himself to, but Yoshida has never done so—except once in Chicago, when he likened his incredible good looks to those of Leonardo DiCaprio. In Nagasaki, however, even if children don’t fully understand the reference, Yoshida’s lighthearted twist on his appearance still gets children to smile. When children ask him for his autograph afterward, he signs it Grandpa Yoshida and adds in parentheses Grandpa Kimutaku.

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Taniguchi, Nagano, Do-oh, Yoshida, and Wada could have stayed silent. They could have buried their traumatic memories for the rest of their lives. And yet, even as the rest of the world has moved on, they chose to make sure their stories are heard. They have found purpose in communicating, in some small part, the extraordinary perils of nuclear war.

Although scientists have significantly refined their ability to accurately estimate radiation doses for individual hibakusha, they still don’t fully understand the long-term medical effects of high-dose, whole-body radiation exposure. Successive revisions of the 1965 radiation dosimetry system include computer simulations and other new technologies to more closely measure survivors’ gamma and neutron doses, allowing researchers to provide estimates of both an individual’s overall radiation exposure and specific dose estimates for fifteen internal organs. Survivors’ blood and tooth enamel (from teeth extracted for personal medical purposes) are now used to document radiation levels at a molecular level. Although challenges persist due to unknown survivor locations and shielding factors at the time of the bombings, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation has calculated dose estimates for over 90 percent of the one hundred thousand survivors in its study cohort. Using hibakusha autopsy specimens repatriated to Japan, a 2009 study at Nagasaki University’s Atomic Bomb Disease Institute indicates that cells from hibakusha who died in 1945 are still radioactive; this suggests that not only were victims externally exposed to the bomb’s radiation, but that the radioactive materials they ingested—such as dust or water—also irradiated their cells from the inside.

DNA mutations in living cells can take many years to result in detectable diseases, so researchers have not stopped investigating rates of hibakusha hypertension, diabetes, and other medical conditions possibly related to radiation exposure. In the meantime, outcomes of long-term studies indicate excess rates of and deaths from certain conditions in survivors even today, including chronic hepatitis and noncancerous heart, thyroid, respiratory, and digestive diseases. Above-normal incidences of leukemia and other cancers persist, including lung, breast, thyroid, stomach, colon, ovarian, thyroid, and liver. Double cancers—the emergence of a second cancer not linked to the spread of an earlier cancer—also occur at higher rates. Dr. Akahoshi Masazumi, cardiologist and director of the Department of Clinical Studies at the RERF in Nagasaki, explained that cancer risk for the youngest hibakusha—who were the most vulnerable to the effects of radiation exposure—will peak around 2015, when they have reached the age of seventy.

While genetic effects and increased cancer rates for children of hibakusha have not been observed to date, numerous Japanese institutions are continuing their studies using DNA and other emerging technologies. The reason for this, explains Dr. Tomonaga Masao, director of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Hospital, is that studies in the United States and Japan have shown concrete experimental evidence that the second generation of mice born to parents exposed to radiation experience higher rates of cellular malformation and higher incidences of cancer than the control groups. “We must be very careful about this,” Dr. Tomonaga says, “because most survivors’ children are passing the age of fifty and are moving into their cancer-prone age.” In 2011, a new national study began on twenty thousand children of hibakusha, comparing them with the same number of children of non-hibakusha for incidence rates of cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases. The RERF and other scientists are also concerned about potential recessive genetic mutations in future generations.

To continue their studies on the impact of radiation exposure on the immune system, medical conditions, and mortality, the RERF, the Atomic Bomb Disease Institute at Nagasaki University, and other research institutions continue to use immense cohorts of living hibakusha and the medical records of deceased survivors. The outcomes of their research have supported scientific-based responses to nuclear accidents such as the 1986 nuclear power plant meltdown in Chernobyl, Ukraine, and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan following the massive earthquake and tsunami there, two events that traumatized many hibakusha. The Fukushima meltdown ignited a shift in Japan’s antinuclear movement to include the gradual phasing out of nuclear power. Ironically, outcomes from hibakusha medical studies are also used to inform international standards for maximum tolerable radiation exposure.

The enormous number and size of studies conducted since 1945, and the need for their continuation, are further reminders of how little American scientists developing the bomb knew about the effects of momentary, high-dose radiation exposure on the human body.

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After thirteen years in a coma with Sugako at his side, Dr. Akizuki died in 2005 at the age of eighty-nine. His biographer, Yamashita Akiko, recalled that in his coffin, Dr. Akizuki “was surrounded with white chrysanthemums and light pink roses and smiling peacefully, as if taking a nap.” He was buried in a small neighborhood cemetery across the street from his hospital.

Do-oh died on March 14, 2007, just as the buds on her beloved drooping cherry trees behind her house were ready to burst. Having surpassed by two years her goal to live until seventy-five, she had, by her own measure, defeated the atomic bomb. “What I mean is—I mean, they dropped the bombs thinking everyone will die, right? But not everyone was killed. I think it takes great emotional strength and force of will to triumph over nuclear weapons.”

A year earlier, Do-oh had been diagnosed with colon cancer—a second cancer unrelated to her earlier breast cancer—too far gone for any treatment. After her diagnosis, her younger sister, Okada Ikuyo, drove her to her last class reunion, where Do-oh, in a wheelchair, posed with her childhood friends for a class photo. Her skin was pale and thin, her eyes red around the edges, and her hair completely white—a reflection of how weak she was; had she been able, she would have colored it. In early 2007, tests revealed that the cancer had spread to her lungs and brain. Okada cared for her sister day and night in the hospital. Do-oh was both deeply grateful and constantly cranky to Okada and her care providers, leaving Okada scrambling to restore relationships with the hospital staff. Do-oh had given up smoking after her first cancer diagnosis—but she still loved beer and was delighted when her friends and family sneaked small bottles into the hospital.

Her death came quickly, at home, where she had wanted to be in the end. Later, Okada found one of Do-oh’s last works of art in a drawer in Do-oh’s family altar. It was a shikishi—an elegant square of card stock used for hand-brushed poetry and short writings. On it, Do-oh had watercolored a small purple iris with long green leaves shooting into the center of the board. From the top right corner downward, in clear, graceful strokes, she had brushed the words: Thank you for a good life.

Seventy-eight-year-old Yoshida died on April 1, 2010, only four months after a sudden illness. His family never told him that his diagnosis was terminal lung cancer, which quickly spread to his spine, nervous system, and bones. They guessed, though, that having cared for his wife with cancer before her death, Yoshida probably knew.

Near the end of his life, Yoshida lay in his hospital bed, always attended by one or more of his siblings, sons, daughter-in-law, or grandchildren. A bouquet of flowers sat on a small bedside table, IV equipment was positioned at the foot of his bed, and one of his caps hung on the bed’s railing. As Yoshida drifted in and out of consciousness, at times his eyes remained slightly open—distant and mostly without recognition of his surroundings. His breathing was labored, and he could no longer talk. When someone spoke to him, his family could sometimes see energy surge through his body into his throat; his mouth would open wider and Yoshida would release a groaning sound—a clear intention to communicate, it seemed—though no understandable sounds emerged.

“It’s going to be so lonely without him,” his younger brother said prior to his death—and countless people felt the same way. Yoshida had overcome his disfigurement and won people over even when they were shocked or repulsed by his face. His legacy, for nearly everyone who ever met him or heard him speak, was determined joy.

Hibakusha are remembered in both typical and unique ways. In the Japanese Buddhist tradition, the deceased is represented on the family’s butsudan (altar), a deep-set wooden cabinet with doors that serves as a place of prayer and remembrance and is passed on from one generation to the next. Inside, families place a bodhisattva statue or other symbolic icon, as well as candles, incense, an altar bell, and offerings for their deceased relatives such as special possessions or foods that she or he had loved in life. Here it is believed that the deceased are available for regular, direct communication, and close family members typically speak to them in the same way as when they were alive. For example, some people begin and end their day with greetings to their deceased family members. Others share their day’s activities or pray to their relatives for help with personal struggles and decisions. Okada’s large, multitiered butsudan, made primarily of black-and-red Japanese lacquer ware, has an elegant bronze Buddhist statue at the back surrounded by gilded Buddhist adornments. In the front, Okada has placed a framed photograph of Do-oh and—to pay homage to one of her sister’s favorite indulgences—freshly brewed coffee in a china cup and saucer. Okada speaks with Do-oh regularly, joking, teasing, complaining, and showing her gifts that friends have brought for the altar to honor Do-oh’s life.

Another Buddhist tradition involves the deceased receiving a kaimyo—a posthumous name—by the monk in their family temple, conferred seven days after death to symbolize the transformation from the physical to the spiritual world. The kaimyo is usually inscribed on a small wooden name plate and given to the family for placement within the family altar. Yoshida’s posthumous name is An-non-in-shaku-Katsuji, which means “Katsuji, who had an earnest wish that all the world would remain peaceful forever.”

Families who wish may also register their deceased hibakusha loved ones at the architecturally stunning Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, which opened in 2003 to provide a place of beauty where hibakusha families, Nagasaki citizens, and visitors to the city can pay their respects to those who have died. In the mostly underground structure, narrow hallways with vaulted ceilings lead visitors into an anteroom lined with backlit photographs of hibakusha, young and old, who are remembered there. As their images slowly fade, others appear in their place. The largest room in the Peace Memorial Hall is Remembrance Hall, an expansive quiet space with cedar-paneled walls lined with benches on three sides. In the center of the enormous room, two rows of rectangular glass pillars, illuminated with soft light from within, form a walkway in the direction of the hypocenter. At the end of the walkway stands a thirty-foot tower, called the registry shelf. As of August 9, 2014, it holds more than 165 books with the hand-inscribed names of 165,409 deceased hibakusha, including a Chinese civilian and a British prisoner of war who died on the day of the bombing. The lighted pillars rise through the ceiling and emerge aboveground into a voluminous, circular, shallow basin of clear water, representing the water that atomic bomb victims craved. At night, seventy thousand tiny lights on the floor of the basin are illuminated beneath the water to honor those who died in the first months after the bombing.

Do-oh and Yoshida also live on through their stories. Do-oh’s childhood classmate Matsuzoe Hiroshi and a group of Do-oh’s friends collected her essays and poems and published them posthumously in a single volume, Ikasarete ikite [Allowed to Live, I Live], named after the title of Do-oh’s most well-known essay. After Do-oh’s death, Matsuzoe also created eighteen more paintings of Do-oh’s life based on her writings. Copies of these paintings have become Do-oh’s kamishibai—colorful illustrations of the key moments of her life that are presented to audiences while someone (first Matsuzoe and now others) tells her story—passing on her experiences and perspectives to those who can no longer hear her in person.

Yoshida’s life is reflected in a kamishibai created by students at Nagasaki’s Sakurababa Municipal Junior High School before his death. Inspired by Yoshida’s presentations at their school, the students first painted fifty original works representing Yoshida’s atomic bomb experiences, simpler and more childlike than Matsuzoe’s paintings of Do-oh’s life. Before his hospitalization, Yoshida selected sixteen of these paintings to become the kamishibai of his life story. The students combined their paintings and Yoshida’s own words to present his story for students at nearby elementary schools. The Nagasaki Board of Education also printed and distributed five hundred copies of Yoshida’s kamishibai and presentation scripts to schools throughout the city. With Yoshida’s blessing, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum presents his kamishibai to interested groups.

Yoshida had planned to make his first trip to the United Nations’ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2010, but due to his illness, he could not go. In his place, Hayashida Mitsuhiro, an eighteen-year-old high school student, antinuclear activist, and grandson of a hibakusha, presented Yoshida’s kamishibai at several New York City schools where Yoshida had been invited to speak. To prepare for his New York trip, Hayashida watched videotapes of Yoshida’s presentations, practiced Yoshida’s tone, pacing, and expression, and rehearsed the English translation of his script. Yoshida died shortly before the young man’s departure for New York. Yoshida’s kamishibai provoked emotional responses from his American audiences. Hayashida closed every presentation with Yoshida’s signature words, imploring students to remember: The basis of peace is for people to understand the pain of others.

____

Taniguchi, Nagano, Do-oh, Yoshida, and Wada beat the odds of immediate death and life-threatening radiation-related diseases and lived to tell their stories. Despite years of denial, discrimination, hiding, and a sense of internal contamination, their drive and their willingness to reveal themselves allow us to understand what it took to survive after surviving. They insisted on being a part of deciding whose story is told, on becoming vocal rememberers of experiences they could not let be forgotten. They wanted to make sure the world sees the absurdity of perceiving nuclear weapons as peacekeepers in the context of the massive and lifelong trauma they cause.

The city of Nagasaki’s peace education program strives for the same goals. All fifth-grade students in each of Nagasaki’s more than fifty elementary schools visit the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. The NFPP lends films and a photographic panel exhibit about the bombing to the city’s nearly thirty junior high schools. Shiroyama Elementary School takes its peace education even further: On the ninth of every month since August 1951, Shiroyama’s students, teachers, and administrators have gathered in the school gymnasium for hibakusha presentations and discussions of war- and peace-related research in the context of the atomic bombing and Japan’s wartime atrocities. When the assembly concludes, the student body stands together and bows to the east, in the direction of the atomic bomb hypocenter, to honor those who died and to hold the vision of a world without war or nuclear weapons. The students then file out to place flowers at different monuments and memorials across the school grounds. Ten times a year for the first six years of their school lives, the children at Shiroyama think about, study, and discuss peace.

In light of the increasing age of survivors and their decreasing numbers, the NFPP and other organizations feel a sense of urgency to find ways to support future generations’ access to and understanding of hibakusha stories. They have launched legacy campaigns to create kamishibai and videotape as many kataribe presentations as they can. A large group of “Peace Guides” are being trained in Nagasaki’s atomic bomb history to provide guided tours at the Atomic Bomb Museum, Peace Memorial Hall, and other atomic bomb sites.

Wada’s nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Yukari, carried on her grandfather’s story when she appeared in a play based on Wada’s experiences of the bombing and its aftermath. “I was eighteen at the time of the bomb, right?” he says. “She was nineteen. She played me as I was back then.” Wada sat in the audience, smartly dressed, bald on top, with thick white hair neatly cut above his ears. Visceral memories flooded his mind. He cried at times, and he felt deep appreciation for the actors, especially his granddaughter. “People who knew nothing about the times sixty-five years ago, or the war, or the atomic bomb, really tried to get what it was like back then.” When the play ended, Wada stood on the stage next to Yukari dressed as him so long ago. Looking at his granddaughter, his face showed a depth of sadness and gratitude he rarely reveals.

At eighty-seven, Wada still takes visitors to the streetcar memorial, proudly explaining its design and his role in collecting the names of the mobilized students who died driving or collecting fares on the morning of the bombing. His guests speak loudly to accommodate his partial hearing loss. Every August, company employees gather here for a memorial service, though the number of survivors who worked there has significantly diminished. On the anniversary of the bombing, Wada comes to this spot in the early morning to pray.

He credits his wife for his good health and his happy life. Hisako beams as she pours him tea.

 • • • 

“I wanted to die first,” Nagano says. “I wanted to die before my husband did because I didn’t want to arrange for any more funerals. I did not want to see any more death. But in the year 2000, after eleven and a half years of being in the hospital, my husband died.”

At eighty-three, Nagano lives with her eldest daughter and college-age grandson in Ogi-machi, about a mile north of the hypocenter. After being hospitalized for a bleeding intestinal ulcer and seeing her children worry on her behalf, she strives every day to stay healthy. “I live peacefully,” she says. “I get up whenever I want to. I go to speak as a kataribe when I am asked. I go out to eat with my friends. But I have a limited income. I can live well as long as I don’t indulge in luxury.” An avid karaoke singer, Nagano misses Yoshida, her frequent singing partner at social gatherings.

Less frequently now, Nagano takes a taxi to her family’s cemetery just east of the hypocenter. From the top of the hill where the taxi stops, most of the Urakami Valley is spread before her: a metropolis of office buildings, residences, parks, and schools, edged by green mountains, with the Urakami River flowing southward into the bay. Nagano uses the railing to keep her balance and takes her time walking down a narrow paved walkway and turning into a long row of gravesites running horizontally across the hill. Her family’s marble monument is second in the row, engraved on both sides with the names and dates of death of her husband’s family members and her own, in order of their deaths. For Nagano’s family, her older sister who died in infancy is listed first, then Seiji, Kuniko, her father, her older brother, and, last, her mother, Shina—June 5, 1995. Vases of bright yellow, purple, pink, and white zoka (artificial flowers) sit on smaller granite blocks in front of the main memorial. “Since I can’t come often, real flowers would die,” she says. “These stay beautiful.” Stored in urns below are her family’s ashes, though Nagano will never open them again.

She lights some incense and places it on the altar in a ceramic bowl filled with sand. “This,” she says, “is because we imagine that our family members who have died like the scent.” She steps back, claps her hands twice, bows her head, and stands in silence. When she is finished, she snuffs out the incense, gathers her things, and heads farther down the pathway to a steep stone staircase that leads to the street. “I used to be able to go down the stairs easily, ton-ton-ton-ton,” she says, holding tightly to the iron handrail. At the bottom, she catches her breath, then hails a taxi to return home.

Her friends and the many students who write her letters after hearing her story remind Nagano that it would have been impossible to know of the imminent atomic bombing of her city when she brought Seiji and Kuniko back from Kagoshima. They urge her to release her self-blame and remorse. “But every night,” Nagano says, “when I am in the bathtub alone, those memories just come back to me. It makes me sad and dreary. I wonder why only I survived to live happily in this time of peace. Even now, when I don’t have to worry about anything because my children are grown, I can’t erase my sorrow for what happened to my brother and sister.”

 • • • 

“My children keep telling me to stop driving to my son’s house, which is ten hours away,” Taniguchi says. His hair is graying now, and deep vertical wrinkles ripple out from the corners of his mouth. “The truth is, since I turned seventy, they are constantly telling me what I shouldn’t do because I am old!” What Taniguchi doesn’t say, however, is that at eighty-five, he is in constant pain and suffers from many health problems. The post-bedsore indentations in his chest are still so deep that his heartbeat is visible. He has lost nearly all vision in one eye, and his memory is waning. After more than twenty-five surgeries, including at least ten skin transplants on his back and left arm, the middle of his back at the spine causes him the most pain—not on the surface, but deep inside. When he stands or walks, his arm—unable to straighten—remains bent, his hand hanging down from his wrist. More than half of his body is covered in scars. “My skin can’t breathe,” he says, “so the fatigue is terrible in the summer months.” Taniguchi remains extremely thin, still eating only small amounts to avoid breaking the tightly stretched skin that covers his back, legs, and arms. The transplanted skin on his back often cracks. His wife, Eiko, applies cream to his back every day.

Fueled by determination, every morning since his retirement twenty-six years ago, Taniguchi has dressed in a suit and tie, combed back his hair, and driven from his home on Mount Inasa to the offices of Nagasaki Hisaikyo—the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council—on the second floor above a small souvenir shop in Peace Park. Tourists roam the seven-square-mile park that features the Peace Statue, the ruins of Urakami Prison destroyed in the bombing, and the Vault for the Unclaimed Remains of Victims containing shelves filled with urns holding the ashes of 8,962 unidentified hibakusha. On either side of tree-lined walkways, monuments from countries all over the world honor those who died. A large fountain at the south end of the park overlooks the Urakami Valley.

At Hisaikyo, Taniguchi supports survivors’ successful applications for government health care benefits. A more comprehensive Hibakusha Relief Law went into effect in 1995, which greatly improved survivors’ access to medical care and support. “However,” Taniguchi says, “the law is very hard to understand, and the procedures for applying for and receiving support from the government are very complicated.” Taniguchi helps survivors and their family members through this process. He also supports their efforts to sue the government for coverage of medical conditions not yet approved, claims that have sometimes resulted in the expansion and refinement of the definitions, boundaries, diseases, and disabilities covered by the hibakusha health care laws. Still, Taniguchi and other activists continue to argue that screening procedures and definitions are too restrictive, allowing the government to deny coverage to many who are still in need.

“It’s strange that I am still alive,” he says, almost in disbelief. In fact, all of the people Taniguchi worked with in 1955 to create Nagasaki Hisaikyo have died. “I am the only one left.” As he ages, typical greetings from friends like “Please take care of yourself” bring him no consolation, and he falls silent when people wish him a long life. “That would mean many more years of pain,” he says. “Either way, I’ll have pain until I die.”

From the windows of the Nagasaki Hisaikyo meeting room across the hall from his office, Taniguchi looks north toward Sumiyoshi-machi, the once-rural area where the bomb blasted him off his bike and melted the skin off his back and arms. “If you were to measure life with a ruler and an entire life were 30 centimeters long, 29.9 centimeters of my life were destroyed that day. That last millimeter . . . I found the strength to live within that one millimeter because I realized I had survived because of the support I received from so many people. So my life is not just for myself; I now have to live for other people. Even though it’s excruciating, I feel that I have a responsibility to live my life to the very end.”

Taniguchi stands up from the table to head to the balcony for a cigarette break. As he passes the young American girl videotaping the interview, he pauses for a moment and almost smiles.

“Erase the bad parts,” he says, “okay?”