Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War

by Susan Southard

Many Americans’ perceptions of the atomic bombings are infused with inaccurate assumptions—in large part because the grave effects of whole-body radiation exposure were categorically denied by high-level U.S. officials. For years after the attacks, news accounts, photographs, scientific research, and personal testimonies of nuclear survival were both censored in Japan by U.S. occupation forces and restricted in the United States by government request. U.S. officials also constructed and promoted an effective but skewed narrative defending the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most Americans, relieved that the war was over, easily accepted the government’s simplified message that the bombings had ended the war and saved a quarter of a million, half a million, or a million American lives. With wartime propaganda in both nations depicting the enemy as subhuman, and with Americans’ fury over Pearl Harbor, Japan’s mistreatment and killings of Allied POWs, and its slaughter of civilians across Asia, a common American response to the atomic bombings was that “the Japanese deserved what they got.” All of these factors have limited Americans’ public inquiry into and understanding of the true impact on the people—nearly all civilians—who experienced the world’s first wartime use of atomic bombs. Compelled by a greater understanding of these historical influences and ongoing questions about the survivors’ personal experiences, I traveled to Nagasaki numerous times

In any historical account that incorporates personal narrative, there are complications due to the inherent limitations and unreliability of memory, especially traumatic memory. I countered this by cross-checking survivors’ accounts against support documentation to verify or expand on their memories of events, places, and people. Further, I am an American, of another culture and generation than the subjects of this book, and I wanted to prevent potential manipulation or appropriation of the survivors’ stories, even more so because they were people who, no matter what the rationale, had already been violated by my country.

the risk of discrimination against hibakusha exists even today. Many survivors still keep their identity hidden to avoid being perceived as “different”—or worse, seeing their children or grandchildren denied employment or marriage because of a parent’s or grandparent’s hibakusha status.

At eighteen, he was old enough to remember a childhood before Japan was at war, when he had played with the children of British, Chinese, Russian, and American diplomats. “I thought they were just like me,” he remembered. “Sometimes I went to their homes, and the American and British mothers made cakes. The Chinese families made delicious buns. But the Russians gave me black bread”—he winced, laughing—“that wasn’t so good.”

It was, in the words of historian John W. Dower, a “war without mercy,” in which both Japan and the United States promoted racist, dehumanizing language about and perceptions of the other nation. In the United States, a Time magazine article reported that the “ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing . . . indicates it.” Within this climate of racism and political fear-mongering, the U.S. government rounded up and interned an estimated 120,000 Japanese American citizens and “resident aliens” deemed high risks for espionage and sabotage.

Every family was required to belong to a tonarigumi, through which Japan’s military police monitored not only public obedience and resistance but also every individual’s private enthusiasm level or “treasonous” attitudes toward the war. Nagasaki alone had 273 tonarigumi, each with five to ten families. Those in the minority who expressed disbelief in the emperor’s divinity, the government’s political ambitions, or Japan’s military aggression were imprisoned, tortured, and often killed. Even at work, disobedience to one’s supervisor could result in extreme physical punishment.

When his older friends left for the war, he and everyone else knew they weren’t likely to return, especially by 1945, when many recruits were “invited” into the kamikaze corps. “I thought something was wrong,” Wada remembered. He later wished that he had spoken out publicly against the war. “But to tell you the truth, I was scared. I worried that I might be killed.”

He followed the rules—of his grandparents, his school, and his government. “I was a child then,” he reflected. “I pretty much thought that whatever adults said was correct: that the war was good, that Japan—and only Japan—was good, and that the Koreans, Chinese, and Americans were bad. These weren’t my thoughts,” he clarified. “They’re what the adults taught me. When I grew older, I understood that these were lies.”

Even without yet knowing the scale of the Soviet attack, Japan’s leaders knew that their troops could not effectively retaliate, and the Soviet declaration of war had ended any last hope of Japan’s securing Soviet neutrality or its assistance in attaining better surrender terms. Prime Minister Suzuki had met Emperor Hirohito earlier that morning and received approval to advocate for acceptance of the Potsdam surrender terms. Grave concern over Japan’s dire domestic situation and the Hiroshima bombing fortified the arguments of those pressing for immediate surrender.

In his book Downfall, Richard Frank effectively disproves both the ideas that it was because of the Soviet entry into the war as well as that Japan was willing to agree to "unconditional surrender" prior to Nagasaki.

“Us?” Yoshida said. “We thought Japan would win for sure. We had to endure until we won. That’s how it was. Everyone wanted to fight in the war. We longed to. We were educated this way starting in elementary school. We were brainwashed, so we didn’t think it was possible for us to lose.” The emperor, he explained, “was considered a descendant of God. At school, there was a portrait of him. We would bow and pay our respects when we entered a room. That was the Japanese way.”

By then it was eleven a.m. People throughout the city were back to their daily routines, hanging laundry, reading newspapers, weeding gardens, visiting sick family members, scouring the hills for food, lining up at ration stations, or chatting with neighbors. Twenty-four parishioners and two priests gathered inside Urakami Church for confession.

When Nagano and her father approached the Yanagawa Bridge, they halted at the sight of a dead horse standing on all four legs, totally blackened, its head stretched upward.

Mothers and fathers searched for their children at schools, factories, and shelters throughout the area, but facial burns and swelling rendered people so unrecognizable that many parents could only identify their sons or daughters by reading the ID tags on their school uniforms. Fortunate families were overwhelmed with gratitude when a loved one returned. When one mother burst out shouting and crying with happiness when her daughter finally came home, a military policeman rebuked her loudly: “Such effeminate behavior has caused Japan to be defeated!”

The occupation troops did not turn out to be violent and cruel as the Japanese people had been indoctrinated to believe. Before their arrival, many soldiers had been briefed in Japanese courtesy, as well as geography, culture, and basic language skills. Children, in particular, were enamored with the American soldiers, who played hopscotch and catch with them, and offered them chewing gum, chocolate, and milk, exotic treats that were otherwise unattainable in the months after the war’s end.

A young deaf Japanese man was able to communicate with some of the soldiers using simple sign language. “I will never forget the destruction caused by the atomic bomb,” he remembered, “but I have no grudge against those soldiers. They were kind and good.”

Not everyone in Nagasaki was happy with the U.S. occupiers. Dr. Akizuki mourned the loss of his country’s sovereignty and felt that Japan had “finally become one of the United States of America.” Others, angry and embittered about the atomic bombing, found it hard to accept soldiers from their former enemy nation that had delivered the bomb. “The universal horror experienced by those living in the atom-bombed areas could not be shaken off by even the promise of peace,” fifteen-year-old Hattori Michie remembered. “We knew war is appalling and has few rules, but what the enemy did to our innocent civilians on a mass scale we felt to be outside the purview of a civilized nation’s warfare.”

Other actions, however, were extremely offensive, including evicting Japanese residents from their Western-style homes in southern Nagasaki for use as private homes for American officers, and taking over other buildings as well for occupation offices and barracks. Another conspicuous act of insensitivity came that winter when two well-fed and healthy units of the 2nd Marine Division pitted themselves against each other in a New Year’s Day football game.

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

In an odd contradiction, the new constitution established many human rights and equalities for the Japanese people, but the country’s social and economic reforms, individual freedoms, and its new democracy itself were, in effect, forced on Japan by an occupying nation.

Over time, the left side of his face and the lower left side of his body began to heal, but the right side of his face remained scabbed and infected. At some point, his burned right ear finally rotted and fell off, leaving only a small hole on the side of his head through which he could still hear.

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

Hayashi Tsue, the mother of a girl who died at Shiroyama Elementary School on the day of the bombing, planted young cherry trees in the playground of the school in memory of her daughter and all the victims she had seen during her harrowing search for her child in the days after the attack. No saplings were available anywhere in the city, so a gardener transported them from another prefecture northeast of the city. As the trees grew, every spring Hayashi quietly observed the beauty of the trees, consoling herself by imagining that her daughter’s soul had transformed into their blossoms.

Although the Catholics in Nagasaki were a small percentage of the population, Nagai’s writings strongly influenced the Japanese public’s characterization that Nagasaki’s response to the atomic bombing was prayerful and even passive—different from the national perception that Hiroshima survivors were activists willing to express public outrage.

Nagai also influenced the lives of non-Catholics: In 1978, thirty-three years after the bombing, a Japanese man told Catholic missionary Paul Glynn that Nagai’s writing, which he had stumbled upon in a public library, had changed his life. The man had been enraged with Japan’s leaders and his wartime teachers who had brainwashed everyone into believing that Japan was a divine nation that could never be conquered, and he agonized that perhaps “human effort and personal values were ultimately meaningless.” Nagai’s writings persuaded him to convert to Christianity and believe in a God “who is always good, even though it may not appear so in the short term.”

Brutal private and social stresses persisted as well. As with Nagano’s painful emotional distance from her mother, many families remained shattered by blame and guilt. Children with visible injuries and hair loss were taunted by their uninjured schoolmates who called them “one-eyed devil,” “chicken leg,” “baldy,” “monster,” “atomic bomb,” and “tempura”—the last referring to Japanese deep-fried shrimp and vegetables.

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

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

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

The ten-year state of war between Japan and the Allied nations that was declared after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor formally came to an end in September 1951, when representatives of Japan, the United States, and forty-six other Allied nations assembled in San Francisco to sign the Treaty of Peace with Japan. When the peace treaty went into effect in April 1952, the United States’ occupation of Japan drew to a close.

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

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

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

Rumors had circulated that other hibakusha records had been burned or relocated somewhere in Japan, but no one could say for sure what had actually happened to them. Taniguchi is convinced that the U.S. government took them either to the ABCC or back to the United States, and that his record was left behind only because he had still been in the hospital at the time.

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

One day at Tomoji’s school, everything changed. During a break in the all-school sports day, the children in Tomoji’s class were sitting with their parents in a circle on the ground eating lunch together, when some of the children began staring at Yoshida. One boy called out to Tomoji, “Tomo-chan! Your father has an awful face, huh!” Oh, my God! Yoshida thought. It would have been better if I hadn’t come! But this time, Tomoji spoke up for his father. “My daddy was hurt by the atomic bomb,” he told his friend. “It’s nothing scary!” “I felt so grateful to my son,” Yoshida recalled, recounting every detail of that day and every word his son uttered on his behalf. “I was saved,” he said. “I was saved by my son’s words.”

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.

Once alone, however, Dō-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 Dō-oh reawakened to her own power. Having smoked most of her life, she now quit.

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.

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.”

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.

Gaman: Enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity

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.”

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!”