Hiroshima: The Aftermath

Writing in 1985, John Hersey follows up with the survivors he profiled in his 1946 piece “Hiroshima.”

She was near the end of her resources. Fleeing from her house through the fires on the day of the bombing, she had saved nothing but a rucksack of emergency clothing, a blanket, an umbrella, and a suitcase of things she had stored in her air-raid shelter; she had much earlier evacuated a few kimonos to Kabe in fear of a bombing.

Around the time her hair started to grow in again, her brother-in-law went back to the ruins of her house and recovered her late husband’s Sankoku sewing machine, which needed repairs. And though she had lost the certificates of a few bonds and other meagre wartime savings, she had luckily copied off their numbers before the bombing and taken the record to Kabe, so she was eventually able to cash them in. This money enabled her to rent for fifty yen a month—the equivalent then of less than fifteen cents—a small wooden shack built by a carpenter in the Nobori-cho neighborhood, near the site of her former home. In this way, she could free herself from the charity of her in-laws and begin a courageous struggle, which would last for many years, to keep her children and herself alive. The hut had a dirt floor and was dark inside, but it was a home of sorts. Raking back some rubble next to it, she planted a garden. From the debris of collapsed houses she scavenged cooking utensils and a few dishes. She had the Sankoku fixed and began to take in some sewing, and from time to time she did cleaning and laundry and washed dishes for neighbors who were somewhat better off than she was. But she got so tired that she had to take two days’ rest for every three days she worked, and if she was obliged for some reason to work for a whole week she then had to rest for three or four days. She soon ran through her savings and was forced to sell her best kimono. At that precarious time, she fell ill. Her belly began to swell up, and she had diarrhea and so much pain she could no longer work at all. A doctor who lived nearby came to see her and told her she had roundworm, and he said, incorrectly, “If it bites your intestine, you’ll die.” In those days, there was a shortage of chemical fertilizers in Japan, so farmers were using night soil, and as a consequence many people began to harbor parasites, which were not fatal in themselves but were seriously debilitating to those who had had radiation sickness. The doctor treated Nakamura-san with santonin, a somewhat dangerous medicine derived from certain varieties of artemisia. To pay the doctor, she was forced to sell her last valuable possession, her husband’s sewing machine. She came to think of that act as marking the lowest and saddest moment of her whole life. Though Nakamura-san could not know it, she thus had a bleak period ahead of her. In Hiroshima, the early postwar years were, besides, a time, especially painful for poor people like her, of disorder, hunger, greed, thievery, black markets. Non-hibakusha employers developed a prejudice against the survivors as word got around that they were prone to all sorts of ailments, and that even those like Nakamura-san, who were not cruelly maimed and had not developed any serious overt symptoms, were unreliable workers, since most of them seemed to suffer, as she did, from the mysterious but real malaise that came to be known as one kind of lasting “A-bomb sickness”: a nagging weakness and weariness, dizziness now and then, digestive troubles, all aggravated by a feeling of oppression, a sense of doom, for it was said that unspeakable diseases might at any time plant nasty flowers in their bodies, and even in those of their descendants. As Nakamura-san struggled to get from day to day, she had no time for attitudinizing about the bomb or anything else. She was sustained, curiously, by a kind of passivity, summed up in a phrase she herself sometimes used—“Shikata ga-nai,” meaning, loosely, “It can’t be helped.” She was not religious, but she lived in a culture long colored by the Buddhist belief that resignation might lead to clear vision; she had shared with other citizens a deep feeling of powerlessness in the face of a state authority that had been divinely strong ever since the Meiji Restoration, in 1868; and the hell she had witnessed and the terrible aftermath unfolding around her reached so far beyond human understanding that it was impossible to think of them as the work of resentable human beings, such as the pilot of the Enola Gay, or President Truman, or the scientists who had made the bomb—or even, nearer at hand, the Japanese militarists who had helped to bring on the war. The bombing almost seemed a natural disaster—one that it had simply been her bad luck, her fate , to suffer. When she had been wormed and felt slightly better, she made an arrangement to deliver bread for a baker named Takahashi, whose bakery was in Nobori-cho. On days when she had the strength to do it, she would take orders for bread from retail shops in her neighborhood, and the next morning she would pick up the requisite number of loaves and carry them in baskets and boxes through the streets to the stores. It was exhausting work, for which she earned the equivalent of about fifty cents a day. She had to take frequent rest days. After some time, when she was feeling a bit stronger, she took up another kind of peddling. She would get up in the dark and trundle a borrowed two-wheeled pushcart for two hours across the city to a section called Eba, at the mouth of one of the seven estuarial rivers that branch from the Ota River through Hiroshima. There, at daylight, fishermen would cast their leaded skirt-like nets for sardines, and she would help them to gather up the catch when they hauled it in. Then she would push the cart back to Nobori-cho and sell the fish for them from door to door. She earned just enough for food. A couple of years later, she found work that was better suited to her need for occasional rest, because within certain limits she could do it on her own time. This was a job of collecting money for deliveries of the Hiroshima paper, the Chugoku Shimbun, which most people in the city read. She had to cover a big territory, and often her clients were not at home or pleaded that they couldn’t pay just then, so she would have to go back again and again. She earned the equivalent of about twenty dollars a month at this job. Every day, her will power and her weariness seemed to fight to an uneasy draw. Despite the family’s poverty, the children seemed to be growing normally. Yaeko and Myeko, the two daughters, were anemic, but all three had so far escaped any of the more serious complications that so many young hibakusha were suffering. Yaeko, now fourteen, and Myeko, eleven, were in middle school. The boy, Toshio, ready to enter high school, was going to have to earn money to attend it, so he took up delivering papers to the places from which his mother was collecting. These were some distance from their Dr. Shum-o house, and they had to commute at odd hours by streetcar. The old hut in Nobori-cho stood empty for a time, and, while continuing with her newspaper collections, Nakamura-san converted it into a small street shop for children, selling sweet potatoes, which she roasted, and dagashi, or little candies and rice cakes, and cheap toys, which she bought from a wholesaler. All along, she had been collecting for papers from a small company, Suyama Chemical, that made mothballs sold under the trade name Paragen. A friend of hers worked there, and one day she suggested to Nakamura-san that she join the company, helping wrap the product in its packages. The owner, Nakamura-san learned, was a compassionate man, who did not share the bias of many employers against hibakusha; he had several on his staff of twenty women wrappers. Nakamura-san objected that she couldn’t work more than a few days at a time; the friend persuaded her that Suyama would understand that. So she began. Dressed in company uniforms, the women stood, somewhat bent over, on either side of a couple of conveyor belts, working as fast as possible to wrap two kinds of Paragen in cellophane. Paragen had a dizzying odor, and at first it made one’s eyes smart. Its substance, powdered paradichlorobenzene, had been compressed into lozenge-shaped mothballs and into larger spheres, the size of small oranges, to be hung in Japanese-style toilets, where their rank pseudo-medicinal smell would offset the unpleasantness of non-flushing facilities. Nakamura-san was paid, as a beginner, a hundred and seventy yen—then less than fifty cents—a day. At first, the work was confusing, terribly tiring, and a bit sickening. Her boss worried about her paleness. She had to take many days off. But little by little she became used to the factory. She made friends. There was a family atmosphere. She got raises. In the two ten-minute breaks, morning and afternoon, when the moving belt stopped, there was a birdsong of gossip and laughter, in which she joined. It appeared that all along there had been, deep in her temperament, a core of cheerfulness, which must have fuelled her long fight against A-bomb lassitude, something warmer and more vivifying than mere submission, than saying “Shikata ga-nai.” The other women took to her; she was constantly doing them small favors. They began calling her, affectionately, Oba-san—roughly, “Auntie.” She worked at Suyama for thirteen years. Though her energy still paid its dues, from time to time, to the A-bomb syndrome, the searing experiences of that day in 1945 seemed gradually to be receding from the front of her mind. Like a great many hibakusha, Nakamura-san had kept away from all the agitation, and, in fact, also like many other survivors, she did not even bother to get a health book for a couple of years after they were issued. She had been too poor to keep going to doctors, so she had got into the habit of coping alone, as best she could, with her physical difficulties. Besides, she shared with some other survivors a suspicion of ulterior motives on the part of the political-minded people who took part in the annual ceremonies and conferences. Nakamura-san’s son, Toshio, right after his graduation from high school, went to work for the bus division of the Japanese National Railways. He was in the administrative offices, working first on timetables, later in accounting. When he was in his mid-twenties, a marriage was arranged for him, through a relative who knew the bride’s family. He built an addition to the Dr. Shum-o house, moved in, and began to contribute to his mother’s support. He made her a present of a new sewing machine. Yaeko, the older daughter, left Hiroshima when she was fifteen, right after graduating from middle school, to help an ailing aunt who ran a ryokan, a Japanese-style inn. There, in due course, she fell in love with a man who ate at the inn’s restaurant, and she made a love marriage. After graduating from high school, Myeko, the most susceptible of the three children to the A-bomb syndrome, eventually became an expert typist and took up instructing at typing schools. In time, a marriage was arranged for her. Like their mother, all three children avoided pro-hibakusha and antinuclear agitation. May your family flourish For a thousand generations, For eight thousand generations. A year or so after Nakamura-san retired, she was invited by an organization called the Bereaved Families’ Association to take a train trip with about a hundred other war widows to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, in Tokyo. This holy place, established in 1869, was dedicated to the spirits of all the Japanese who had died in wars against foreign powers, and could be thought roughly analogous, in terms of its symbolism for the nation, to the Arlington National Cemetery—with the difference that souls, not bodies, were hallowed there. The shrine was considered by many Japanese to be a focus of a still smoldering Japanese militarism, but Nakamura-san, who had never seen her husband’s ashes and had held on to a belief that he would return to her someday, was oblivious of all that. She found the visit baffling. Besides the Hiroshima hundred, there were huge crowds of women from other cities on the shrine grounds. It was impossible for her to summon up a sense of her dead husband’s presence, and she returned home in an uneasy state of mind. In May each year, around the time of the Emperor’s birthday, when the trees along broad Peace Boulevard were at their feathery best and banked azaleas were everywhere in bloom, Hiroshima celebrated a flower festival. Entertainment booths lined the boulevard, and there were long parades, with floats and bands and thousands of marchers. This year, Nakamura-san danced with the women of the folk-dance association, six dancers in each of sixty rows. They danced to “Oiwai-Ondo,” a song of happiness, lifting their arms in gestures of joy and clapping in rhythms of threes: Green pine trees, cranes and turtles . . . You must tell a story of your hard times And laugh twice. The bombing had been four decades ago. How far away it seemed! The sun blazed that day. The measured steps and the constant lifting of the arms for hours at a time were tiring. In midafternoon, Nakamura-san suddenly felt woozy. The next thing she knew, she was being lifted, to her great embarrassment and in spite of begging to be let alone, into an ambulance. At the hospital, she said she was fine; all she wanted was to go home. She was allowed to leave. He was still racked by memories of the appalling days and nights right after the explosion—memories that it would be his lifework to distance himself from. Within hours, ten thousand wounded and dying people had surged into the hospital, and thousands more and hundreds of dead were lying in the yard and in the driveway and for blocks both ways in the street outside. Dr. Sasaki was the only unhurt doctor in the hospital. For three straight days—with one hour of sleep in all that time, stolen in hiding outside the hospital—in a setting of fallen plaster and dust and blood and vomit, breathing the stink from the necessary mass cremations in the hospital grounds, working at night by candlelight, wearing glasses borrowed from a nurse, he lost all sense of his craft and stumbled here and there, mechanically daubing and stitching and bandaging raw flesh, over and over, over and over. In the year that followed, he worked to the limits of his strength and often beyond the limits of his understanding. Besides his duties as a surgeon, he had to spend every Thursday across the city at the University of Hiroshima, to chip away at his doctoral dissertation on appendiceal tuberculosis. As was the custom in Japan, he had been permitted to start his practice as soon as he graduated from medical school. It took most young interns five years of additional study to get their actual doctoral degrees; in Dr. Sasaki’s case, it was, for various reasons, to take ten. He had been commuting during that year from the small town of Mukaihara, where his mother lived, about an hour by train from the city. His family had money—and, indeed, over the years it turned out that the most efficacious medicine for whatever ailed him would be cash or credit, the larger the dosage the better. His grandfather had been a landlord and had accumulated wide mountain tracts of valuable woodland. His late father, a doctor, had earned good money in a private clinic. During the turbulent time of hunger and crime after the bombing, thieves had broken into two fortlike storage repositories next to his mother’s house and taken many valued heirlooms, including a lacquer box given to the Doctor’s grandfather by the Emperor, an ancient case for writing brushes and ink blocks, and a classic painting of a tiger, alone worth ten million yen, or more than twenty-five thousand dollars. There were not many such eligible young men in Mukaihara, and numerous marriage brokers sounded him out. He followed up some of these feelers. One father of an offered bride received his agent and turned Dr. Sasaki down. Perhaps this was because Dr. Sasaki had a reputation of having been a very bad boy—a “tomcat,” some said—when he was young, and because he had been sharply rebuked, once, by an older doctor for illegally treating patients in Mukaihara in the evenings after his work at the Red Cross Hospital, but perhaps it was also because the young woman’s father was overcautious. It was said of him that he not only followed the Japanese saying “Check an old stone bridge well before crossing” but would not cross even after checking. Dr. Sasaki, never in his life having experienced such a rebuff, decided that this was the girl for him, and, with the help of two persistent go-betweens, he eventually won the wary parent over. He was married then to a woman whom he came to consider much wiser and more sensible than he. His grandfather having deposited large sums in the Bank of Hiroshima, Dr. Sasaki went to it confidently expecting a big loan to help him get started. But the bank said that a clinic in such a small town could easily fail, and it put a cap on his credit of three hundred thousand yen, then less than a thousand dollars. So Dr. Sasaki started treating patients in his wife’s parents’ house. He performed simple surgery—on appendixes, gastric ulcers, compound fractures—but he also rather daringly practiced every other sort of medicine, too, except gynecology and obstetrics. He did surprisingly well. Before long, he was getting nearly a hundred patients a day. Some came to him from considerable distances. The bank noticed, and his limit of credit rose to a million yen. In 1954, he put up a proper clinic building within the compound of his wife’s family; it was a two-story structure with nineteen beds for in-patients and a total floor space of two hundred and eighty mats. He financed the building with a loan of three hundred thousand yen from the bank and by selling timber from the lands he had inherited from his grandfather. In the new clinic, with a staff of five nurses and three on-the-job trainees, and working himself without pause six days a week from eight-thirty in the morning till six in the evening, he continued to prosper. Dr. Sasaki, who had himself suffered nothing but this last, paid little or no attention to any of these revelations. He did not follow them closely in the medical journals. In his town in the hills, he treated few hibakusha. He lived enclosed in the present tense. A few hours after the operation, a ligature of one of the blood vessels into the lung cavity gave way, and Dr. Sasaki suffered severe hemorrhaging for nearly a week. One day toward the end of that time, as he continued to cough up blood and grew worrisomely feeble, there gathered around him what he construed as a deathwatch: his wife, Dr. Hattori, the hospital matron, several nurses. He thanked them, said goodbye to his wife, and died. Or, rather, he thought he died. Some time later, he regained consciousness and found himself on the mend. He did not give up cigarettes. His wife’s death and his own near-death, together with his realization that he was no longer young, started him thinking about the elderly, and he decided to build a much larger new clinic, where he would practice geriatric medicine. This branch of the compassionate art was attracting some of the ablest Japanese doctors, and it also happened to be growing extremely lucrative. As he put it to friends, who laughed at what they considered his overreaching, everyone after sixty had aches and pains, everyone as old as that needed massage, heat therapy, acupuncture, moxa, and comfort from a friendly physician—they would come in flocks. By 1977, Dr. Sasaki’s credit with the Bank of Hiroshima had soared, and it granted him a loan of nineteen million yen, or about eighty thousand dollars. With this money he put up, on land on the edge of town, an imposing four-story concrete building, with nineteen beds for in-patients and with extensive facilities for rehabilitation, and also with a splendid apartment for himself. He took on a staff of three acupuncturists, three therapists, eight nurses, and fifteen paramedics and maintenance people. His two sons, Yoshihisa and Ryuji, by now both doctors, came to help out in especially busy periods. He was right about the flocks. He worked from eight-thirty to six, six days a week, and he saw an average of two hundred and fifty patients a day. Some came to him from cities as far away as Kure, Ondo, and Akitsu, on the coast, and others from villages all over the prefecture. Taking advantage of huge tax deductions that Japanese doctors could claim, he saved large sums, and as he returned money on his bank loans the bank kept raising his line of credit. He got the idea of building an old people’s home, which would cost two hundred million yen. It would be necessary to get approval for this project from the Takata County Medical Association. He submitted plans. He was turned down. Soon afterward, a leading member of the association built in the city of Yoshida just such a home as Dr. Sasaki had proposed. Undaunted, Dr. Sasaki, aware that the three foremost pleasures of his elderly patients were family visits, good food, and a relaxed bath time, used the bank’s loans to build, on the site of his former clinic, a luxurious bathhouse. This was ostensibly for patients, but he opened it to the townspeople as well, charging more for admission than the usual public bathhouse did; its tubs, after all, were of marble. He spent half a million yen a month on its upkeep. Every morning, Dr. Sasaki met with the entire staff of the clinic. He had a favorite lecture: Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don’t live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile. Dr. Sasaki’s own pile grew and grew. His life was insured for a hundred million yen; he was insured against malpractice for three hundred million yen. He drove a white BMW. Rare vases stood on chests in his living room. In spite of the enormous tax deductions allowed Japanese doctors, he had come to be the payer of the highest income tax in Takata County , and his tax was among the ten highest in all of Hiroshima Prefecture . He had a new idea. He would drill down next to the clinic for subterranean hot water, to fill hot-springs baths. He hired the Tokyo Geological Engineering Company to do a survey, and it assured him that if he drilled down eight hundred metres he would get from sixty to a hundred litres of water a minute, at between 79 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit. He had visions of a hot-springs spa; he calculated that he could supply water for hot baths in three hotels. He started digging last month. He could face Hiroshima now, because a gaudy phoenix had risen from the ruinous desert of 1945: a remarkably beautiful city of more than a million inhabitants—only one in ten of whom was a hibakusha—with tall modern buildings on broad, tree-lined avenues crowded with Japanese cars, all of which had English lettering on them and appeared to be brand-new; a city of strivers and sybarites, with seven hundred and fifty-three bookstores and two thousand three hundred and fifty-six bars. If past memories did stir up in him, Dr. Sasaki had come to be able to live with his one bitter regret: that in the shambles of the Red Cross Hospital in those first days after the bombing it had not been possible, beyond a certain point, to keep track of the identities of those whose corpses were dragged out to the mass cremations, with the result that nameless souls might still, all these years later, be hovering there, unattended and dissatisfied. Father Kleinsorge lived this life of misery with the most extraordinarily selfless spirit. From the moment of the bombing, he had denied his own flesh to minister to others. Though not a sturdy man, he fled the first fires carrying a suitcase, which contained his breviary, account books for the diocese, and some cash belonging to the mission, and also carrying, pickaback, the Japanese secretary of the diocese—who eventually broke away from him and ran back and immolated himself in the flames. In a park where Father Kleinsorge and several fellow-priests took refuge, he bound others’ wounds, carried buckets to fight fires, stayed up all night to comfort Murata-san, the mission housekeeper, gave water the next day to many survivors, among them a band of soldiers whose eyes had been melted out of their faces, and then, though he felt completely spent, walked to a police station to fill out a property claim for the mission and, finally, hiked more than three miles to the order’s Novitiate, in the hilly suburb of Nagatsuka. Within two weeks, he succumbed to radiation sickness, and in September he entered the Tokyo hospital for a three-month stay. Still very weak after his return to Hiroshima, he started trudging for hours every day through the city streets to visit parishioners who were down with injuries or radiation sickness, and, as well, to instruct candidates for conversion. One of the latter was a crippled young woman named Toshiko Sasaki, who had worked as a clerk in the East Asia Tin Works and had suffered dreadful multiple compound fractures of her left leg in the bombing; though he was often still feverish, he called on her, first at the Red Cross Hospital and then at her home, in the suburb of Koi, which meant a walk of several miles. He never failed to keep an appointment he had made, and he always arrived on the minute of the promised hour. After his second discharge from the hospital, he returned to the tiny Noborimachi chapel, which he and a colleague had constructed on the site of their previous building by joining, end to end, two of the standardized “barracks” that the city was then selling to encourage rebuilding. There he continued his self-abnegating pastoral life. In 1948, he was named priest of the much grander Misasa church, in another part of town. There were not yet many tall buildings in the city, and neighbors called the big church the Misasa Palace. A convent of Helpers of Holy Souls was attached to the church, and besides his priestly duties of conducting Mass, hearing confessions, and teaching Bible classes he ran eight-day retreats for novices and sisters of the convent, during which the women, given Communion and instructed by him from day to day, would maintain silence. He still visited Sasaki-san and other hibakusha who were sick and wounded, and he would even babysit for young mothers. He often went to the sanatorium at Saijyo, an hour by train from the city, to comfort tubercular patients. Father Kleinsorge was briefly hospitalized in Tokyo twice more. His German Jesuit colleagues were of the opinion that in all his work he was a little too much concerned for others, and not enough for himself. Beyond his own stubborn sense of mission, he had taken on himself the Japanese spirit of enryo—setting the self apart, putting the wishes of others first. They thought he might literally kill himself with kindness to others; he was too rücksichtsvoll, they said—too regardful. When gifts of delicacies came from relatives in Germany, he gave them all away. When he got penicillin from an Occupation doctor, he gave it to parishioners who were not as sick as he. He gave lessons on the catechism when he had a high fever. After he came back from a long hike of pastoral calls, the Misasa housekeeper would see him collapse on the steps of his rectory, head down—a figure, it seemed, of utter defeat. The next day, he would be out in the streets again. Gradually, over years of this unremitting labor, he gathered his modest harvest: some four hundred baptisms, some forty marriages. At Noborimachi, he began instructing the female members, a mother and two daughters, of a wealthy and cultured family named Naganishi. Feverish or not, he went to them, always on foot, every evening. Sometimes he would arrive early; he would pace up and down the street outside, then ring the bell at precisely seven o’clock. He would look at himself in a hall mirror, adjust his hair and habit, and enter the living room. He would teach for an hour; then the Naganishis would serve tea and sweets, and he and they would chat until exactly ten. He felt at home in that house. The younger daughter, Hisako, became devoted to him, and when, after eighteen months, his various symptoms grew so bad that he was going to have to be hospitalized she asked him to baptize her, and he did, on the day before he entered the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital for an entire year’s stay. He returned to the large Misasa congregation, but it was harder and harder for him to carry the kind of overload he cherished. He developed back pain, which was caused, doctors said, by a kidney stone; he passed it. Dragged down by constant pain and by infections that were abetted by his shortage of white cells, he limped through his days, pushing himself beyond his strength. Finally, in 1961, he was mercifully put out to pasture by the diocese, in a tiny church in the country town of Mukaihara—the town where Dr. Sasaki was flourishing in his private clinic. When he first arrived, he felt enterprising, and, on the principle that souls are best caught while unripe, he had builders add two rooms to the chapel and started in them what he called the St. Mary’s Kindergarten. So began a bleak life for four Catholics: the priest, two Japanese sisters to teach the babies, and a Japanese woman to cook. Few believers came to church. His parish consisted of four previously converted families, about ten worshippers in all. Some Sundays, no one showed up for Mass. After its first spurt, Father Takakura’s energy rapidly flagged. Once each week, he took a train to Hiroshima and went to the Red Cross Hospital for a checkup. At Hiroshima station, he picked up what he loved best to read as he travelled—timetables with schedules of trains going all over Honshu Island. The doctors injected steroids in his painful joints and treated him for chronic flulike symptoms, and once he reported he had found traces of blood in his underwear, which the doctors guessed came from new kidney stones. In the village of Mukaihara, he tried to be as inconspicuous—as Japanese—as he could. He sometimes wore Japanese clothes. Not wanting to seem high-living, he never bought meat in the local market, but sometimes he smuggled some out from the city. A Japanese priest who occasionally came to see him, Father Hasegawa, admired his efforts to carry his naturalization through to perfection but found him in many ways unshakably German. He had a tendency when he was rebuffed in an undertaking to stubbornly push all the harder straight for it, whereas a Japanese would more tactfully look for some way around. Father Hasegawa noticed that when Father Takakura was hospitalized he rigidly respected the hospital’s visiting hours, and if people came to see him, even from far away, outside proper hours he refused to receive them. Once, eating with his friend, Father Hasegawa declined his host’s offer of a bowl of rice; he said he was full. But then delicious pickles appeared, which caused a Japanese palate to cry out for rice, and he decided to have a bowl after all. Father Takakura was outraged : How could he eat rice plus pickle when he had been too full to eat rice alone? During this period, Father Takakura was one of many people whom Dr. Robert J. Lifton interviewed in preparing to write his book “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima.” In one conversation the priest hinted that he realized he had achieved a truer identity as a hibakusha than as a Japanese: If a person says to me that he is weary , if it is a hibakusha who says it, it gives me a different feeling than if he is an ordinary person. He doesn’t have to explain. . . . He knows all of the uneasiness—all of the temptation to lose spirit and be depressed—and of then starting again to see if he can do his job. . . . If a Japanese hears the words “tenno heika” , it is different from a Westerner hearing them—a very different feeling in the foreigner’s heart from what is felt in the Japanese person’s heart. It is a similar question in the case of one who is a victim and one who is not, when they hear about another victim. . . . I met a man one time . . . said, “I experienced the atomic bomb”—and from then on the conversation changed. We both understood each other’s feelings. Nothing had to be said. Once, on a late-spring day, not long after Yoshiki-san arrived, sparrows alighted in a persimmon tree outside his office window. He clapped his hands to drive them away, and soon there appeared on his palms purple spots of the sort that all hibakusha dreaded. The doctors in Hiroshima shook their heads. Who could say what they were? They seemed to be blood bruises, but his blood tests did not suggest leukemia. He had slight hemorrhages in his urinary tract. “What if I get blood in my brains?” he asked once. His joints still hurt. He developed liver dysfunction, high blood pressure, back pains, chest pains. An electrocardiogram turned up an anomaly. He was put on a drug to ward off a coronary attack, and on an anti-hypertensive drug. He was given steroids, hormones, an anti-diabetic drug. “I don’t take medicines, I eat them,” he said to Yoshiki-san. In 1971, he was hospitalized for an operation to see whether his liver was cancerous; it was not. All through this time of decline, a stream of visitors came to see him, thanking him for all he had done for them in the past. Hisako Naganishi, the woman he had baptized the day before his long hospitalization, was especially faithful; she brought him open-faced sandwiches on German rye bread, which he loved, and when Yoshiki-san needed vacations she would move in and tend him in her absence. Father Berzikofer would come for a few days at a time, and they would talk and drink a great deal of gin, which Father Takakura had also come to love. From then on, he was bedridden. Yoshiki-san fed him, changed diapers that she made for him, and cleaned his body. He read the Bible and timetables—the only two sorts of texts, he told Yoshiki-san, that never told lies. He could tell you what train to take where, the price of food in the dining car, and how to change trains at such-and-such a station to save three hundred yen. One day, he called Yoshiki-san, greatly excited. He had found an error. Only the Bible told the truth! His fellow-priests finally persuaded him to go to St. Luke’s Hospital in Kobe. Yoshiki-san visited him, and he drew out from a book a copy of his chart, on which was written “A living corpse.” He said he wanted to go home with her, and she took him. “Because of you, my soul has been able to get through purgatory,” he said to her when he was in his own bed. He weakened, and his fellow-priests moved him to a two-room house in a hollow just below their Novitiate, in Nagatsuka. Yoshiki-san told him she wanted to sleep in his room with him. No, he said, his vows would not permit that. She lied, saying that the father superior had ordered it. Greatly relieved, he allowed it. After that, he seldom opened his eyes. She fed him only ice cream. When visitors came, all he could say was “Thank you.” He fell into a coma, and on November 19, 1977, with a doctor, a priest, and Yoshiki-san at his side, this explosion-affected person took a deep breath and died. He was buried in a serene pine grove at the top of the hill above the Novitiate. The fathers and brothers of the Nagatsuka Novitiate noticed over the years that there were almost always fresh flowers at that grave. On the third day, some friends who had supposed her dead found her there, gave her the news that her father, her mother, and a baby brother had all been killed, and then left her there. Later, she was carted away in a truck, her whole leg discolored, swollen, putrid, and so painful that she kept fainting. She was shifted from relief station to relief station—four times in five weeks—with nothing done for her compound fractures except the insertion of a rubber tube to drain the pus. At last, in early September, she was moved to the Red Cross Hospital, where she was put under the care of Dr. Sasaki . Having long since run out of plaster of Paris, he did not even try to set the broken bones. Over several weeks, he made three deep incisions to drain the wounds. The bones eventually mended after a fashion, leaving her left leg three inches shorter than her right, with her left foot turned inward. Nine months after the bombing, she was discharged on crutches and joined her thirteen-year-old brother, Yasuo, and six-year-old sister, Yaeko, who had escaped injury on the day of the explosion because they had been in the family home, in the suburb of Koi. Now, finally, living with them there, she was beginning to feel alive again. The only person who had given Toshiko any real comfort in all this time was Father Kleinsorge, who had begun visiting her in the hospital and now continued calling on her in Koi. He was clearly bent on converting her. The confident logic of his instruction did little to convince her, for she could not accept the idea that a God who had snatched away her parents and put her through such hideous trials was loving and merciful. She was, however, deeply moved by the priest’s faithfulness to her, for it was obvious that he, too, was weak and in pain, yet he walked great distances to see her. His warmth—together with the penicillin she was now able to take—helped heal her leg and her misery. Her house stood by a cliff, on which there was a grove of bamboo. One morning, she stepped out of the house, and the sun’s rays glistening on the minnow-like leaves of the bamboo trees took her breath away. She felt an astonishing burst of joy—the first she had experienced in as long as she could remember. She heard herself reciting the Lord’s Prayer. In September, she was baptized. Father Kleinsorge was in the hospital in Tokyo, so another priest, Father Cieslik, officiated. She was good at her work. She seemed to have found a calling, and the next year, convinced that her brother and sister were well cared for, she accepted a transfer to another orphanage, called the White Chrysanthemum Dormitory, in a suburb of Beppu, on the island of Kyushu, where it would be possible for her to receive professional child-care training. In the spring of 1949, she began commuting by train, about a half hour each way, to the city of Oita, to take courses at Oita University, and in September she passed an examination that qualified her as a nursery-school teacher. She worked at the White Chrysanthemum for six years. Her lower left leg was badly bent, its knee was frozen, and its thigh was atrophied by the deep incisions Dr. Sasaki had made The sisters in charge of the orphanage arranged for her to enter the National Hospital in Beppu for orthopedic surgery. She was a patient there for fourteen months, during which she underwent three major operations: the first, not very successful, to help restore her thigh; the second to free her knee; and the third to re-break her tibia and fibula and set them in something like their original alignment. After the hospitalization, she went to a nearby hot-springs therapeutic center for rehabilitation. Her leg would give her pain for the rest of her life, and her knee would never again bend all the way, but her legs were now more or less equal in length, and she could walk almost normally. She went back to work. The White Chrysanthemum, with space for forty orphans, stood near an American Army base; on one side was an exercise field for the soldiers, and on the other were officers’ houses. After the Korean War began, the base and the orphanage were packed. From time to time, a woman would bring in an infant whose father was an American soldier, never saying that she was the mother—usually that a friend had asked her to entrust the baby to the orphanage. Often, at night, nervous young soldiers, some white, some black, having sneaked off the base without leave, would come begging to see their offspring. They wanted to stare at the babies’ faces. Some of them tracked down the mothers and married them, though they might never again see the children. Sasaki-san felt compassion both for the mothers, some of whom were prostitutes, and for the fathers. She perceived the latter as confused boys of nineteen and twenty who as draftees were involved in a war they did not consider theirs, and who felt a rudimentary responsibility—or, at the very least, guilt—as fathers. These thoughts led her to an opinion that was unconventional for a hibakusha: that too much attention was paid to the power of the A-bomb, and not enough to the evil of war. Her rather bitter opinion was that it was the more lightly affected hibakusha and power-hungry politicians who focussed on the A-bomb, and that not enough thought was given to the fact that warfare had indiscriminately made victims of Japanese who had suffered atomic and incendiary bombings, Chinese civilians who had been attacked by the Japanese, reluctant young Japanese and American soldiers who were drafted to be killed or maimed, and, yes, Japanese prostitutes and their mixed-blood babies. She had firsthand knowledge of the cruelty of the atomic bomb, but she felt that more notice should be given to the causes than to the instruments of total war. One day, at the White Chrysanthemum, she got an urgent message that her brother had been in an automobile accident and might die. She hurried to Hiroshima. Yasuo’s car had been hit by a police patrol car; it had been the policeman’s fault. Yasuo survived, but four ribs and both legs had been broken, his nose had been caved in, there was a permanent dent in his forehead, and he had lost the sight of one eye. Sasaki-san thought she was going to have to tend him and support him for good. She began taking accounting courses, and, after a few weeks, qualified as a Third Class Bookkeeper. But Yasuo made a remarkable recovery, and, using the compensation he was paid for the accident, he entered a music school, to study composition. Sasaki-san went back to the orphanage. In 1954, Sasaki-san visited Father Takakura and said that she knew now that she would never marry, and she thought the time had come for her to go into a convent. What convent would he recommend? He suggested the French order of Auxiliatrices du Purgatoire, Helpers of Holy Souls, whose convent was right there at Misasa. Sasaki-san said she did not want to enter a society that would make her speak foreign languages. He promised her she could stay with Japanese. She entered the convent, and in the very first days she found that Father Takakura had lied to her. She was going to have to learn Latin and French. She was told that when the knock of reveille came in the morning she must cry out, “Mon Jésus, miséricorde! ” The first night, she wrote the words in ink on the palm of one hand, so she could read them when she heard the knock the next morning, but it turned out to be too dark. She became afraid she might fail. She had no trouble learning about Eugenie Smet, known as Blessed Mary of Providence, the founder of the order, who in 1856 had started programs in Paris for care of the poor and for home nursing and had eventually sent to China twelve sisters she had trained. But, at thirty, Sasaki-san felt too old to be a schoolgirl learning Latin. She was confined to the convent building except for occasional walks—two hours each way, painful for her bad leg—to Mitaki, a mountain where there were three beautiful waterfalls. In time, she discovered she had surprising hardihood and tenacity, which she credited to all she had learned about herself in the hours and weeks after the bombing. When the mother superior, Marie Saint-Jean de Kenti, asked her one day what she would do if she were told she had failed and would have to leave, she said, “I would take hold of that beam there and hold on with all my strength.” She did hold on, and in 1957 she took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and became Sister Dominique Sasaki. Her hard-earned doggedness told, and she remained fully in charge of the Garden of St. Joseph for twenty years. Thanks to her schooling as an accountant, she was able to introduce a rational system of bookkeeping. Eventually, the Society of Helpers, with support from branches in the United States, raised money for a new building, and Sister Sasaki supervised the construction of a concrete-block structure cut into the brow of a hill. A few years later, a subterranean waterway began to undermine it, and she saw to its replacement with a more modern building, of reinforced concrete, with single and double rooms fitted with Western-style washbasins and toilets. Her greatest gift, she found, was her ability to help inmates to die in peace. She had seen so much death in Hiroshima after the bombing, and had seen what strange things so many people did when they were cornered by death, that nothing now surprised or frightened her. The first time she stood watch by a dying inmate, she vividly remembered a night soon after the bombing when she had lain out in the open, uncared for, in dreadful pain, beside a young man who was dying. She had talked with him all night, and had become aware, above all, of his fearful loneliness. She had watched him die in the morning. At deathbeds in the home, she was always mindful of this terrible solitude. She would speak little to the dying person but would hold a hand or touch an arm, as an assertion, simply, that she was there. Once, an old man revealed to her on his deathbed, with such vividness she felt she was witnessing the act, that he had stabbed another man in the back and had watched him bleed to death. Though the murderer was not a Christian, Sister Sasaki told him that God forgave him, and he died in comfort. Another old man had, like many Kyushu miners, been a drunkard. He had had a sordid reputation; his family had abandoned him. In the home, he tried with pathetic eagerness to please everyone. He volunteered to carry coal from storage bins, and he stoked the building’s boiler. He had cirrhosis of the liver, and had been warned not to accept the daily ration of five ounces of distilled spirits that the Garden of St. Joseph mercifully issued to the former miners. But he continued to drink it. Vomiting at the supper table one night, he ruptured a blood vessel. It took him three days to die. Sister Sasaki stayed beside him all that time, holding his hand, so that he might die knowing that, living, he had pleased her. Back in Japan, she did volunteer work for two years at the Tokyo headquarters of the Society of Helpers, then spent two years as mother superior of the convent at Misasa, where she had taken her training. After that, she led a tranquil life as superintendent of the women’s dormitory at the music school where her brother had studied; it had been taken over by the Church and was now called the Elizabeth College of Music. When he had finished at the school, Yasuo became qualified as a schoolteacher, and now he taught composition and mathematics in a high school in Kochi, on the island of Shikoku. Yaeko was married to a doctor who owned his own clinic in Hiroshima, and Sister Sasaki could go to him if she needed a doctor. Besides continuing difficulties with her leg, she had endured for some years a pattern of ailments which—as with so many hibakusha—might or might not have been attributable to the bomb: liver dysfunction, night sweats and morning fevers, borderline angina, blood spots on her legs, and signs in blood tests of a rheumatoid factor. One of the happiest events in her life came in 1980, while she was stationed at the society’s headquarters in Tokyo: she was honored at a dinner to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of her becoming a nun. By chance, a second guest of honor that night was the head of the society in Paris, Mother General France Delcourt, who, it happened, had also reached her twenty-fifth year in the order. Mother Delcourt gave Sister Sasaki a present of a picture of the Virgin Mary. Sister Sasaki made a speech: “I shall not dwell on the past. It is as if I had been given a spare life when I survived the A-bomb. But I prefer not to look back. I shall keep moving forward.” He managed to rescue two of his clinic’s nurses from the wreckage in the river; four other nurses and the only two in-patients he had at that time were killed. He spent a nightmarish day and night on the banks of the river among living, dying, and dead grotesques, unable because of his own pain to render the slightest first aid. The next day, he walked with the two nurses through the smoldering ruins of an entire city to his parental home, in the suburb of Nagatsuka, only to find its roof collapsed. He made his way to the summer house of a friend in the town of Fukawa. There, toward the end of September, he heard of an empty private clinic in Kaitaichi, a suburb to the east of Hiroshima. He bought it, moved in, and undertook a practice. Fully recovered from his wounds, he soon had many patients. A convivial man, fifty years old, Dr. Fujii enjoyed the company of foreigners, and it was soon his pleasure, in the evenings, to ply members of the occupying forces with a seemingly endless supply of Suntory whiskey that he somehow laid hands on. For years, he had had a hobby of studying foreign languages, English among them. Father Kleinsorge had long been a friend, and had frequently visited him in the evenings to teach him to speak German. The Doctor had also taken up Esperanto. During the war, the Japanese secret police had got it into their heads that the Russians used Esperanto for their spying codes, and Dr. Fujii had more than once been questioned closely about whether he was getting messages from the Comintern. He was now eager to make friends with Americans, and the shingle of his clinic had these words on it in English: In 1948, Dr. Fujii built a new clinic, in Hiroshima, on the site of the one that had been ruined by the bomb. The new one was a modest wooden building with half a dozen bedrooms for in-patients. He had trained as an orthopedic surgeon, but after the war that craft was becoming subdivided into various specialties. He had earlier had as a special interest prenatal hip dislocations, but he now thought himself too old to go very far with that or any other specialty; besides, he lacked the sophisticated equipment needed for specialization. He performed operations on keloids, did appendectomies, and treated wounds; he also took medical cases. Through his Occupation friends, he was able to get penicillin. He treated about eighty patients a day. He had five grown children, and, in the Japanese tradition, they followed in their father’s footsteps. The oldest and youngest were daughters, Myeko and Chieko, and both married doctors. The oldest son, Masatoshi, a doctor, inherited the Kaitaichi clinic and its practice; the second son, Keiji, did not go to medical school but became an X-ray technician; and the third son, Shigeyuki, was a young doctor on the staff of the Nihon University Hospital in Tokyo. Keiji lived with his parents, in a house that Dr. Fujii had built next to the Hiroshima clinic. He took up golf, and built a sand bunker and set up a driving net in his garden. In 1955, he paid the entrance fee of a hundred and fifty thousand yen, then a little more than four hundred dollars, to join the exclusive Hiroshima Country Club. He did not play much golf, but, to the eventual great joy of his children, he kept the family membership. Thirty years later, it would cost fifteen million yen, or sixty thousand dollars, to join the club. He succumbed to the Japanese baseball mania. The Hiroshima players were at first called, in English, the Carps, until he pointed out to the public that the plural for that fish, and for those ballplayers, had no “s.” He went often to watch games at the huge new stadium, not far from the A-Bomb Dome—the ruins of the Hiroshima Industrial Promotion Hall, which the city had kept as its only direct physical reminder of the bomb. In their early seasons, the Carp had dismal records, yet they had a fanatical following, something like those of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Mets in their lean years. But Dr. Fujii rather mischievously rooted for the Tokyo Swallows; he wore a Swallows button on the lapel of his jacket. Hiroshima, in its regeneration as a brand-new city after the bombing, turned up with one of the gaudiest entertainment districts in all Japan—an area where, at night, vast neon signs of many colors winked and beckoned to potential customers of bars, geisha houses, coffee shops, dance halls, and licensed houses of prostitution. One night, Dr. Fujii, who had begun to have a reputation as a purayboy, or playboy, took his tenderfoot son Shigeyuki, who was twenty years old and home awhile from the grind of his Tokyo medical school, out on the town to show him how to be a man. They went to a building where there was a huge dance floor, with girls lined up along one side. Shigeyuki told his father he didn’t know what to do; his legs felt weak. Dr. Fujii bought a ticket, picked out an especially beautiful girl, and told Shigeyuki to bow to her and take her out there and do the quickstep that he had taught him on the dance floor at home. He told the girl to be gentle with his son, and he drifted away. The girls, staying with American host families who spoke little or no Japanese, were often lonely, and Dr. Fujii devised ways to cheer them up. He was playful and considerate. He organized outings for Japanese food, taking two or three girls at a time. Once, a party was to be given by an American doctor and his wife just three days after one of the Maidens, Michiko Yamaoka, had undergone a major operation. Her face had a dressing on it, and her hands were bandaged and strapped to her body. Dr. Fujii didn’t want her to miss the party, and he got one of the American doctors to arrange for her to ride through the city to the party in an open red limousine, behind a police escort with a siren. On the way, Dr. Fujii had them stop at a drugstore, where he bought Michiko a toy horse for ten cents; he asked the policeman to take a picture of the presentation of this gift. Sometimes he went out alone to have a good time. The other Japanese doctor, named Takahashi, was his hotel roommate. Dr. Takahashi was a light drinker and a light sleeper. Late at night, Dr. Fujii would come in, crash around, flop down, and break into a sleep-shattering symphony of snores. He was having a wonderful time. His relationship with his wife was growing difficult. Ever since his trip to America, he had wanted a house like that of one of the Mount Sinai doctors, and now, to her chagrin, he designed and built, next to the wooden house Shigeyuki was living in, a three-story concrete home for himself alone. On the ground floor it had a living room and an American-style kitchen; his study was on the second floor, lined with bound books, which Shigeyuki eventually found to be volume after volume of meticulous copies he had made in medical school of course notes by a classmate named Iwamoto, who was brighter than he; and on the top floor were an eight-mat Japanese-style bedroom and an American-style bathroom. Toward the end of 1963, he rushed its completion, so it would be ready to house an American couple who had been host parents to some Maidens and were coming to visit after the first of the year. He wanted to sleep there for a few nights to try it out. His wife argued against the haste, but he stubbornly moved in, late in December. The family had made a plan to meet the next morning at eleven for drinks and the traditional New Year’s breakfast of ozoni, a soup, and mochi, rice cakes. Chieko and her husband and some other guests arrived and began drinking. At half past eleven, Dr. Fujii had not appeared, and Shigeyuki sent his seven-year-old son, Masatsugu, out to call up to his window. The boy, getting no answer, tried the door. It was locked. He borrowed a ladder from a neighbor’s house and climbed to the top of it to call some more, and still there was no response. When he told his parents, they became alarmed and hurried out, broke a window next to the locked door to get it open, and, smelling gas, rushed upstairs. There they found Dr. Fujii unconscious, with a gas heater at the head of his futon turned on but not burning. Strangely, a ventilator fan was also turned on; the draft of fresh air from it had probably kept him alive. He was stretched out on his back, looking serene. There were three doctors present—son, son-in-law, and a guest—and, fetching oxygen and other equipment from the clinic, they did everything they could to revive Dr. Fujii. They called in one of the best doctors they knew, a Professor Myanishi, from Hiroshima University. His first question: “Was this a suicide attempt?” The family thought not. There was nothing to be done until January 4th; everything in Hiroshima would be shut down tight for the three-day New Year’s holiday, and hospital services would be at a minimum. Dr. Fujii remained unconscious, but his life signs seemed not to be critical. On the fourth, an ambulance came. As the bearers were carrying Dr. Fujii downstairs, he stirred. Swimming up toward consciousness, he apparently thought he was being rescued, somehow, after the atomic bombing. “Who are you?” he asked the bearers. “Are you soldiers?” In the University Hospital, he began to recover. On January 15th, when the annual sumo-wrestling contests began, he asked for the portable television set he had bought in America, and he sat up in bed watching. He could feed himself, though his handling of chopsticks was a bit awkward. He asked for a bottle of sake. By now, everyone in the family was off guard. On January 25th, his stool was suddenly watery and bloody, and he became dehydrated and lost consciousness. For the next nine years, he lived the life of a vegetable. He remained in the hospital, fed through a tube, for two and a half years, and then was taken home, where his wife and a loyal servant cared for him, feeding him through the tube, changing his diapers, bathing him, massaging him, medicating him for urinary infections he developed. At times, he seemed to respond to voices, and sometimes he seemed to be dimly registering pleasure or displeasure. At ten o’clock on the night of January 11, 1973, Shigeyuki took his son Masatsugu, the boy who had climbed the ladder to call his grandfather on the day of the accident, now a premedical student of eighteen, to Dr. Fujii’s bedside. He wanted the boy to see his grandfather with the eye of a doctor. Masatsugu listened to his grandfather’s breathing and heartbeat and took his blood pressure; he judged his condition stable, and Shigeyuki agreed. The next morning, Shigeyuki’s mother telephoned him, saying that his father looked funny to her. When Shigeyuki arrived, Dr. Fujii was dead. The Doctor’s widow was against having an autopsy done. Shigeyuki wanted one, and he resorted to a ruse. He had the body taken to a crematorium; then, that night, it was taken out a back way and was delivered to the American-run Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, on top of a hill to the east of the city. When the postmortem had been done, Shigeyuki went for the report. Finding his father’s organs distributed in various containers, he had the strangest feeling of a last encounter, and he said, “There you are, Oto-chan—there you are, Papa.” He was shown that his father’s brain had atrophied, his large intestine had become enlarged, and there was a cancer the size of a Ping-Pong ball in his liver. The remains were cremated and buried in the grounds of the Night of the Lotus Temple, of the Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism, near his maternal family home in Nagatsuka. At the moment of the explosion, he had been two miles from the hypocenter, because he had been helping a friend to evacuate some belongings, in fear of an air raid, to the house of a rich man in the hilly suburb of Koi. Appalled by the extent of the ruins he could see from up there, he made his way into the burning center, thinking to get back to his home and church. Going past a silent procession of gruesomely bomb-burned and maimed citizens fleeing the city’s fires, and past houses where people buried under wreckage were crying out for help, he apologized aloud, over and over, for the shame of being unhurt and of not stopping to help. By an astonishing chance, he met his wife, Chisa, carrying Koko, their eight-month-old daughter. Pressed down under the wreckage of the parsonage, Chisa had clawed an escape hole for the baby and herself, and she was now making her way to the home of friends in Ushida. The couple parted as they had met, benumbed. Kiyoshi Tanimoto got as far as Asano Park, by the Kyo River, which was the evacuation point for the people of his neighborhood. There he began ministering to the wounded and the dying. With a basin in his hand, he gave water to the thirsty, who, though unspeakably injured, would raise themselves slightly and bow their thanks to him. Much of the time, he ferried sufferers across the river. Once, as he was lifting a burned victim into the boat, he felt the skin slip off the flesh under his hands; the shock was so great that he had to sit down for a time to recover. He worked that way, with heroic fortitude, for five days and nights. Far enough from the bomb’s hypocenter at the moment of the burst to escape a heavy dosage of radiation from it, he had nonetheless become contaminated by his quick return to the saturated ruins and by having carried in his arms so many of the wounded and having moved so many corpses. In time, he came down with such a severe case of radiation sickness, with a fever of 104 for weeks on end, that his wife thought he was going to die. After two months in bed, he felt well enough to try to resume his ministry. Gradually, Hiroshimans began to repossess the plots of rubble where their houses had stood. Many of them were building crude wooden huts, scavenging fallen tiles from ruins to make their roofs. There was no electricity to light their shacks, and at dusk each evening, lonely, confused, and disillusioned, they gathered in an open area near the Yokogawa railroad station to deal in the black markets and to console each other. Into this zone now trooped, each evening, Kiyoshi Tanimoto and four other Protestant ministers and, with them, a trumpeter and a drummer tooting and thumping “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Taking turns, the ministers stood on a box and preached. With so little to entertain them, a crowd always gathered, even including some panpan girls, as prostitutes who catered to G.I.s had come to be called. The anger of many hibakusha, directed at first against the Americans for dropping the bomb, had by now subtly modulated toward their own government, for having involved the country in a rash and doomed aggression. The preachers said that it was no use blaming the government; that the hope of the Japanese people lay in repenting their sinful past and relying on God: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Because he had no church into which to lure converts, if there should be any, Kiyoshi Tanimoto soon realized the futility of this evangelism. Parts of the reinforced-concrete shell of his Gothic-towered church in the city still stood, and he now turned his mind to trying to find ways to restore the building. He had no money. The building had been insured for a hundred and fifty thousand yen, then less than five hundred dollars, but bank funds had been frozen by the conquerors. Learning that military supplies were being allocated for various kinds of reconstruction, he got requisition slips for “conversion materials” from the prefectural government and began a hunt for things he could use or sell. In that time of widespread thievery and of resentment of the Japanese military, many of the supply depots had been looted. Finally, he found on the island of Kamagari a warehouse of paints. American Occupation personnel had made a mess of the place. Unable to read Japanese labels, they had punctured many cans and kicked them over, apparently to see what was in them. The minister got hold of a boat and carried a big cargo of empty cans to the mainland, and he was able to barter them with an outfit named the Toda Construction Company for a tile roof for his church. Little by little, over the months, he and a few loyal parishioners worked on the carpentry for the building with their own hands, but they lacked the funds to do much. On the sea voyage, an ambitious idea grew in his mind. He would spend his life working for peace. He was becoming convinced that the collective memory of the hibakusha would be a potent force for peace in the world, and that there ought to be in Hiroshima a center where the experience of the bombing could become the focus of international studies of means to assure that atomic weapons would never be used again. Eventually, in the States, without thinking to check with Mayor Shinzo Hamai or anyone else in Hiroshima, he drafted a memorandum sketching this idea. He lived as a guest in the basement of Marvin Green’s Weehawken parsonage. Pastor Green, enlisting the help of some volunteers, became his manager and promoter. From a church directory he compiled a list of all the churches in the country with more than two hundred members or with budgets of more than twenty thousand dollars, and to hundreds of these he sent out hand-done broadsides soliciting invitations for Kiyoshi Tanimoto to lecture. He drew up a series of itineraries, and soon Tanimoto was on the road with a set speech, “The Faith That Grew Out of the Ashes.” At each church, a collection was taken. On and between speaking trips, Tanimoto began submitting his peace-center memorandum to people he hoped might be influential. On one visit to New York from Weehawken, he was taken by a Japanese friend of his to meet Pearl Buck, in the office of her husband’s publishing firm. She read, and he explained, his memorandum. She said she was impressed by the proposal, but she felt she was too old and too busy to help him. She thought, however, that she knew just the person who might: Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. Mr. Tanimoto should send his memo to Mr. Cousins, and she would speak to him about it. One day not long afterward, while he was touring a rural area near Atlanta with his lecture, he got a telephone call from Cousins, who said he was deeply moved by the memorandum—might he put it in the Saturday Review as a guest editorial? On March 5, 1949, the memorandum appeared in the magazine, under the title “Hiroshima’s Idea—an idea that, Cousins’ introductory note said, “the editors enthusiastically endorse and with which they will associate themselves.” Tanimoto had written: The people of Hiroshima, aroused from the daze that followed the atomic bombing of their city on August 6, 1945, know themselves to have been part of a laboratory experiment which proved the longtime thesis of peacemakers. Almost to a man, they have accepted as a compelling responsibility their mission to help in preventing further similar destruction anywhere in the world. . . . The people of Hiroshima . . . earnestly desire that out of their experience there may develop some permanent contribution to the cause of world peace. Towards this end, we propose the establishment of a World Peace Center, international and non-sectarian, which will serve as a laboratory of research and planning for peace education throughout the world. . . . The people of Hiroshima were in fact, to a man, totally unaware of Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s proposal. They were, nonetheless, acutely aware of the special role that the city was destined to play in the world’s memory. On August 6th, the fourth anniversary of the bombing, the national Diet promulgated a law establishing Hiroshima as a Peace Memorial City, and the final design for the commemorative park by the great Japanese architect Kenzo Tange was revealed to the public. At the heart of the park, there would be, in memory of those who had died, a solemn cenotaph in the shape of a haniwa, an arch of clay, presumably a house for the dead, found in prehistoric tombs in Japan. A large crowd gathered for the annual Peace Memorial Ceremony. Tanimoto was far away from all this, touring American churches. A few days after the anniversary, Norman Cousins visited Hiroshima. Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s idea had been pushed aside in Cousins’ mind by a new one, of his own: that an international petition in support of the United World Federalists—a group urging world government—should be submitted to President Truman, who had ordered the dropping of the bomb. Within a short time, 107,854 signatures had been gathered in the city. After a visit to an orphanage, Cousins returned to the States with yet another idea—for “moral adoption” of Hiroshima orphans by Americans, who would send financial support for the children. Signatures for the World Federalist petition were being gathered in the United States as well, and Cousins thrilled Tanimoto, who until then had known very little about the organization, by inviting him to be in the delegation that would present the petition to President Truman. Unfortunately, Harry Truman declined to receive the petitioners and refused to accept the petition. Back home at the beginning of 1950, Tanimoto called on Mayor Hamai and the prefectural governor, Tsunei Kusunose, asking their official support for his peace-center idea. They turned him down. Through a press code and other measures, General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the occupying forces, had strictly prohibited dissemination of or agitation for any reports on the consequences of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings—including the consequence of a desire for peace—and the officials evidently thought that Tanimoto’s peace center might get the local governments in trouble. Tanimoto persevered, calling together a number of leading citizens, and, after Norman Cousins had set up a Hiroshima Peace Center Foundation in New York to receive American funds, these people established the center in Hiroshima, with Tanimoto’s church as its base. At first, it found little to do. The Cadillac arrived, and the minister jubilantly decided to take the gas guzzler for a spin. As he was climbing the heights of Hijiyama, to the east of the city, he was stopped by a policeman and arrested for driving without a license. It happened that he had recently begun serving as chaplain of the police academy, and when the higher-ups at the police station saw him brought in they laughed and let him go. Our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the great blessing Thou hast granted America in enabling her to build in this last decade the greatest civilization in human history. . . . We thank Thee, God, that Japan has been permitted to be one of the fortunate recipients of American generosity. We thank Thee that our people have been given the gift of freedom, enabling them to rise from the ashes of ruin and be reborn. . . . God bless all members of this Senate. . . . Virginia’s Senator A. Willis Robertson rose and declared himself “dumbfounded yet inspired” that a man “whom we tried to kill with an atomic bomb came to the Senate floor and, offering up thanks to the same God we worship, thanked Him for America’s great spiritual heritage, and then asked God to bless every member of the Senate.” A woman named Shizue Masugi now visited Hiroshima from Tokyo. She had led a wildly unconventional life for a Japanese woman of her time. A journalist, married and divorced while young, she had later been the mistress, in turn, of two famous novelists and, later still, had married again. She had written short stories about the bitter loves and bitter solitude of women and was now writing a column for lovelorn women in the big Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. She would become a Catholic before she died, but she would choose to be buried in the Tokeiji Temple, a Zen center founded in 1285 by a monk who felt sorry for women with cruel husbands and decreed that any of them who took asylum in his temple as nuns could consider themselves divorced. On her trip to Hiroshima, she asked Kiyoshi Tanimoto what most needed to be done for women who were hibakusha. He suggested plastic surgery for the Keloid Girls. She started a campaign for funds in the Yomiuri, and soon nine girls were taken to Tokyo for surgery. Later, twelve more were taken to Osaka. Newspapers called them, to their chagrin, Genbaku Otome, a phrase that was translated into English, literally, as A-Bomb Maidens. After their departure, an awkward meeting took place in the Mayor’s office, at which distribution to orphans of the moral-adoption funds was discussed. Cousins had brought fifteen hundred dollars, but it turned out that two hundred dollars of this amount had been set aside for six particular children, sixty-five dollars had been allocated to the Maidens, and a hundred and nineteen dollars had been spent by Tanimoto at the Fukuya department store for briefcases to be presented as gifts by Norman Cousins to the directors of six orphanages. This left eleven hundred and sixty-five dollars, or only about two dollars and seventy cents for each of four hundred and ten orphans. The city officials, who thought they were in charge of the project, were furious about the sums Tanimoto had deducted. In a report of this meeting, the Hiroshima paper Chugoku Shimbun reported, “Rev. Tanimoto responded, ‘I was following Mr. Cousins’s instructions in this, not my own wishes.’ “ Tanimoto had lately been getting used to criticism. His long absences from his church for trips to America had earned him the nickname of A-bomb minister. Hiroshima doctors had wanted to know why the Maidens were not operated on in Hiroshima. And why just girls? Why not boys? Some people thought they saw Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s name in the paper too often. The enormous Cadillac had not gone down well, even though it had quickly turned out to be a dog and had had to be junked. On May 5, 1955, Kiyoshi Tanimoto took off with the girls from Iwakuni Airport in a United States Military Air Transport plane. As the girls were being settled in host homes around New York, he was hustled off to the West Coast for the start of yet another fund-raising tour. Among other appointments on his itinerary was one for the evening of Wednesday, May 11th, at the NBC studios in Los Angeles, for what Cousins gave him to understand was to be a local television interview that would be helpful to the project. That evening, somewhat fuddled, he was seated before bright lights and cameras on a living-room-like set. An American gentleman he had just met, named Ralph Edwards, beamed and, turning to the camera, addressed an estimated forty million Americans he attracted every Wednesday night: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ‘This Is Your Life.’ The ticking you hear in the background is a clock counting off the seconds to 8:15 A.M., August 6, 1945. And seated here with me is a gentleman whose life was changed by the last tick of that clock as it reached eight-fifteen. Good evening, Sir. Would you tell us your name?” “Kiyoshi Tanimoto.” “And what is your occupation?” “I am a minister.” “And where is your home?” “Hiroshima, Japan.” “And where were you on August 6, 1945, at eight-fifteen in the morning?” Tanimoto had no chance to answer. The ticking grew louder and louder, and there was an uproar from kettledrums. “This is Hiroshima,” Edwards said as a mushroom cloud grew on the viewers’ screens, “and in that fateful second on August 6, 1945, a new concept of life and death was given its baptism. And tonight’s principal subject—you, Reverend Tanimoto!—were an unsuspecting part of that concept. . . . We will pick up the threads of your life in a moment, Reverend Tanimoto, after this word from Bob Warren, our announcer, who has something very special to say to the girls in the audience.” The fateful clock of doom, now unheard, ticked off sixty additional seconds as Bob Warren tried to remove Hazel Bishop nail polish from a blonde’s fingernails—an effort that was unsuccessful, even though he resorted to using a metal scouring pad, with which he had succeeded in removing rust from a frying pan. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was totally unprepared for what followed. He sat there, torpid, sweating, and tongue-tied, as, after the manner of the famous program, his life was sketchily reviewed. Through an archway came Miss Bertha Sparkey, an elderly Methodist missionary who had taught him in his youth about Christ. Then came his friend Marvin Green, with a joke about life in divinity school. Then Edwards pointed out in the studio audience some parishioners Tanimoto had had just after his ordination, during a brief temporary pastorate in the Japanese-American Hollywood Independence Church. Next came the shocker. In walked a tall, fattish American man, whom Edwards introduced as Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay on the Hiroshima mission. In a shaky voice, Lewis told about the flight. Tanimoto sat there with a face of wood. At one point, Lewis broke off, closed his eyes, and rubbed his forehead, and forty million watchers across the land must have thought he was crying. Edwards: “Did you write something in your log at that time?” Lewis: “I wrote down the words ‘My God, what have we done?’ ” After that, Chisa Tanimoto trotted onstage with clipped steps, because she was wearing what she never wore at home—a kimono. In Hiroshima, she had been given two days to uproot herself—and the four children she and her husband now had—and get to Los Angeles. There they had all been incarcerated in a hotel, kept strictly away from their husband and father. For the first time on the show, Tanimoto’s expression changed—to surprise; he seemed to have become a stranger to pleasure. Next, two of the Maidens, Toyoko Minowa and Tadako Emori, were presented in silhouette behind a translucent screen, and Edwards made a pitch to the audience for money for the Maidens’ operations. And, finally, the four Tanimoto children—daughter Koko, who had been an infant in the bombing, now ten; son Ken, seven; daughter Jun, four; and son Shin, two—came running out into their father’s arms. CONFIDENTIAL FROM: TOKYO To: SECRETARY OF STATE MAY 12, 1955 EMBASSY-USIS SHARE WASHINGTON CONCERN LEST HIROSHIMA GIRLS PROJECT GENERATE UNFAVORABLE PUBLICITY. . . . TANIMOTO IS LOOKED UPON HERE AS SOMETHING OF A PUBLICITY SEEKER. MAY WELL TRY TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF TRIP TO RAISE FUNDS FOR HIROSHIMA MEMORIAL PEACE CENTER, HIS PET PROJECT. DO NOT BELIEVE HE IS RED OR RED-SYMPATHIZER, BUT HE CAN EASILY BECOME SOURCE OF MISCHIEVOUS PUBLICITY. . . . By diplomatic pouch: SECRET The Reverend Tanimoto is pictured as one who appears to be anti-Communist and probably sincere in his efforts to assist the girls. . . . However, in his desire to enhance his own prestige and importance he might ignorantly, innocently, or purposefully lend himself to or pursue a leftist line. . . . RALPH J. BLAKE AMERICAN CONSUL GENERAL, KOBE On August 6th, the tenth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Tanimoto placed a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. On that day, in Hiroshima itself, far away from him, a genuine Japanese peace movement, riding the anger over the Lucky Dragon incident, got under way. Five thousand delegates attended the first World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. The Tanimotos returned to Japan in December. Nor did he have any place in the Japanese peace movement, for he had been out of the country at crucial moments in its development, and, besides, his Christian outlook made him suspicious of the radical groups that were on the cutting edge of anti-nuclear activity. While he was away on this last trip, a national organization called Nihon Gensuikyo, the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, had come into being, and there had been a surge of activity pushing the Diet for medical care for hibakusha. Like many hibakusha, he was repelled by the growing political coloration of these doings, and he stayed away from the mass meetings in Peace Park on the subsequent anniversaries. Koko the Tanimoto daughter who as an infant had experienced the bombing, had been taken almost every year to the American-run A.B.C.C. for a physical checkup. On the whole, her health had been all right, although, like many hibakusha who had been babies at the time of the bombing, her growth was definitely stunted. Now, an adolescent in junior high school, she went again. As usual, she undressed in a cubicle and put on a white hospital gown. When she had finished going through a battery of tests, she was taken this time into a brightly lit room where there was a low stage, backed by a wall marked with a measurement grid. She was stood against the wall, with lights in her eyes so glaring she could not see beyond them; she could hear Japanese and American voices. One of the former told her to take off the gown. She obeyed, and stood there for what seemed an eternity, with tears streaming down her face. Koko was so frightened and hurt by this experience that she was unable to tell anyone about it for twenty-five years. In the summer on Pearl Buck’s farm, the Tanimoto children had played with the dozen orphans, mostly Oriental, that the American author had taken under her wing. The family had been impressed by Mrs. Buck’s generosity, and now they decided to keep and raise the child who had been entrusted to them. Back in Japan, Koko took a job in Tokyo, working for an oil-drilling firm, Odeco. She told no one she was a hibakusha. In time, she found someone she could confide in—her boyfriend’s best friend. He turned out, in the end, to be the man she married. She had a miscarriage, which she and her family attributed to the bomb. She and her husband went to the A.B.C.C. to have their chromosomes checked, and though nothing abnormal was found they decided not to try again to have a child. In time, they adopted two babies. These last few years when August 6th approaches, voices are heard lamenting that this year, once again, the commemorative events will be held by a divided peace movement. . . . The sentence inscribed on the Memorial Cenotaph—“Rest in peace, for the mistake shall not be repeated”—embodies the passionate hope of the human race. The appeal of Hiroshima . . . has nothing to do with politics. When foreigners come to Hiroshima, you often hear them say, “The politicians of the world should come to Hiroshima and contemplate the world’s political problems on their knees before this Cenotaph.” Kiyoshi Tanimoto was over seventy now. The average age of all hibakusha was sixty-two. The surviving hibakusha had been polled by Chugoku Shimbun in 1984, and 54.3 per cent of them said they thought that nuclear weapons would be used again. Tanimoto read in the papers that the United States and the Soviet Union were steadily climbing the steep steps of deterrence. He and Chisa both drew health-maintenance allowances as hibakusha, and he had a modest pension from the United Church of Japan. He lived in a snug little house with a radio and two television sets, a washing machine, an electric oven, and a refrigerator, and he had a compact Mazda automobile, manufactured in Hiroshima. He ate too much. He got up at six every morning and took an hour’s walk with his small woolly dog, Chiko. He was slowing down a bit. His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty. ♦

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