5.1.14 Oppenheimer

The heat was tremendous. And I felt like my body was burning all over. For my burning body the cold water of the river was as precious as the treasure. Then I left the river, and I walked along the railroad tracks in the direction of my home. On the way, I ran into an another friend of mine, Tokujiro Hatta. I wondered why the soles of his feet were badly burnt. It was unthinkable to get burned there. But it was undeniable fact the soles were peeling and red muscle was exposed. Even I myself was terribly burnt, I could not go home ignoring him. I made him crawl using his arms and knees. Next, I made him stand on his heels and I supported him. We walked heading toward my home repeating the two methods. When we were resting because we were so exhausted, I found my grandfather’s brother and his wife, in other words, great uncle and great aunt, coming toward us. That was quite coincidence. As you know, we have a proverb about meeting Buddha in Hell. My encounter with my relatives at that time was just like that. They seem to be the Buddha to me wandering in the living hell.

When we were near in Hatchobori and since I had been holding my son in my arms, the young woman in front of me said, ‘I will be getting off here. Please take this seat.’ We were just changing places when there was a strange smell and sound. It suddenly became dark and before I knew it, I had jumped outside…. I held [my son] firmly and looked down on him. He had been standing by the window and I think fragments of glass had pierced his head. His face was a mess because of the blood flowing from his head. But he looked at my face and smiled. His smile has remained glued in my memory. He did not comprehend what had happened. And so he looked at me and smiled at my face which was all bloody. I had plenty of milk which he drank all throughout that day. I think my child sucked the poison right out of my body. And soon after that he died. Yes, I think that he died for me.

“I was three years old at the time of the bombing. I don’t remember much, but I do recall that my surroundings turned blindingly white, like a million camera flashes going off at once.

Then, pitch darkness.

I was buried alive under the house, I’ve been told. When my uncle finally found me and pulled my tiny three year old body out from under the debris, I was unconscious. My face was misshapen. He was certain that I was dead.

Thankfully, I survived. But since that day, mysterious scabs began to form all over my body. I lost hearing in my left ear, probably due to the air blast. More than a decade after the bombing, my mother began to notice glass shards growing out of her skin – debris from the day of the bombing, presumably. My younger sister suffers from chronic muscle cramps to this day, on top of kidney issues that has her on dialysis three times a week. ‘What did I do to the Americans?’ she would often say, ‘Why did they do this to me?’.”

“There were no air raid alarms on the morning of August 9, 1945. We had been hiding out in the local bomb shelter for several days, but one by one, people started to head home. My siblings and I played in front of the bomb shelter entrance, waiting to be picked up by our grandfather.

Then, at 11:02am, the sky turned bright white. My siblings and I were knocked off our feet and violently slammed back into the bomb shelter. We had no idea what had happened.

As we sat there shell-shocked and confused, heavily injured burn victims came stumbling into the bomb shelter en masse. Their skin had peeled off their bodies and faces and hung limply down on the ground, in ribbons. Their hair was burnt down to a few measly centimeters from the scalp. Many of the victims collapsed as soon as they reached the bomb shelter entrance, forming a massive pile of contorted bodies. The stench and heat were unbearable.

My siblings and I were trapped in there for three days.

Finally, my grandfather found us and we made our way back to our home. I will never forget the hellscape that awaited us. Half burnt bodies lay stiff on the ground, eye balls gleaming from their sockets. Cattle lay dead along the side of the road, their abdomens grotesquely large and swollen. Thousands of bodies bopped up and down the river, bloated and purplish from soaking up the water. ‘Wait! Wait!’ I pleaded, as my grandfather trod a couple paces ahead of me. I was terrified of being left behind.”

At the time of the bombing, I was two years and two months old. That morning, I was sleeping on the second floor of our Japanese- style wooden house in a Japanese-style bed, when suddenly the blast from the atomic bomb crushed our house. Fortunately I was not harmed, maybe because I was protected by the bed itself and the ceiling of the house did not hit me directly. After the blast, my mother, who had been preparing food, searched for me in the rubble of what had been my bedroom, and found I was still sleeping in the bed. She got me out of the ruins of our house, which burned to the ground ten to fifteen minutes after the initial blast. These are the dual physical effects of an atomic bomb: first the blast and then the fire.

Research shows that “short-distance survivors” – those who were located within 1.5 km of the hypocentre of the blast – have an average rate of leukaemia about fifty times higher than the average rate of leukaemia occurrences among distant survivors. This was the first finding of an atomic bomb radiation-induced disease, leukaemia.

The initial leukaemia peak disappeared after about fifteen years, but to my surprise a second leukaemia peak is now appearing, this time among the survivors who were children younger than ten years old at the time of the bombing. They are now approximately 85 years old. These survivors develop a special type of leukaemia, called myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), which occurs in the elderly.

It is very clear that the atomic bomb affects the human body for a lifetime, which means that the atomic bomb radiation affected survivors’ DNA. Double-strand DNA is the driver of the cells that make up the human body. Radiation from the atomic bomb injured these double-strand DNA and, while still hot from the radiation, the damaged DNA erroneously re-coupled, developing malignant genes, or abnormal gene fusions that cause various cancers, including this second type of leukaemia, MDS.

Nagasaki University doctors performed extensive psychological research in 1995, on the occasion of 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing. We found that about 7,000 survivors showed a very high incidence of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder after fifty years, a very large-scale psychological consequence. They suffer from flashbacks to the memory of the bombing, causing their mental health to deteriorate. This was the first data about psychological research. I showed this data at the first Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, held in Oslo in 2013.

There are also other non-medical effects. First of all, there were financial or economic problems. Most of the survivors lost their houses and belongings and became destitute. In the first five to almost ten years, no economic help was provided by the Japanese government. Because of this, survivors united to protest to the government, asking for hospital and medical care as well as economic support. That was the beginning of the survivors’ movement, whose long history of protest still continues today. Survivors want the government to admit that their present condition, physically, mentally and socially, is due to the atomic bombing.

There was some social stigma. Some people could not get married in the very early recovery phase, in the 1950s and early 1960s. Many people who were not exposed to the atomic bomb were hesitant to allow their sons or daughters to get married to atomic bomb survivors. That was a kind of social discrimination. But gradually this segregation disappeared and many survivors could have a normal family life. It took almost ten years to reach an understanding of the effects of the atomic bomb. Some people were heavily affected – those who were located a short distance from the centre of the blast – but those who were some distance away seemed fine. Once this was widely recognized, there was no more of such discrimination in allowing marriage with survivors.

Until just before 11 o’clock, [my twin brother and I] were out on the veranda. Then we got hungry and went into the sitting room in the back of the house. While we were sitting there at the table, a whitish-blue light shot across the room. Then came a roar that seemed to shake the whole house.

The roof had been blown off, and we could see the sky. The pillars and walls were embedded with large numbers of sharp-edged fragments of broken glass. The other houses in the neighbourhood were in the same state of destruction. Across the harbour, the central part of the city was covered in clouds of dust.

My twin brother and I evacuated to the bomb shelter in our yard, where we waited for our father and our older brother to come home. About an hour had passed when our oldest brother arrived home from his factory. He told us that it was too dangerous to stay in that small bomb shelter and that we should move to a larger one nearby.

The bigger bomb shelter, which was like a tunnel carved into the cliff-side, was filled with mothers and their children. Children who were outside when the bomb detonated had been showered with heat rays and had suffered burns on any exposed skin. Other children were crying because they had been injured by shards of glass and other fragments that had been thrown by the blast. We spent that entire night waiting anxiously for our father to come back. By the next morning, however, he still hadn’t returned. At that point, the three of us went to find him.

There were many dead bodies amongst the debris littering the roads. The faces, arms and legs of the dead had become swollen and discoloured, causing them to look like black rubber dolls. As we stepped on the bodies with our shoes, the skin would come peeling off like that of an over-ripe peach, exposing the white fat underneath.

There were many dead bodies floating in the river as well. We were drawn to one that belonged to a young woman of about 18 or 19, from which a long white belt was dragging behind. When we got closer, we saw that this white belt was really her intestines, which were protruding from the side of her abdomen. Feeling nauseous, we turned our eyes away and hurried off in the direction of our father’s workplace.

Our father’s factory had been reduced to nothing but scorched metal framing. Through the demolished walls we saw three men working with shovels. We called out, “Our name is Yamawaki. Where is our father?” One of the men glanced over and said, “Your father is over there.” He pointed in the direction of the demolished office building.

The three of us dashed off in the direction he had pointed to. What we found there was our father’s corpse, swollen and scorched like all of the others. As we stood there stunned, the men with the shovels told us that if we wanted to take our father back home, it was better to cremate him there first. The crematories had also been destroyed in the bombing and could not be used.

Not knowing what else to do, we went around the scorched ruins of the factory and gathered up smouldering pieces of wood so we could perform the cremation. We put our father’s body on top of a bed of burned posts and then piled up the pieces of wood on top of him. When we lit it on fire, the flames rose high in the air. We put our hands together to say prayers for him. When we looked up again after finishing our prayers, we saw both of our father’s feet were sticking out from the fire. That was an absolutely unbearable thing to see. Our feelings must have showed because the man from the factory told us we had better go home for the day and come back the next day to collect the remains.

The next morning we looked around the kitchen area of our demolished house for a pot to put our father’s remains in. When we arrived at the place where we had cremated our father’s body, however, a shock awaited us. The body still remained as it had been the day before, in a half-cremated state and covered over with ash. There was no one from the company around. We three brothers only wanted to collect our father’s cremated bones, but his half-burned body was lying exposed. The only parts of his body that had been cremated were the tips of his hands and feet and part of his stomach. We could only pick out a few of his bones.

This body, which was like a skeleton covered in ash, was far more gruesome than the corpse of someone just deceased. It was even more unpleasant when we thought about how this body belonged to the same father we had always talked to and eaten meals with. It got so that I could no longer bear to look at our father’s body and I said to my brother, “Let’s go home now and leave his body here.”

Thinking back on that, I know that it was not the right thing to do. My brother looked at our father’s body for a while longer and then said that there was nothing more we could do except to take his skull home. My brother had brought tongs, but when the tongs touched our father’s skull it crumbled apart like a plaster model and the half-burned brains came flowing out. Letting out a scream, my brother threw down the tongs and darted away. The other two of us ran after him. These were the circumstances under which we forsook our father’s body.”