Page 1 of 2 The horror of Hiroshima lives on
By Frida Berrigan
I can't help myself. I still think it's worth bringing up, even for the 64th
time. I'm talking, of course, about the atomic obliteration, at the end of a
terrible, world-rending war, of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on
August 6 and 9, 1945, whose anniversaries - if that's even the appropriate word
for it - are once again upon us.
In this, at least, I know I'm not a typical American: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
still seem all too real to me. As the child of anti-nuclear activists, I was
raised to pay attention to two significant dates in American history - the day
when the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber named after the pilot's mother,
dropped Little Boy, a five-ton uranium explosion bomb, on Hiroshima; and
the moment, three days later, when another plane, jokingly named Bock's Car
(after the plane's original pilot), dropped Fat Man (a moniker supposedly given
it in honor of former British prime minister Winston Churchill), a more complex
plutonium implosion bomb, on Nagasaki.
When I was little, in preparation for those dates - and in this we were truly a
minority of a minority in this country - we showed films documenting the
aftermath of the atomic bombings. To this day, I can remember threading our old
16mm projector and then watching the shocking, shaky, grainy, black-and-white
footage of ruined cities and ruined bodies filling the living room wall as a
somber voice-over narrated the facts.
So now, as the 64th anniversary of so many deaths approaches and thinking the
unthinkable remains incomprehensibly in vogue, it seems worth the bother to
recall one more time just what it means for the unthinkable to become reality.
The death count
In Hiroshima, Little Boy's huge fireball and explosion killed 70,000 to 80,000
people instantly. Another 70,000 were seriously injured. As Joseph Siracusa,
author of Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction, writes: "In one
terrible moment, 60% of Hiroshima… was destroyed. The blast temperature was
estimated to reach over a million degrees Celsius, which ignited the
surrounding air, forming a fireball some 840 feet [256 meters] in diameter."
Three days later, Fat Man exploded 561 meters above Nagasaki, with the force of
22,000 tons of TNT. According to "Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered," a web
resource on the bombings developed for young people and educators, 286,000
people lived in Nagasaki before the bomb was dropped; 74,000 of them were
killed instantly and another 75,000 were seriously injured.
In addition to those who died immediately, or soon after the bombings, tens of
thousands more would succumb to radiation sickness and other radiation-induced
maladies in the months, and then years, that followed.
In an article written while he was teaching math at Tufts University in 1983,
Tadatoshi Akiba calculated that, by 1950, another 200,000 people had died as a
result of the Hiroshima bomb, and 140,000 more were dead in Nagasaki. Akiba was
later elected mayor of Hiroshima and became an outspoken proponent of nuclear
disarmament.
Surviving Hiroshima
Those who somehow managed to survive call themselves Hibakusha, which
literally means "those who were bombed". Most of the inhabitants of those two
cities who miraculously made it through those hot and terrible August days are,
if alive, now in their 70s or 80s, and they continue to tell their unique
stories of horror, destruction, and survival. Their urgent pleas for peace,
disarmament, and atonement often go unheard by a 21st century American culture
that often seems to barely recall what happened last week, much less 64 years
ago. Many of them have, over the years, traveled to the United States to tell
their stories and show their scars, demanding that we never forget and that the
world work towards nuclear disarmament.
Akihiro Takahashi is 77 years old now, but part of him will always be the
14-year-old boy standing in line with his classmates on August 6, 1945, less
than a mile from where Little Boy detonated. He still recalls how he and his
classmates were knocked off their feet by the blast. When he stood up again, he
"felt the city of Hiroshima had disappeared all of a sudden. Then I looked at
myself and found my clothes had turned into rags due to the heat. I was
probably burned at the back of the head, on my back, on both arms and both
legs. My skin was peeling and hanging."
Since that time, Takahashi has endured many operations and spent countless
hours in the hospital to repair the damage wrought in that single instant. On
that August morning, he began to walk home - though there were few homes left
in the leveled city - stopping to relieve the terrible heat and pain of his
burns in the Ota River that flows through Hiroshima.
Along the way, he encountered injured friends, including a boy with terrible
burns on the bottoms of his feet whom he half carried along with him. "When we
were resting because we were so exhausted," he related in an oral history, "I
found my grandfather's brother and his wife, in other words, great uncle and
great aunt, coming toward us. That was quite [a] coincidence... [W]e have a
proverb about 'meeting Buddha in hell'. My encounter with my relatives at that
time was just like that. They seem[ed] to be the Buddha to me wandering in the
living hell."
Jigoku de hotoke ni au you is the phrase. In English, the equivalent
would be "like meeting a Buddha in hell; an oasis in a desert," something rare
that provides great relief. There were not many such oases in Hiroshima that
day.
Imagining Nagasaki
Akihiro Takahashi's story (of which the above was but a small part) is just one
of so many thousands - and hardly one of the grimmest. Of course, 80,000 to
140,000 stories went with their potential tellers to their graves that day.
Along with the stories that could be told, there were also the photographs to
help us imagine the unimaginable.
Yosuke Yamahata was 28 years old and working for the Japanese News Information
Bureau in August 1945. Along with Eiji Yamada, a painter, and Jun Higashi, a
writer, he was dispatched to devastated Nagasaki by the Japanese military just
hours after Fat Man exploded and instructed to "photograph the situation so as
to be as useful as possible for military propaganda".
Their train arrived at the outskirts of the ruined city in the middle of the
night. Here's how Yamahata describes the scene: "I remember vividly the cold
night air and the beautiful starry sky ... A warm wind began to blow. Here and
there in the distance I saw many small fires, like elf fires, smoldering.
Nagasaki had been completely destroyed."
By the time the sun rose, Yamahata had made his way to the center of what was
no longer a city. As the day went on, he retraced his steps, along the way
taking photographs of the carnage and destruction until he was back at the
train station.
All in all, he took 119 photographs that day, capturing some of the most
haunting and enduring images of the atomic age. In one, a bloodied boy holding
a rice ball stares, his head covered with an air raid hood (a dark cloth that
the Japanese military handed out to civilians telling them it would protect
them from American bombs); in another, an exhausted-looking woman nurses a
badly burnt baby.
In almost every image, the ground is littered with burnt bodies and unattached
limbs, household items, rubble, and timbers. As he walked through the missing
city, people cried out for water or for help uncovering bodies buried in the
rubble. "It is perhaps unforgivable," reflected Yamahata, "but in fact at the
time I was completely calm and composed. In other words, perhaps it was just
too much, too enormous to absorb".
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