Day 288: Nagasaki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the base of Mount Kompira southeast of the hypocenter, Nagasaki University School of Medicine and its affiliated hospital host multiple organizations that serve hibakusha medical needs, document historical and current studies on radiation-related medical conditions, and provide the public with data on nuclear weapons stockpiles across the world. Nagasaki’s famous one-legged stone torii gateway still perches, blackened and erect, at the hillside entrance to Sanno Shrine. Up the hill, two scarred camphor trees—once considered dead after the bomb’s blast and heat had severed their trunks and branches and scorched them bare—are now more than twenty feet in circumference and rise fifty-five and sixty-nine feet high, their massive branches reaching out in all directions, creating a thick green canopy over the walkway leading to the shrine.
Except for those like Yoshida who cannot hide their disfigurement, most of the approximately fifty thousand aging hibakusha living in the Nagasaki area remain invisible to the public eye. Many avoid the hypocenter district altogether because of the terrifying feelings that still arise. Others agonize that their family members’ bones lie beneath today’s bustling roads, buildings, and memorial parks. Some bow their heads in silence as they pass by in their cars or by train.
The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) was introduced in Japan in the 1990s and came into public awareness as a psychological condition after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, but counseling remains culturally foreign and rarely available. Images of hideously burned people reaching out for help are permanently engraved in many survivors’ memories. One woman feels like she’s going insane because she can’t forget the voices of small children and their mother buried beneath their collapsed house screaming for help. Another has never eaten a pomegranate since watching—and smelling—one of her family members being cremated on top of wood from a pomegranate tree. For many, silence has remained the only way to survive.

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

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

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

~~Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War -by- Susan Southard