Peace Quest: The Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By Joe Copeland

Hiroshima and Nagasaki's survivors of atomic bombings have made it their mission to work for peace and nuclear disarmament, a quest they have pursued for 70 years even as they coped with health effects, grief and the rebuilding of their cities. Prize-winning Seattle journalist and Fulbright scholar Joe Copeland, who has interviewed survivors over nearly three decades, provides a compelling look at these remarkable people, their sense of purpose and their hopes, born out of tragic loss, for a better world. This first edition builds on his research at Hiroshima City University's Hiroshima Peace Institute under a Fulbright scholar research grant and his writings on his site, HiroshimaStories.com. Working with former Pulitzer Board member Joann Byrd as his editor, he vividly portrays the survivors' mission over time and in the context of today's events.

"In this riveting look back at the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, Joe Copeland weaves the intrigue of wartime politics with the personal stories of those who survived the world's first and only nuclear bomb. The result is a rich tapestry of human tragedy, arrogance and hope. " – Mary Bruno, author of An American River and former Editor-in-Chief of Crosscut.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joe Copeland
• Release date: Aug 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996655200

Joe Copeland

Joe Copeland is a veteran U.S. journalist who has been an editor for Crosscut.com, a non-profit news site for the Pacific Northwest, since 2010. He was an editorial writer and columnist with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper before its closure in March 2009. Before joining the Post-Intelligencer, he wrote and edited for The Herald of Everett, most recently as editorial page editor for 13 years. He has reported from Japan several times, including from Hiroshima and Nagasaki under grants as part of the Akiba Project in Japan, from the East-West Center in Honolulu as a Jefferson Fellow, and as a Fulbright Scholar visiting researcher at Hiroshima City University’s Hiroshima Peace Institute for three months in 2009. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Patti; they have two grown children, Sean and Cathy. He plans further versions of this book as well as other works related to the survivors of the atomic bombings. He maintains a blog, Hiroshimastories.com, started as part of the Fulbright research, where you can read additional stories and learn about future publications.

Book preview

Survivors on a Quest

The image burned in the minds of so many survivors is that, as they tried to make their way out of Hiroshima with their own injuries, they passed by the injured and dying who begged, Water, water.

The universal training at the time was that it would be dangerous to give a badly burned person water. All these years later, though, the survivors wish they had done so, if only to give a little comfort to those who were surely going to die.

As World War II ended, in August 1945, atomic bombs devastated the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands, destroying huge stretches of the cities and leaving an atomic legacy of radiation, death, illness and injury.

Somehow, out of the unparalleled destruction, the survivors — hibakusha, literally bomb-affected persons in Japanese — have come together around a goal of ensuring that their experience saves the world from the prospect of ever seeing such suffering again.

It is seven decades since the start of the atomic age. Now, they worry whether they can bring the world to listen to the pleas of No more Hiroshimas, no more Nagasakis.

They have shown tremendous resolve in their personal recoveries and their advocacy for peace, their efforts to tell the world their stories, and to urge a world in which an ethic of non-violence replaces perpetual warfare.

To this day, the hibakusha have been left to wonder if anybody is listening to the lessons they pulled together out of the rubble of the two cities and their lives. Yet, they have never ceased appealing for peace, nuclear disarmament and, ultimately, the abolition of atomic weaponry.

It’s that dedication — as well as the importance of their lessons — that has drawn me back to Nagasaki and Hiroshima over time.

Many of them faced the most precarious of circumstances, often even worse well after the bombing than in its immediate aftermath. The survivors have suffered cancers, lethargy they link to radiation exposure, burns and injuries that have, in many cases, never fully healed.

They were left, to a person, with profound losses of friends and families, and the need to rebuild their lives amid demolished cities where social support systems were frayed or torn apart. And they had to do it with grim memories of charred bodies and of seeing living victims with almost unimaginable injuries.

Parents lost children, sometimes never finding any trace of them in areas where it’s said that digging even a bit into the ground will still turn up some small bones or bits of the effects of the victims.

Most of today’s survivors were young at the time of the bombing. The bombings altered their lives irreversibly, destroying communities, taking away untold personal opportunities. Some of the children lost both parents but managed to find their way. Those were bleak postwar years in Japan, and they often received much less support from neighbors and family than we would like to think. There were so many street children in Hiroshima that many became easy pickings for recruitment into street gangs. Other hibakusha faced years and even decades of treatment for their horrible burns and other injuries.

Almost all survivors have lived with worries about their health, even those who apparently came through relatively unscathed. Some know that their chromosomes have damage, and many have fought repeated battles with different cancers. Thousands still take part in regular medical tests conducted in a joint U.S.-Japan research effort to establish the effects of radiation on human beings.

The chronic fatigue that seems to have afflicted untold numbers of hibakusha caused problems at school and work. And it exacerbated early discrimination against survivors, whom some feared at first might carry contagion. But in a society where prospective marriage partners’ families are quick to worry about any social or health blemishes, many have raised families and enjoy grandchildren.

Despite it all, many managed to focus not on their losses and challenges, but on saving the world from similar horrors.

Out of the hundreds of thousands who survived, the number of people who actively speak about their experiences is relatively small, but it’s long felt to me that those who do speak out represent all the rest.

When I first went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1986, the survivors and officials alike were already talking about the aging of the hibakusha, fearing that their voices would be lost. Over the years, though, as some of the most active witnesses for peace have died or become too old, others have stepped forward. That process cannot last forever. But the hibakusha have shown remarkable resilience, strength and, especially given their physical suffering, a determination to live to tell their stories.

In this book, I present some of their stories, a sampling of what I’ve written as a journalist, to mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing and to tell about their efforts, courage and dedication. This volume leaves for later editions other stories, including some about other people whom I most treasure having met.

Most of these inspiring stories draw on interviews conducted in Japan during 2009, when I was supported by a Fulbright grant, hosted by Hiroshima City University’s Hiroshima Peace Institute and the invaluable help of interpreters, friends and those who have engaged with the survivors in peace efforts.

These are the stories of hibakusha who once saw the dying beg, Water, water, and have translated that around the world, to plead, Peace, peace.

The remains of what had been a modern building on the riverfront, originally a hall for a center promoting the Prefecture of Hiroshima and its products. It’s now known as the Atomic Bomb Dome.

A School’s ‘Miraculous Survivor’

In the elementary school near where my wife and I lived in Hiroshima a few years ago, Kiyoko Imori was one of the few students to survive the atomic bombing. And she has endured all the decades of uncertainty and, at times, isolation that followed. She’s been by far the longest-lived of all the students and teachers at Honkawa Elementary School.

She has long been in fragile health with conditions likely associated with her radiation exposure, but she was sharp, lively and cheerful when I met her at her longtime Yokohama home in 2009.

Imori has since suffered worsening health challenges, and became bedridden after being hospitalized with pneumonia in October 2013, according to Hiroshima’s daily paper, the Chugoku Shimbun, in June 2014. The reporter wrote, Perhaps on account of her physical condition, Ms. Imori occasionally spoke in a detached manner about the events of August 6, 1945. I remember parts of our conversation that way but she was also engaging. And there were limits to what she recalled from more than six decades earlier, but also powerful details and wit. The Hiroshima reporter’s interview seemed to catch something else I remember: the devotion and sometimes-playful interplay between Imori (whose maiden name was Tsutsui) and her husband, Hiroteru. There’s a picture with both of them smiling and holding hands with a caption saying that her spouse responded to her praise of his care for her by saying, You’ll outlive me.

I got to meet Imori because of living near the elementary school where she had been a student. A parent from the neighborhood told me about her; after some checking, the parent, a friend and the leader of a peace group helped put me in contact with her.

Imori was living in Yokohama, where she had moved many years earlier. Since turning 40, she has had recurring bouts with cancer and suffered from a variety of health ailments, but she was focused, pleasant and energetic as we talked that afternoon. And she quickly began talking about the events of August 6.

Like almost everyone who remembers that August 6, she recalls it as a day that started with beautiful weather, sunny and cloudless. It was, in fact, just what U.S. aircrews and their support team had wanted, a day with perfect visibility.

It was a good walk from her house to Honkawa Elementary School. It wasn’t the neighborhood school she might have normally attended, but her father thought it would be a good one. Indeed, according to the Chugoku article, she could have been evacuated with other elementary school children to the safety of the countryside. But families could choose to keep children at home. Imori said she had not wanted to be sent to the countryside, and her father had decided to keep the family together.

That morning, my father … had a day off so he was at home, Imori said. Growing shortages caused by Japan’s war troubles led to electricity rationing, and his workplace had a day off for energy conservation.

A little brother also was home, along with her mother, when an 11-year-old school friend came to the house to go with Imori to school. And I said goodbye to my parents and left them, for good, Imori recalled.

As she would later tell young people on annual visits to a Yokohama school, Japan faced shortages and she was always hungry. While doing their best under the circumstances, people were eager for an end to the war. Such were the wartime circumstances, but as for myself, I had been quite a happy girl, much loved by my parents, she said.

She said that she and her friend, Kazuko Aohara, walked through the Honkawa school’s main gate and, as required at the time, bowed in front of the school’s hoanden, a small, shrine-shaped structure in which the Emperor’s writings were kept.

The friends then went directly to the shoe shelves along a concrete wall in one of the buildings to take off their shoes and put on the ones worn inside the school. The moment I entered the school, the bomb was dropped, she told me. And it became all black inside, dark in the building. And then after a while, I saw some lights. I went out of the building and saw the entire school compound was in fires.

She and Aohara tried to make sense of what they were seeing. As far as the eye could see, everything and everywhere was on raging fire, she told students. "It was literally a sea of fire. We saw flames gushing out of the windows of the school building we had just rushed out of. In spite of the scorching heat, we were standing there, completely petrified.

Then two women teachers burst out of the school building. One of the teachers was bleeding from her ear. Seeing us, they urged us to jump into the river right behind the school. Today, a road runs between the school and the Honkawa River, and there’s a path where people bike or walk. But at the time, the school property went right up to the river.

At times, the tide made the water in the river, just a few miles away from Japan’s Inland Sea along the Pacific Ocean, very low. Fortunately, it was probably around high tide, and there was a lot of water in it, she told the students in her speech (which her husband had