Masako's Story: Surviving the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

By Kikuko Otake

On August 6, 1945, when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Furuta family was living one mile away from the hypocenter. Five year old Kikuko, her mother, Masako, and her two brothers barely escaped with their lives. However, their soldier father was not so fortunate. Masako never talked about her family's experiences on that day and the grim days following the bombing. Then one day, Masako started to talk about what happenedbreaking a silence of nearly fifty years. Written by Kikuko (Furuta) Otake, now a retired assistant professor of Japanese in the United States, Masako's story is a collection of prose-poetry, based on the true story of her family's tragedy. It is written with an "Objectivist" lineation similar in its understated power to Charles Reznikoff's Testimony. Kikuko Otake's Masako's Story is a powerful addition to the literature of the Atomic Bomb, and yet more evidence that we should all work together to stop the Nuclear madness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781463443368

Kikuko Otake

Kikuko Otake (maiden name, Furuta) was born in Osaka, Japan. Her family moved to Hiroshima, her parents’ hometown, just a few months before the explosion of the atomic bomb there. At the time of the attack, she lived just over a mile away from the hypocenter. She barely escaped death and sustained a wound to her head. She also suffered greatly from the “atomic bomb syndrome.” Her father, most of her uncles, and a number of cousins perished during the bombing. After graduating from Tsuda College in Tokyo, she came to the United States in 1968. She received her M. A. in education from California State University at Los Angeles. She is now a naturalized U. S. citizen. Based on her mother’s account of the atomic bombing, she wrote an autobiographical book, Amerika e Hiroshima kara (To America from Hiroshima) in Japanese, and published it in 2003 in Japan. Masako’s Story is the English adaptation of her original book. She published its first edition through the publisher Ahadada Books in 2007, and this book is the revised second edition. Kikuko Otake, an award-winning haiku, tanka and senryu poet, is a retired assistant professor of Japanese language. She lives with her husband in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California.

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Masako’s Story

Surviving the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

Revised Second Edition

Kikuko Otake

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© 2011 Kikuko Otake. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 12/22/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4634-4336-8 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-4337-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-4338-2 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011914162

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Letter to the Reader

Part I

1. I Can’t Talk About It Today

2. Oh! I Can’t Continue to Speak of It!

3. Nam’amidabutsu

4. The Remains of Uncle Yataro

5. Human Beings Don’t Die Easily

6. That’s Why You Are Still Alive Today

7. Watashi no Ningyo

Part II

1. Atomic Bomb

2. Skinning Tomatoes

3. Anniversary

4. I Believe in God

5. WHY

6. No More Radiation

7. Breast Cancer

8. Medicine to Prevent Radiation-Induced Cancer

9. I Will Ask YOU

10. What Would Happen to Our Bodies?

11. Nuclear Deterrence

12. Don’t Repeat the Evil

13. Looking Back, Moving Forward

Epilogue

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

ENDNOTES

Masako’s Story: Surviving the

Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

To Nobuichi

who died during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima

To Masako

who lived through the bombing and its aftermath

Foreword

We can never say for certain how human beings will respond to the harm inflicted upon them. Some of us may seek vengeance or justice (and sometimes the distinction is less than clear). Others may internalize their trauma and revisit it upon themselves or upon others—a cycle of violence familiar to abusers and their victims. Still others may try to forgive the perpetrator and put the offense behind them. Violence against entire populations can provoke wars, revolutions, or acts of terror.

Sometimes—not often enough—those who have suffered terribly at the hands of others look for higher moral ground. Gold Star Mothers and some veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan (and Vietnam before them) have marched to insist that no one else’s sons and daughters be killed in pointless wars. Some of the families of those who died in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 have renounced wars of retaliation that have killed members of other families thousands of miles away. Relatives of murder victims have, on occasion, spoken out passionately and eloquently against the death penalty. While they may forgive, they do not wish to forget, and make it part of their life’s work to ensure that the meaning of their loss is not forgotten or misappropriated by the larger community.

Perhaps in no place and at no other time in history has this desire been more manifest than among the hibakusha—the survivors of the US atomic bombings against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For more than 60 years—since those terrible mornings in August 1945 when the lives of more than 100,000 people were snuffed out instantly in two fireballs brighter than the sun—the hibakusha have told their personal stories and have shared the pictures of their burned and broken bodies, not to evoke pity or to extract apologies, but to move the rest of us to a determination that no one else will ever suffer in this way. No more Hiroshima! No more Nagasaki! is the appeal of all hibakusha, reiterated here in the story of Kikuko Otake’s mother, Masako.

One can visit the peace museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—as I was privileged to do a few years ago—and learn the history of the bombings from hundreds of photos and descriptions. Seeing the twisted wreckage of the A-bomb dome for the first time is a shock for which photos and film clips cannot prepare you. Yet none of these artifacts conveys the abhorrent nature of nuclear weapons as well as words from a survivor:

"Fallout sticks to my bone marrow, and keeps on releasing radiation,

Radiation that will continue to eat