Atomic Bomb Survivors Have a Warning for the World
As the world inches closer to nuclear war, survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki speak to Tribune about the urgent need to rid the world of atomic weapons.
Aerial view of the mushroom cloud from an atomic blast rising over Hiroshima, Japan. Credit: Hulton Archive / Getty Images
- Interview by
- Owen Dowling
The Japanese term for survivors of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 is hibakusha. This community of people — their ranks now thinning as the average age of a survivor reaches eighty-five — has remained bonded for nearly eight decades now by common experience of the urbicidal American attacks and their long radioactive tail, and common scars bodily and psychological. Almost all surviving hibakusha were small children or infants during the fiery final month of the Second World War, so to speak with them today is to hear the stories of people whose entire lives have been lived under (and despite) the terrible shadow of the mushroom cloud.
In a testament to the extraordinary fortitude and principle of a group of people who, more than almost any other, would have been justified in pursuing a quiet, comfortable life, many hibakusha have long been vigorously active in international anti-war and anti-nuclear advocacy. Sharing their personal accounts at public meetings, university campuses, conferences, and peace demonstrations, these survivors have undertaken their global mission for several years now in collaboration with Japanese anti-militarist NGO Peace Boat. First established in the 1980s to oppose official censorship in the country about the overseas crimes of Imperial Japan by undertaking maritime exchanges with its wartime victims throughout East Asia, the organisation now charters the ‘Global Voyages for a Nuclear Free World: Peace Boat Hibakusha Project’, helping to convey over 170 hibakusha around the world on ocean-faring speaking delegations since 2008.
One stop along this year’s Global Voyage was London, specifically Friends House on Euston Road, where this past Sunday morning the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Quakers co-hosted the event, ‘Meet the Survivors: Stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki’ — welcoming to Britain and hearing the testimonies of hibakusha guests Toshiko Tanaka and Ogawa Tadayoshi.
This landmark meeting was timely, coming right on the eve of Starmer Labour’s latest solemn pledge to maintain a ‘triple lock nuclear deterrent’ (and under unspecified requisite ‘circumstances’, in a prim euphemism, ‘to use it.’) Between protracted trench warfare and nuclear intimations in Ukraine, Israeli genocide in Gaza and belligerence beyond, and the prospect of great power conflict in the South China Sea, we find ourselves at a moment of supreme international danger, unparalleled in the post-Cold War conjuncture. Facing a jingoist Starmer government under such combustible circumstances, we may indeed be poised to enter an era which requires we dust off E.P. Thompson’s iconic 1981 maxim that: ‘We must protest if we are to survive.’
Tribune’s principled opposition to nuclear weapons is almost as old as the magazine itself, dating back to its front-page reportage on the bombardment of Hiroshima in August 1945, which opened: ‘A city of 300,000 people covering an area of twelve square miles has been blown to oblivion.’ However, though the publication has long foregrounded anti-nuclear politics within its coverage — after the 1957 formation of CND becoming ‘The Paper That Leads the Anti-H-Bomb Campaign’ — as far as we are aware the voices of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have never directly appeared within Tribune’s pages. Sunday’s London audience with Peace Boat’s hibakusha representatives offered a rare and precious opportunity to redress this lacuna.
Tribune’s Owen Dowling attended Sunday’s ‘Meet the Survivors: Stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki’ event, and spoke to hibakusha delegates Toshiko Tanaka and Ogawa Tadayoshi about their own experiences of the nuclear destruction of their childhood cities, and lives forever branded by the destructive events which saw Robert J. Oppenheimer ‘become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Their messages to young people today, as the once-discredited notion that nuclear weapons could ever actually be fired is increasingly resuscitated by the world’s sabre-rattling political classes, are more timely than ever.
My name is Toshiko Tanaka. This year I have turned eighty-five, and I am from Hiroshima. I experienced the atomic bomb at the age of six.
My name is Ogawa Tadayoshi, and I am seventy-nine years old. I am from Nagasaki, and I experienced the atomic bomb at the age of one.
Could you tell us a little about your life before the bomb? About your family, and if you have any memories about life in Japan during the war?
When I was six years old, my dad was away in the war, so he was not around at the time, but my mum was hosting a hotel in Hiroshima while raising her kids — my siblings and me — before the nuclear bomb was dropped. I was lucky because right before the atomic bomb was dropped, a week before, we moved to a place which was further from where the bomb was dropped than where we had been living, which was only 500 metres from ground zero. At the elementary school which I originally attended, all of my former classmates were killed by the atomic bomb. I am still traumatised by this, because I am the only person who survived out of all my classmates.
I was born in Nagasaki, and lived 1.5 kilometres from where the hypocentre of the explosion was, but because my father somehow sensed with the war situation that this was somehow not a safe place to be, he moved us to another place which was eight kilometres from the centre. Because of this I survived. The place where I was born was entirely destroyed after the atomic bomb.
Before the atomic bomb was dropped, my family was quite wealthy. I was one of five children in the family. My dad worked for his business which was doing well, but after the atomic bomb he lost his job, and our family became extremely poor. I remember at the time I was usually very hungry; really I felt starving the whole time.
Toshiko-san, to the extent that you would be comfortable recounting, could you please describe your experience on the morning of the nuclear bomb being dropped on Hiroshima?
On the day when the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I was on my way to elementary school. I then noticed that there was an aeroplane in the sky, and then suddenly there was a bright whiteness. I sensed that this was dangerous so I covered my face, and a few seconds later I realised that my face and my upper shoulder were burning from the flash. [Toshiko Tanaka rolls up her sleeve and extends her exposed forearm with a burn scar running down it:] Here is the place where my arm was burned whilst I was covering my face. It’s been eighty years, so the scarring has faded and gotten lighter.
Ogawa-san, I know you were very young and don’t necessarily have strong personal memories, but can I ask about your family’s experience of the bombing? Am I correct in saying that while your family was not in the centre of Nagasaki on the day the bomb dropped, they travelled into the devastated city a few days afterwards?
One week after they dropped the bomb, my father decided to go back to the site of our previous home in Nagasaki to see the situation there, and he brought seven family members with him to our original house. Within the first two weeks after the nuclear explosion, there was still deadly surface radiation; we went there after one week, so we suffered from radiation poisoning. Our whole family walked seven kilometres from our new home all the way back to the centre of Nagasaki, to see what had happened. Eventually my father found one of his relatives’ bodies lying on the spot where we had lived, who we then buried there.
Am I right in assuming, given these were the first military uses or even public revelations of the existence of nuclear weapons, that there wasn’t an awareness of the danger of the lingering radioactive fallout in the environment in the days after the nuclear explosion — so your family wouldn’t have known the danger of the place they were walking into?
That’s correct, they were not aware of the danger of the radiation, which is why my dad made the decision to bring the whole family back into Nagasaki, especially with me having been at such a young age. If they had known they wouldn’t have brought me all the way back there.
For the first six years after the bomb people were not properly aware of the danger of the lingering radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which explains why a lot of people continued to live in the places where they had dropped the bombs. They were aware of the danger of burns to your body from the explosions, but they were not aware that there was a lot of radiation left. There were a lot of people still eating food grown locally; many people died because they ate food which had been contaminated by radiation.
Toshiko-san, could you describe the very immediate aftermath of the bombing in your experience in Hiroshima? What did the city look like at ground level? As such a young child, what was your experience and understanding of what had happened?
After I experienced the initial explosion and was burned, I returned home immediately. I found my home in a very broken state, and everything had burned, but fortunately my mum was alright. But she could hardly recognise me: my hair had burned, my arm had burned, and I looked completely blackened because I was covered by ash. My mum found it very difficult to recognise her own child.
That same day I developed a fever, and fell unconscious for three or four days. When I eventually opened my eyes, I started to smell my own body, and could smell that my skin was burned. I then realised I could smell that a lot of people in the area surrounding our house had burned also, and when I went outside I saw that a lot of people had died; their bodies were laid down all over the street. Some of them were not even burned or visibly wounded, but had still fallen and died — at the time I didn’t understand why. My mum later told me that in the days that I had laid unconscious, she had seen a lot of people just falling down and dying there on the pavement. I believe that in Nagasaki it was the same situation, and Ogawa-san has confirmed this to me.
In the weeks and months that followed the bombings, after the immediate danger of death and direct injury from the explosions themselves had passed, what happened to you and your families? Where did you go, where did you live?
As I mentioned, after the atomic bomb my father became unemployed, so my family, which had five kids — me the youngest at one-year-old, a four-year-old, an eight-year-old, a ten-year-old, and a twelve-year-old — were living in a much poorer condition. My father then had to travel very far from us every day by bicycle to work in Nagasaki. This drained his energy a lot, and he quickly became ill; he died very soon after the bomb, because he had worked himself too hard. After that, my mum had to support the entire family herself, but was only able to do small part-time jobs because of her young children. That’s why I remember I was constantly hungry, our family didn’t earn enough money to make a living. Eventually after ten years we moved back into the city, two kilometres from where had been the hypocentre, and after I got married I lived somewhere else in Nagasaki — also two kilometres from the hypocentre.
Our family stayed in Hiroshima after the bombing, because as I mentioned nobody knew the danger of the radiation — at the time I wondered why everyone continued to keep dying, because we didn’t know about radiation sickness. At the time there were four family members living together: me, my mum, and my two sisters, while my dad was away with the army in the city of Fukuoka. The four of us survived the bombing, and lived together afterwards. Before the explosion our family had run a hotel, but this was destroyed by the bomb and everything was gone, so we didn’t have enough money to survive. My mum decided to work tailoring clothes and fixing small things to support the family. She always regretted that time because her family lacked money and she had to work; she didn’t have the chance to complete a good education. She eventually did get to study a lot of things, but after a long time.
Did either of you suffer long-term health problems resulting from the bombings?
This is a very good question. After the bombing I felt like dying multiple times, there was radiation in my body which caused me to constantly feel tired and like I had to lay down to rest. Whenever I was feeling fatigued my mouth constantly had discharge coming out; I went to the hospital but nobody knew anything about it or that it was caused by radiation from the explosion. So I still suffered from this even after seeking medical help, and have suffered from many other ailments my whole life.
I was only one year old so I don’t have memories, I don’t believe I suffered major adverse health effects at the time because we were just outside of Nagasaki itself when the bomb was dropped. Some of my family members did later get cancer, but I’m not sure whether or not this was because of the radiation from the bomb.
Why did you become involved with Peace Boat, and what is your message to younger generations today about nuclear weapons? What should the experience of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 convey to young people in today’s world?
My answer is that, because I have experience of the horror of the nuclear weapon, I feel the responsibility to let the young generation know how horrible any future use of nuclear weapons would be. I feel that I am obligated to do it because I suffered. Ogawa-san is also doing such a good job, because he suffered the bombing at such a young age, but he still senses the importance of delivering the peace message to the world. It is not acceptable what is going on with Russia and Ukraine, or in Gaza, and I don’t want any other country to ever use nuclear weapons again. That is why I decided to take the Peace Boat, to deliver this message. If we ever use the nuclear bomb again, I believe the whole world will be destroyed. I don’t want to see that happen, that’s why I made the decision to be here and share my testimony today. I feel a responsibility to do it.
I want to let the young generation know that nuclear weapons have actually been used, and I don’t want anyone to forget what happened to us. Since 2009 I’ve been organising a project with the help of my granddaughter, called the ‘Lest We Forget’ project: I want to receive 1,000 photographs of beautiful things and places taken at 11:02 am on the 9th of August — the time when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki — and have them compiled for a commemorative exhibition in time for the 100th anniversary of the bombing in 2045.
To get us started, could you please say a few words just to introduce yourselves: who you are, when you were born, and where you are from?