The elusive horror of Hiroshima
Hiroki Kobayashi
The
official plans had been appropriately grand: 11,500 attendees would gather in
Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park for a somber ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary
of the atomic bombing of the city by the United States on August 6, 1945. But
the pandemic had other plans.
As it
has done in most cities around the world, the COVID-19 virus
has altered or canceled much of Hiroshima’s daily life: concerts, marathons,
museum exhibits. The anniversary ceremony will still take place on August 6,
albeit with 10,000 fewer attendees. Only bomb survivors—or hibakusha—and their families may now attend.
Audience members will be seated six feet apart in the park. World leaders, no
longer able to attend in person, have been asked to submit video messages
instead.
Hiroshima is harrowingly familiar with
abrupt, unfathomable tragedy. But when I visited the city in late 2018, I was
struck by how ordinary it looked and felt. I recall sitting on the narrow,
elegant Motoyasu Bridge watching a bustling morning scene. Briefcase-carrying
commuters in suits walked and biked across the bridge. Schoolchildren in
uniforms skipped by in small groups. Nearby, a riverside café with a pretty
fruit stand and ice cream stall out front was getting ready to open.
It
could have been a scene from any city. But Hiroshima, of course, is not just
any city. About 500 yards north of Motoyasu Bridge stands another bridge, the
Aioi. The span was the original target for the bombing crew of the Enola Gay, which dropped a nearly
10,000-pound uranium bomb that detonated close to the spot where I was perched.
I was in Hiroshima to do research and
conduct interviews for my book about World War II reporter
John Hersey—the first journalist to reveal the true aftermath of the bomb here,
particularly its radioactive impact on human beings. I was especially keen to
meet Koko Tanimoto Kondo, a prominent peace activist and one of the last
surviving protagonists of Hersey’s blockbuster article, “Hiroshima,” which was
published in the August 31, 1946, issue of the New
Yorker and later became a book.
When
Hersey arrived in Hiroshima in 1946, eight months after the bombing, he found a
post-apocalyptic wasteland. Now Hiroshima Prefecture is home to nearly three
million people and is a major tourist destination. There’s a world-class museum documenting the event,
as well as many monuments. Among them: the Genbaku Dome, one of the few
structures left standing in the city center after the bomb fell and now a
UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Hiroshima’s leaders say they want the
city to be regarded by the world in two ways: as a cautionary tale—a warning
about the horrors of nuclear warfare—and as a phoenix that survived those
horrors and resurrected itself, a triumph of the human spirit.
When I met Ms. Kondo, she was
alternately solemn and mischievous, with pronounced gallows humor. She was
then 74, but as we walked through the city together, I could hardly keep up
with her. She told me that she and her mother, Chisa Tanimoto—also a blast
survivor who lived to an advanced age—used to joke grimly that the bomb’s
radiation had somehow preserved them.
As we walked down a wide, tree-lined
boulevard that sunny morning, it was hard for me to comprehend that this was
the site of the first nuclear attack in history, and that Ms. Kondo was one of
the few humans on Earth to have witnessed and survived it. (For those who lived, memories of the bomb are impossible
to forget.)
When the U.S. dropped the bomb—dubbed “Little Boy” and scribbled with
profane messages to the Japanese emperor—on Hiroshima, tens of thousands of
people were burned to death or buried alive by collapsing buildings or
bludgeoned by flying debris. Those directly under the bomb’s detonation point,
or hypocenter, were incinerated, instantaneously erased from existence. The
true death toll—estimates have ranged between 100,000 and 280,000—will never be
known.
“You
dig two feet and there are [still] bones,” Hidehiko Yuzaki, the governor of
Hiroshima Prefecture told me. “We’re living on that. Not only near the
epicenter, but across the city.”
At the time of the bombing, Ms.
Kondo—then just over eight months old—was in her mother’s arms in their house
near the city center. The house collapsed on top of them, but her mother
managed to free them from the debris and escape before a wall of flame consumed
the area.
That day and night, as hellish fires and
whirlwinds tore through the ruins, and blast survivors tried to find refuge in
the city’s few surviving parks, the Japanese government in Tokyo had a
difficult time processing what had happened. Had the city been attacked by a
massive force of B-29s? Had a new sort of weapon been used? How else could such
devastation be explained?
A professor named Yoshio Nishina,
Japan’s chief nuclear physicist and leader of the country’s own atomic bomb
effort, was dispatched to Hiroshima. On August 8, he reported back to the
Japanese government. The city, he said, was “completely wiped out.” What he had
seen there was “unspeakable.”
“I’m very sorry to tell you this,” he
wrote. “The so-called new-type bomb is actually an atomic bomb.” (Related: The U.S. planned to drop more than two atomic bombs on
Japan.)
The bomb had exploded slightly northwest
of the city’s center. A Japanese report soon estimated that nearly 66,500
buildings had been razed or damaged. A subsequent U.S. report commented that
Hiroshima had been “uniformly and extensively devastated” and noted that a
bomb-induced “fire-storm” had contributed to the devastation.
A few weeks later, foreign
correspondents began trying to get into Hiroshima. The first, Leslie
Nakashima—who before the war had possessed both American and Japanese
citizenship and been stranded in Japan for the duration of the
conflict—confirmed in a United Press dispatch that the city of 300,000 had been
obliterated. “I was dumbfounded with the destruction before me,” he wrote. At
the city center near where the bomb exploded, only the skeletons of three
concrete buildings were still standing. It was being said, he reported, that
Hiroshima might remain uninhabitable for 75 years.
Yet within 24 hours, survivors were
already returning to the city to search for relatives, friends, and former
homes in the rubble. Ms. Kondo’s family was among those who would return and
rebuild their lives upon the ashes.
The aftermath
Soon tens of thousands of occupation troops arrived in both Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, destroyed by a second atomic bomb three days after Hiroshima.
Even though the flattened cities were essentially graveyards, they were treated
less than reverently by some of the “occupationaires,” as they called
themselves. (Shifting circumstances and last-minute choices doomed the Nagasaki.)
In Nagasaki, U.S. Marines cleared bomb debris to play a football game,
which they dubbed the Atom Bowl. Over the next year, many soldiers came to
Hiroshima’s ground zero to have their picture taken and collect “bomb
souvenirs.” It was a “treasure area” of buried curios and heirlooms, recalled
one visiting American doctor, who gathered up a few broken porcelain cups to
use for ashtrays. But fear of possible residual radiation kept warier
occupationaires away from the hypocenter site.
By the time Hersey arrived in Hiroshima in May 1946, survivors who had
returned there were impoverished and starving. Weeds were pushing up through
the rubble—among them, aptly named species like panic grass and feverfew.
When Hersey’s article appeared in the New Yorker, it
created an international furor. One of his editors asked him to consider
returning to the city to write a follow-up, but Hersey would not return for 40
years. When he finally visited Hiroshima, in 1985, he found that “a gaudy
phoenix had risen from the ruinous desert of 1945.” The city’s population had
grown to more than a million; trees lined new, broad avenues. There were, he
observed, hundreds of bookstores and thousands of bars. (This 390-year-old bonsai survived the blast, but its story was nearly
forgotten.)
Another of Hersey’s protagonists, Toshiko Sasaki—a young clerk at the
East Asia Tin Works at the time of the bombing who's now deceased—had also been
stunned by the rapid rebuilding. “I wouldn’t say the city is being
reconstructed,” she once commented, “so much as it’s a completely new city.”
Ground zero
When I interviewed Ms. Kondo in the lobby of a boxy, modern hotel on
Peace Boulevard, she told me about August 6, 1945. Although she was too young
then to remember the events herself, her mother told her about the day—but not
until Ms. Kondo was much older.
"I could not ask my parents how I survived," she told me.
"I knew if I asked, they would have to recall the worst day of their life.
When I was 40, she told me what happened. The whole house crashed, everything
on top of her body, which protected me. She was unconscious, and when she came
to, it was dark. There was no light coming through. She heard a baby’s crying
voice—it was mine. It was her own baby. She thought it was someone else’s. My
mother called, 'Please, help!'—but no one came. Then she could see the small
light coming through the [rubble]. And she moved little by little and made a
hole, and got out with me." All they saw when they emerged was fire
engulfing their neighborhood.
Ms. Kondo also showed me a family photo album from the years that
followed. Then she opened a plastic bag and took out the tiny pink cotton dress
she’d worn that day. Remarkably intact, the garment brought the catastrophe to
life for me. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum has filled with such humanizing
artifacts: a broken watch that stopped exactly at 8:15 A.M., a scalded tricycle
unearthed from the ruins.
After the interview, we strolled to a small Italian restaurant near the
museum for lunch. I noticed that many American businesses had set up in the
city; McDonald's and Starbucks franchises loosely ring Peace Memorial Park.
After lunch, we visited the memorials and monuments in the park. Visitors lined
up before the Cenotaph for Atomic Bomb Victims, several bowing quietly before
it. We walked back to the Aioi Bridge, the Enola Gay’s target. When
the bomber dropped Little Boy, it drifted in the air and detonated
slightly off-target. Where I asked Ms. Kondo, is the literal hypocenter?
She led me to an empty, three-block-long street nearby and stopped in
front of a low-rise medical building with graying tiles on its exterior. Next
door was a 7-Eleven. Here, she said and pointed to a small plaque in front of
the medical building.
“The first atomic bomb used in the history of humankind exploded
approximately 600 meters above this spot,” it read. “The city below was hit by
heat rays of approximately 3,000 to 4,000 degrees C, along with a blast wind
and radiation. Most people in the area lost their lives instantly.”
I found myself irrationally looking straight up into the air, almost as
if expecting to see something there too, some impossible remnant or marker. But
all I saw was the blue sky above—as sun-filled as it had been on the morning of
August 6, 1945.
Lesley M. M. Blume is a journalist, historian, and New
York Times bestselling author. Her new book, Fallout:
The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, was released on August 4.
Hiroki Kobayashi is a Tokyo based photographer who concentrates on
cultural issues and is a regular contributor to National Geographic.
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