(10 years ago Chris Steele-Perkins visited Hiroshima with writer Miyako Yamada to document the stories of Hibakusha - Japanese survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is the twelfth of a series of posts in which we'll share their recollections of the horrifying events that occurred 70 years ago.)
Ms. Senji Yamaguchi. Born 1930. 14 years old at time of Nagasaki bombing.
“No more Hiroshima. No more Nagasaki. No more hibakusha!”
In June 1982, as Co-chairperson of the Japan Confederation of A-and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations, Senji Yamaguchi shouted these demands at the Special Session on Disarmament at UN Headquarters in New York. He held high a picture of himself with keloid scars.
Now 74, Yamaguchi lives in a nursing home with his wife, Sachiko. His chronic asthma is more of a problem than he had hoped. He loses his breath after taking just a few steps. He says it was caused by exposure to 4000-degree heat.
“When my lungs were exposed to the heat ray, my bronchi naturally contracted to protect me. Therefore, my bronchial tubes are less than half normal size.”
He has had over 20 surgical operations. “But hey, I’m still alive,” he says with a sigh.
On August 9, 1945, the conscripted 14-year-old was digging a trench behind the Ohashi Mitsubishi Weapons Factory about one kilometer from the hypocenter. “We’re almost done. We’ll be finished before lunch.” They all raised their voices as they heaved their picks over their heads. They had dug down to their waists.
“Suddenly, FLASH! A blue-white light pierced my eyes. I lost consciousness and lay in the trench. I have no idea how long I was out, but when I came to, I couldn’t see any of the people I had just been working with. Everything around me was transformed. People were burned black, lying on their backs with their arms and legs spread out. Some were lying motionless on their stomachs. The factory was engulfed in enormous pillars of fire. I jumped out of the trench and into the Urakami River. I swam to the opposite bank. I climbed the bank, then up a small hill. ‘Water, please!’ people around me begged as they died. Their hair and clothes were burned. I couldn’t tell the men from the women. Faces burned, people burned as black as kettles. Koreans brought to Japan for forced labor were moaning pitifully.
I managed to get to a station for relief trains, but when I tried to get on the train that came that evening, a soldier shouted at me, ‘You’re not injured enough. You stay here!’ Late that night, I finally got on a train. Unable to stand, I lay down in the aisle. Blood from the others heaped in the aisle oozed into my mouth. I threw up, a yellow fluid bursting from my stomach. I was overcome with the desire to sleep, but even my youthful mind understood that if I went to sleep, I would die.”
Yamaguchi was taken off the train at Omura Station. He lay on his stomach on the platform. He heard he was going to be transported to the hospital. He got up, but the skin on his chest, abdomen and legs stuck to the platform, peeling right off.
“At the Omura Naval Hospital, every day was a battle. When the bandages on the burns covering my whole body were removed, dozens of maggots fell out. The maggots were biting my wounds. Maggots have teeth. Can you believe it? And when they were changing the gauze, the pain was so bad I would faint. I kept shouting, ‘Kill me! Kill me!’”
His burn scars grew into keloids. His gums bled. The purple spots of death appeared. He turned jaundice yellow due to liver dysfunction. He wavered between life and death. Finally, he began to recover about the time the cosmos bloomed.
“The picture of me and my keloids displayed in the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum was taken about one month after the bombing. It was taken by a medic when American doctors came to the hospital. All around me, survivors lost hope and committed suicide, but I was determined to live. Then, I studied as hard as I could. When I graduated from the machinery course at Nagasaki Technical School, I was already 20 years old. However, hard study helped me passed the employment examination for Mitsubishi Shipbuilding. Hope was swelling in my breast. I took the physical exam, and that is where I failed. I believe it was because I had gruesome scars on half of my face, with keloids from my neck to my elbow. My whole body shook as if boiling from anger. I was filled with despair and outrage. With nothing else to do, I returned to Goto Islands where my father lived. I worked with my father on the farm and in our sweet shop.”
However, that did not work out, so he returned to Nagasaki. He threw himself into the peace movement and the struggle against nuclear weapons.
“It has been 53 years since I first got involved in the hibakusha movement. It has been a bitter experience, but a global movement is saying ‘the A-bomb must go.’ Actually, most of the southern hemisphere is nuclear-free nations, but there are still some politicians like Hitler, and the world is changing. We are in the age of nuclear war by computer. If the US fires three warheads, 30 warheads will explode back at them. If anyone strikes, they will be hit back.”
“Truman dropped the atomic bombs unnecessarily. I’m sure Churchill would not have dropped it. It’s true that Japan was too slow to surrender, but we would have surrendered without the bomb. The war is a difficult subject. Four years ago, I went as a hibakusha to speak at an American university. In response, the Chinese said they would put up a display about the Nanking Massacre. In other words, they were saying that Japan was an aggressor before it was a victim. We have a long history of invading China. Japan needs to apologize sincerely and quickly to China. We cannot use the atomic bomb to overlook the invasion.”
This year, Senji Yamaguchi was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.