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JAPAN - HIROSHIMA WOMEN SURVIVORS STORIES

By Pamela Philipose

Hiroshima Survivors Matsunaga Shizuko & Ishikawa Ritsuko

Tokyo (Women’s Feature Service) – When I met two women survivors of Hiroshima, Matsunaga Shizuko and Ishikawa Ritsuko, the words of British playwright Edward Bond came back to me: “We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima…”

As part of the small but vocal community of hibakushas, or survivors of the atom bomb attack on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both Shizuko and Ritsuko continue to testify publicly to the horrors – actual and potential – of nuclear warfare. They were part of a delegation of 10 hibakushas on board the Peace Boat, a remarkable initiative launched by a group of socially concerned Japanese students in 1983. The Peace Boat has been encircling the globe at regular intervals over the past two decades highlighting the imperative of a peaceful, anti-nuclear, environmentally-friendly and rights conscious world.

Being invited on board the Peace Boat as a guest instructor on its 75th voyage, gave me a chance to interact with Shizuko and Ritsuko and get a glimpse of an instant in world history when humanity itself come under a cloud – a mushroom-shaped cloud.

Shizuko was a schoolgirl of 13 and Ritsuko, an infant of one-and-a-half years, when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It wiped out 10 square kilometres of that city and took over 60,000 lives instantly, leaving hundreds of thousands of others with the lingering, long-term and searing impacts of radiation. This horrendous scenario was to be played out three days later in Nagasaki, with the second bomb clawing out a third of the port city and killing over 50,000.

Today, Shizuko has a memory of that moment. That particular day, she was not in school. Her mother had wanted her to help on a work site, where people were dismantling fallen buildings to create firebreaks as war time activity. The chore that she did for her mother may well have saved her life, because the work site was about 2.1 kilometres from the hypocentre of the explosion, while school was just 1.4 kilometres away.

Since Shizuko was working under the open sky, she actually saw the plane in the sky – she recalled it as like a “white line stretched across with a glittering tip”. Time was about 8.15 in the morning. She also remembers registering the fact that it was a “B-29”; US bombers were a familiar enough concept in wartime Japan. When the explosion happened she shut her eyes and appeared to have blacked out. By the time she regained consciousness, her world had been reduced to ashes, “Everything seemed grey and there were no sound of birds singing,” as she put it. She also felt a burning sensation on the side of her face that had faced the sky and smelt the distinct odour of her burnt hair.

As the petrified girl staggered to her feet and tried to find her way, a big mushroom cloud had formed over the city, its central column bloating and changing shape, “it looked like it would swoop down on me,” said Shizuko. There were debris around her and fires raged at every corner. Some adults who recognised her tried to calm her, but every one of those who was alive was in a state of shock themselves, some with blank, expressionless faces. As she made her way home, she saw many men and women screaming for help, desperate for water. When she got home she found that a major part had collapsed and her mother badly injured. She recalled her mother as having “her cheek muscles broken open like a pomegranate and the upper half of her body covered with blood”. Her grandmother had been lifted up by the blast and brought down under a falling wardrobe – within a month the elderly woman had died of internal injuries.

As the family struggled to pull itself together, the full impact of the nuclear catastrophe began to reveal itself. Of the 300 students in Shizuko’s school, at least 200 had been killed, among whom was a classmate with whom she had once learnt Japanese classical dancing. “I still remember her lovely, smiling face,” said Shizuko. It was decided that those students who had survived the attack would help gather the bodies of those who had perished on the premises of the school, many of which bore keloids, or scar tissue. “We had to carry these bodies and bones to the grounds of the nearby Jisenji temple on planks of wood, with no special protection. Nobody understood how dangerous such exposure was,” recalled Shizuko. It was only later – after the various reports of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission were made public – was there a greater awareness of the many dimensions of “radiation sickness”.

Even after Shizuko recovered from her initial burns, she would fall ill at regular intervals. Meanwhile, life carried on. Said Shizuko, “Like any other young girl, I wanted to live a normal life. At 21, I married my childhood sweetheart, who had volunteered as a kamikaze pilot, but later studied to be an architect. The first shock came at 26. I found I had breast cancer. Fortunately, it was detected early and I responded to treatment.”

The couple, who have no children, later moved to Tokyo where they lived for the next two decades. But of course there really was no getting away from Hiroshima. Shizuko remembered one occasion, particularly, when she had visited an exhibition of paintings by hibakushas in Tokyo, “I stood in front of a painting that depicted a hand with fire rising from each finger transfixed. Then I broke down sobbing.”

In 1978, she and her husband went back to Hiroshima. Four of her former classmates had, over the years, succumbed to the effects of radiation. It is to keep their memory alive that Shizuko decided she would spend the rest of her life telling her story to the world.

Ishikawa Ritsuko, unlike Shizuko, had no direct memories of that morning being only a baby. But Hiroshima also marked her out in distinct and terrible ways. Her father and aunt went missing soon after the bomb was dropped and her mother fell ill and died seven years later. So, as Hiroshima orphans, Ritsuko and her two sisters were raised by her grandmother in difficult circumstances.

Ritsuko revealed a little known side of the Hiroshima story: The discrimination meted out to A-bomb survivors, which in turn impacted their future in significant ways. Ritsuko, who never married, remembered that at the time when she was looking to settle down in life, potential bridegrooms would inquire if she was a hibakusha and then shy away. Her elder sister, who wanted to work in Tokyo, couldn’t get a job there because in her applications she always had to reveal that she was from Hiroshima. “The discrimination was subtle. In the aftermath of the bomb attacks, residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were considered liabilities - the presumption was that people from these cities would be weaker and more susceptible to ill health, and other problems,” observed Ritsuko.

As a school teacher, she now finds herself well placed to touch the minds of emerging generations. “I tell my children that the Americans unjustifiably dropped those bombs, but I also tell them about the negative role played by the Japanese military during the war. I want them to know the full story – not in an emotional, but rational, way,” she said.

Relating personal histories to strangers is often a painful task. But as the generation that experienced Hiroshima and Nagasaki at firsthand passes away, as memories fade and with them the horror of those twin nuclear attacks, both Shizuko and Ritsuko know how crucial it is that they keep telling their stories – and how important it is that the world never forgets them.