The last witnesses: Preserving the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Growing up as an American, I was surrounded by cultural narratives that treated the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the denouement of a story, one that began with the attack on Pearl Harbor and ended on V-J Day. And while the undeniable anguish of August 6 and 9 was never wholly absent, it also tended to become anesthetized in retellings.

Case in point: In the mid-90s, around the time I was 10, a proposed WWII anniversary exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) became enmeshed in a controversy. The curators wanted to include pictures of the victims and artifacts on loan from the cities; however, opponents argued these elements were offensive to veterans and portrayed a false moral equivalence between America and Japan’s actions during the war. The pictures and artifacts were eventually removed in favor of a pared-down exhibit that focused on the Enola Gay and America’s post-war restoration efforts.

Even today, many Americans still don’t seem capable of seeing Hiroshima and Nagasaki any closer than the view from the cockpit of a B-29 bomber.

In truth, the stories of neither city begin nor end in August 1945. The people who called these communities home were part of a rich tradition that helped shape Japan’s unique culture before, during, and after the war. And thanks to survivors’ tireless efforts, their stories have continued to serve as a warning against the use of nuclear weapons — a warning the international community has heeded for 80 years.

These are the stories M.G. Sheftall wants to share. An expat from Manhattan, Sheftall has lived and taught in Japan for 40 years. He is also a historian and writer, and his two-volume Embers series provides a historical narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki based on years of research as well as extensive interviews with 52 hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bombs). 

I recently sat down with Sheftall to discuss what the survivors shared with him about living through that tragic day, what life was like for the hibakusha in the ensuing decades, and what he hopes everyone can learn from their stories.

Big Think: Why did you choose to write two books on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What did you hope to bring to these stories?

Sheftall: I wrote the books that I had always wanted to read but could never find. As a historian of modern Japanese cultural history, I’m very interested in details of what life was like in those communities before the war. What led to people developing the mindset they did during the war? That historical and cultural context is an integral part of the story, but other English-language books have not captured that to my satisfaction.

I wanted to give [that context] more depth to facilitate empathy, which I think is important. To do that, I had to write two long books. It was never going to fit into one.

Big Think: You provide such rich histories not only for the survivors but also the cities themselves. Why provide that level of historical detail?

Sheftall: Because it’s so fascinating, particularly in the Nagasaki case. It was such a beautiful little community with this ancient Christian history. Its early multiculturalism was almost unheard of in other parts of Japan for centuries. I wanted readers to appreciate that beauty. I wanted them to fall in love with Nagasaki — as I have during my numerous visits there.

Big Think: Let’s discuss the origins and meaning of the word hibakusha.

Sheftall: The prefix hi- means “an agency of affliction.” It’s a condition of being afflicted by something outside of yourself. (It’s a politically loaded word to use.) Baku refers to an explosion or something emanating radiation of some kind. And the suffix -sha means person. So, it’s literally a person exposed to radiation. That’s hibaskusha.

[Author’s Note: the baku in hibakusha can be spelled using different but homophonous kanji, hence the different translations Sheftall points to.]

Big Think: And is it correct that the word has been extended to cover people who were exposed to radiation during the 2011 Fukushima incident as well?

Sheftall: Yes. If they suffered from acute radiation syndrome, then they are officially a hibakusha according to the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare and entitled to special government assistance.

Big Think: In your books, you chronicled the lives of several hibakusha before, during, and after the bombings. Speaking broadly, what was life like for them after surviving Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

Sheftall: Afterward, a lot of them, quite understandably, wanted to get out of the cities. They went to Tokyo mostly or other big metropolitan centers on the Pacific Coast.I found that they had very different experiences than the people who stayed behind in the affected communities. In a way, the people who left had a harder time of it, psychosocially.

One reason is that everyone in the affected communities was also a hibakusha. There was nothing distinctive about that identity at the individual level. There was no stigma attached to that. Everyone had to deal with the dread of not knowing what the future held for them together. 

But during the occupation, there was a long media blackout on discussing the effects of the bombings on human bodies — particularly for the first 10 years or so after. That blank space [left room in] the public imagination for rumors to get around about the survivors: “They were contaminated” or “You shouldn’t get near them because whatever they had would spread to you.” They were treated like lepers.

The people who left [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] were careful to hide their identity from their coworkers, employers, potential marriage partners, and families. Those stories, I found quite tragic.

Big Think: As society caught up and understood the reality better, did you find that things got better for them?

Sheftall: From about the 1960s on, there was a flood of sympathetic literature and other popular media about their plight. The general public began to get a better understanding of what radiation was and [develop] sympathy for what these people had gone through. The hibakusha were viewed more human and less as contaminated objects to be avoided.

Hibakusha activism really picked up around the same time. That also had a huge effect in familiarizing the public with their plight.

Big Think: What do you think people misunderstand or get wrong about the history surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Sheftall: Okay. Do you have memories of the Cold War?

Big Think: I was four when the Wall came down.

Sheftall: That puts things in perspective. Well, when I was growing up, everyone, especially if you lived in a big city, had the dread of nuclear war hanging over us at all times.

It colored and informed our worldview in ways that I think most of us have probably forgotten, and I remember that one of the things that we used to be told as children was that we didn’t have to worry about suffering if New York City got nuked by the Soviets. The idea being that when an atomic bomb lands in your city, you are vaporized instantly. It was so quick and so total that it was also painless. And on those rare occasions when adults mentioned Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the word was used in that context as well: 140,000 people vaporized.

I had long believed that myself, and I got a strange sort of guilt-assuaging comfort out of that as an American. 

But one of the first people that I spoke with for this project, who ended up being an important collaborator for me, was a Nagasaki hibakusha who went on to be a great medical doctor and researcher on the effects of the bombs on human bodies. His name is Dr. Tomonaga Masao, and he said something to me that I’ll never forget. He said, “You Americans really like that word vaporized, don’t you? Well, sorry to tell you, but nobody was vaporized in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”

When the bombs detonated, there were two vectors of what I call immediate destruction — not counting the radiation, which was a much slower killer. The first vector of immediate physical and biological destruction was a burst of electromagnetic energy from the critical reaction of the bomb’s core. This created a fireball that bathed everything within about a two kilometer radius of the hypocenter in about 3–4,000℃ heat. To give you an idea of how hot that is, steel melts at about half that temperature.

The second vector of immediate destruction was the shockwave. The heated air pushed out of the way by the formation of this fireball traveled at slightly more than the speed of sound. It knocked everything down within approximately that same two kilometer radius from the hypocenter.

Now, remember that the Hiroshima bomb detonated at about 650 meters in the air, and the speed of sound is 343 meters per second. So, even if you are standing directly underneath the bomb, the difference of time between the thermal ray beginning to cause you to combust and the arrival of the blast force that would blow you to pieces is about two seconds. Two seconds of you experiencing this 4,000-degree heat. If you’re farther out, say a kilometer away or on the perimeter, you’re being torched alive for about 5–6 seconds of suffering before the shockwave arrives and — to put it bluntly — puts you out of your misery.

So, they had time to scream. 

I’ve often thought of what that moment must have been like. Is it possible to experience eternity in a second? If any humans have ever come close to finding an answer to that, it’s those victims. That thought will haunt me for the rest of my life after doing this project.

Big Think: You mentioned the 140,000 killed at Hiroshima. In Nagasaki, it was 74,000. One thing I didn’t appreciate until reading your books is that those figures come with a footnote that reads “by the end of 1945.” In other words, there was a five-month period of continuous death after the initial bombing.

Sheftall: The people who did the dying after August 6 in Hiroshima and August 9 in Nagasaki also had agonizing and painful deaths.

So, approximately 80,000 people were dead in Hiroshima by the end of the day, killed by either of those two vectors of immediate destruction or the firestorm that swept the city after the explosion. About 45,000 were dead on the ground in Nagasaki by the end of August 9. Of the remaining 60,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 30,000 in Nagasaki, most of them succumbed to acute radiation syndrome.

Acute radiation syndrome is a consequence of the DNA in a person’s cells being compromised, broken by radiation, which directly impacts their body’s maintenance on a daily basis. Our cells undergo a constant cycle of death and rebirth called mitosis, and they need the DNA to pass on the instructions of how to make the replacement cell every time this happens. If that DNA is broken, mitosis cannot take place and the affected person’s body [basically breaks down] while they’re still alive. 

I can’t describe it, the visuals are too awful, but just imagine a community where it takes several months for 60,000 people to die like that. Think also about the people who had to take care of them, who were wiping up all of the various unmentionable bodily liquids and excretions during that long, slow process. What those people had to live with for the rest of their lives.

Big Think: And the confusion of not knowing why this was happening.

Sheftall: Right. For at least the first two months or so, nobody had any idea what this was — even the doctors who were treating them. Then the Americans finally started to cooperate a bit and tell them what was going on, but this was all new to the Americans, as well.

Big Think: Your descriptions of a country in the throes of total war were quite striking, such as when people went out to collect pine resin to make into fuel because of the blockade.

Sheftall: It’s such an interesting insight into that moment and what it must have been like to live there. It’s probably the most spirited and thorough participation in a total war effort on the part of a population in history. 

Many of the people that I have spoken to were teenagers during the war and were directly impacted by the government’s push to employ every resource at the state’s disposal and devote it to the war effort. Their schooling had been canceled, and many were put to work in munitions plants.

People sometimes talk about how Japan was about to surrender when the bombs were dropped. If that’s true, nobody sent the memo down to the level of the average person. That wasn’t on their radar at all. 

The thing that they were afraid of was, What’s going to happen when the Americans land on the beaches, and we have to start fighting them house-to-house in our communities? People were kind of starting to steele themselves for that. They saw it as inevitable. 

When they got the order to be listening to the radio at 12 o’clock noon on August 15, everyone expected that was going to be the final imperial [order] to give their lives in defense of the home islands. They thought that was going to be the go signal for the great decisive battle to decide the fate of Japan.

People were shocked when they realized that it was, in fact, a surrender announcement.

Big Think: In Nagasaki, you cite casualty estimates given to Stillman and Truman for an invasion of Japan. The numbers are staggering.

Sheftall: There were 50,000 American casualties just to take the island of Okinawa. Look on a map and see the size of that place compared to the Japanese Archipelago. It would have been bad, to put it simply. I don’t think it would have reached a million [casualties] on the American side, but it certainly would have gone into the high ten thousands, if not the lower six figures.

And certainly millions of Japanese would’ve been killed either in combat bombings or by disruption of the food supply. That would have become eminent in the autumn of 1946 because the Americans were planning to completely eliminate the railway infrastructure, which would’ve been carrying the harvest from the rice-producing areas to the population centers on the Pacific coast. With ground combat on top of that, you’re talking millions and millions of deaths.

Big Think: Some view the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as morally justifiable and strategically necessary. Others see it as equivalent to a war crime. After researching this subject for nearly a decade and speaking with the hibakusha, what are your thoughts on this debate?

Sheftall: I certainly have a new appreciation for the tragedy of those events and wish they hadn’t happened. But they did happen. There’s nothing we can do about that now in the 21st century.

I’ve spoken to many Americans during my life — and especially over the past 9 years I’ve been doing this research — who say the bombings were necessary because they ended the war and saved lives by making [an invasion] unnecessary. To them I say, Yes, you may be right. The bombs probably did save lives, possibly even millions of lives.

But that doesn’t excuse us from having to know what happened in those cities. If you’re going to claim those bombs were necessary, it’s morally imperative that you also own what happened to those human beings and those cities to make that peace possible. To dismiss that because of the greater good that followed is moral cowardice plain and simple. It’s unnecessary, and it’s cruel.

Big Think: Well said. How do you think we’ll tell the stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki once the hibakusha have finally passed on?

Sheftall: I fear the world that we’ll live in when there are no more hibakusha to give living testimony about the horrors of nuclear war. When there is no one left to say, “I was there. I saw this, this happened, and we can never let it happen again.” When there is no one around who can say that with unassailable moral authority, then the field of political discourse may open up to ideas about noble nuclear conflict.

I hope that my books, in some small way, can preserve those testimonies and pass them on to future generations

Big Think: Is there a message you’d like to leave our readers with?

Sheftall: I believe it’s the moral responsibility of every human being to know what happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Regardless of whether you think the dropping of those bombs was necessary or not, we all have to know what happened there and swear that we’ll never allow it to happen again.