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THE SURVIVORS (in order of appearance)
KIYOKO IMORI was 11 years old at the time. She and her best friend had just
arrived at school and were changing their shoes in a below ground concrete
structure when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. When they emerged,
the school was gone and their 620 classmates were dead. They jumped into the
nearby river to escape the fires that engulfed the city. Although they shared the
exact same experience, Imori survived, but her friend died a week later from
radiation exposure.
SHIGEKO SASAMORI was 13 years old. She shielded her eyes to look at the B-
29 flying over Hiroshima, then the blast knocked her unconscious. She woke up
dazed and badly burned. She found her way to a schoolyard and lay down under
a tree. Unrecognizable because of her burns, she repeated her name and
address over and over until her father finally found her. She came to the United
States in 1955 with a group of young women known as the Hiroshima Maidens
and underwent numerous plastic surgery operations.
KEIJI NAKAZAWA, 6 years old at the time, lost his father, sister and younger
brother in the Hiroshima bombing. In shock, his pregnant mother gave birth to a
baby girl on the day of the bombing. The infant, named Tomoko, died four
months later. Later, Nakazawa told his family's story in the epic comic book
series Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), one of the most powerful literary
explorations of the atomic bombing.
YASUYO TANAKA and CHIEMI OKA were 9 and 10 years old, living in a
Catholic orphanage. Close friends, devote Catholics, they found each other after
the blast, faced extraordinary hardship together, but managed to survive. The
orphanage housed more than 20 infants, all of whom perished. In 1945,
Nagasaki had the largest Catholic population in Asia and some believed that the
city would not bombed by the Americans because of this.
SAKUE SHIMOHIRA was 10 years old. She lost her mother and brother in the
Nagasaki bombing. Later, her sister committed suicide by stepping in front of a
train. For ten years, Shimohira lived with a dozen other homeless survivors in a
small shack in the middle of the devastated landscape, sometimes surviving by
eating grass and garbage. She recalls returning to the place where her sister
died, planning to kill herself too. At the last minute, she jumped aside as the train
approached. "I realized there are two kinds of courage: the courage to die and
the courage to live," she says. "I decided I wanted to live."
KATSUJI YOSHIDA, 13 at the time, remembers feeling the force of the Nagasaki
blast and flying more than 100 feet through the air. One side of his face was
horribly burned and disfigured. Even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, survivors with
external scars experienced cruel treatment from other more fortunate survivors.
Yoshida initially retreated into the shadows, refusing to go out in public. But
soon, with his mother's love and encouragement, he worked up the courage to
step outside and, today, he is a leading figure in the peace movement.
SUNAO TSUBOI was a 20-year-old university student in Hiroshima when the
bomb was dropped. He notes that the art and literature students were drafted
into the army first, before science majors like him. But he says he was ready to
go to war, to die for his country, "to fall like petals from a flower, that was our
destiny."
SHUNTARO HIDA, a 28-year-old military doctor at the time, was a safe distance
from the Hiroshima bomb. He began treating people immediately after the
bombing. Later, patients who should have been getting better began dying. He
says, "We didn't know what it was. For a doctor, that's frightening to not know
what you're treating."
SATORU FUKAHORI 11 years old at the time, says that, even as children in
Nagasaki, they knew Japan was losing the war. "Any fool could see it," he says.
"We had nothing. We needed everything." He says that people who were
exposed to the bomb became "untouchables."
PAN YEON KIM was 8 years old. Her family, like many poor Koreans at the
time, immigrated to Japan, to avoid starvation. After the Hiroshima bombing,
Koreans survivors faced further prejudice and additional hardship, so her family
returned to Korea. She has struggled with the Japanese government to obtain
medical benefits.
ETSUKO NAGANO, 16 years old at the time, lost her brother and sister in the
bombing. She says she still can't forgive herself for convincing her family to
move to Nagasaki, just weeks before the bombing.
SENJI YAMAGUCHI was 14 years old when the bomb was dropped on
Nagasaki. He was unconscious for 40 days. During his long hospitalization, he
started a survivors' organization to lobby the Japanese government to provide
care to victims of the bombing.
SUMITERU TANIGUCHI then a 16-year-old mail carrier in Nagasaki, was about
to deliver a letter when the bomb was dropped. He was badly burned on the
face, arms and back. Strangely, the wounds on his back never healed and he
lives with perpetual pain. He says, "I've shown you my wounds, because I want
you to know this can't happen again.
THE AMERICANS
MORRIS JEPPSON, 23 at the time, was the weapon test officer on the Enola
Gay mission to Hiroshima. His job was to arm the bomb in flight, making him the
last person to touch the bomb before its detonation. Today he says, "I see the
risk of radioactive war as being quite a real possibility."
LAWRENCE JOHNSTON, a 21-year-old civilian scientist working at Los Alamos,
worked on the team that developed the detonators for the Fat Man bomb. He
believes he is the only person to witness all three of the first atomic explosions:
Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He says, "We've opened Pandora's box and
the genie can't be stuffed back in the bottle."
HAROLD AGNEW, 24 at the time, worked on the Manhattan Project in Chicago
and Los Alamos. He flew as a scientific observer on the Hiroshima mission,
capturing the unforgettable image of the rising mushroom cloud with a home
movie camera.
THEODORE "DUTCH" VAN KIRK, 24 years old then, was the navigator aboard
the Enola Gay for the Hiroshima mission. Captain Paul Tibbets told him that the
bomb they were about to drop would probably shorten or end the war. Although
he believes that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right
thing to do, he also says "There is no time I think a bomb should have been used
since World War II. None whatsoever."
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