Etsuko Kanemitsu was standing at her schoolhouse door at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, when she heard the droning sound of a solitary B-29 bomber. She looked up.
At that instant, the summer morning’s blue sky turned a blinding bright yellow. The 14-year-old instinctively turned back toward the school. She was just a mile from the mid-air atomic bomb blast that destroyed her city.
Etsuko’s timing allowed her to survive. When she regained consciousness a few minutes later, she had been blown across the schoolyard. The school lay in ruins. Those inside were buried in rubble.
In the yard, the children who already had left the building lay naked and dying, their burnt skin hanging in tatters. Her own back was severely burned, her clothes blown off her body.
“I thought I was in hell,” she said.
Her personal travail had only begun. It took six months to recover from her burns. As she lay in the hospital, her hair fell out, her gums bled and she suffered from diarrhea and fever-a mysterious new ailment triggered by the radiation.
Etsuko Kanemitsu recovered, but her life has been plagued by a series of medical ills and mishaps that, in her mind at least, were caused by the bomb.
About 20 percent of the nearly 200,000 deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were caused by the massive radiation unleashed by the atomic bombs dropped on those cities. Most of the lingering deaths occurred months later.
Over the next five decades, the bombs also sharply increased cancer rates among survivors, adding thousands of premature deaths to the initial toll.
The medical effects of the world’s first and only wartime use of atomic weapons have been carefully documented. They serve as a reminder of the unique threat to human existence posed by nuclear weapons.
Despite experiments with laboratory animals suggesting there would be an increase in birth defects in the children of survivors, this has not occurred.
But that has been scant comfort to most survivors, who, because of their tainted bodies, have been shunned by the Japanese mainstream-except to serve as symbols for Japan’s belief that its people were the ultimate victims of World War II. The survivors themselves have had to live with the knowledge that their bodies may harbor a ticking time bomb.
The blast and heat of the enormous fireballs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused about 80 percent of all bomb deaths. But the bombs also spewed deadly gamma rays and neutron radiation capable of penetrating all but the thickest concrete and lead shielding.
The huge mushroom clouds that billowed five miles over the cities contained enormous amounts of radioactive ash. Within hours, it began falling back to Earth as black rain, poisoning the landscape for miles around.
The 20-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima was puny compared to the weapons now in the hands of the world’s nuclear powers. Yet it devastated a three-mile radius and permanently scarred the lives of everyone exposed to its destructive force.
Kanemitsu tried to lead a normal life after recovering from her burns and radiation sickness. But it was hard. A-bomb survivors were considered unfit as marriage partners. In 1959, she married another A-bomb survivor.
Their daughter was born in 1961. Around her third birthday, they discovered she had severe eyesight problems requiring thick, corrective lenses.
“Why did my child have to suffer too?” Kanemitsu asked. “I am positive her eye problems were caused by the bomb.”
Doctors aren’t so sure. They say only that it’s possible that the birth defect was caused by the bomb. Statistically, children of atomic bomb survivors have no higher an incidence of congenital malformations than children whose parents weren’t exposed to nuclear fallout.
Of the 118,661 city residents who died within one year of the Hiroshima bomb blast, about 20 percent died from radiation sickness, according to the Hiroshima International Council for Medical Care of the Radiation-Exposed. Radiation caused a similar proportion of the 73,884 deaths officially recorded in Nagasaki, where the atomic bomb was dropped three days later.
The Hiroshima bomb also killed about 20,000 Korean laborers and military personnel, who, because they were transients, were never accurately counted. There were only 250 Japanese soldiers in Nagasaki.
“The radiation exposure was massive,” said Dr. Yukio Sato, director of the Research Institute for Radiation Biology at Hiroshima University. “Within 1,600 feet, most people exposed to the radiation died shortly afterwards, even if they survived the effects of the bomb blast itself.”
Radiation drastically reduces the bone marrow’s ability to produce infection-fighting white blood cells. It took up to three months for the radiated bone marrow to return to normal.
Within a few years, an outbreak of leukemia struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. It was most pronounced among young adults who had been near the bomb center. Their strong constitutions had allowed them to survive severe burns and radiation sickness only to succumb to a rare form of the deadly blood disease.
In a normal population, fatal leukemia might strike one to three people a year out of every 100,000 people. Hiroshima by the early 1950s was reporting from 50 to 100 new cases a year.
Over the years, like clockwork, similar increases were reported in the incidence of a wide range of cancers among A-bomb survivors. The onset of each cancer was determined by the cell growth rates of the exposed organs.
Thyroid cancer, for instance, began appearing in 1955; breast and lung cancer in 1965; stomach and colon cancer in 1975. Within the last 10 years, multiple myelomas-a cancer of the blood-and skin cancers have afflicted A-bomb survivors. The cancer rates ranged from two to six times the rates of unradiated populations.
The numbers are not huge. Counting premature cancer deaths from the two atomic bombs probably would add only several thousand more fatalities to the total. But it was psychologically devastating: Survivors had to live with the constant fear of cancer because they had been exposed to the bombs’ radiation.
The bombs also affected the unborn, especially those fetuses at the key stage of the brain’s development. An estimated 1,100 people were prenatally exposed to radiation within 1.2 miles of the Hiroshima detonation. Nearly 80 percent of the babies conceived 8 to 15 weeks before the blast suffered from severe mental retardation.
Much of the early work on the medical effects of the bombs was carried out by the U.S. government’s Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, which, as the Cold War gathered steam and nuclear weapons became central to U.S. defense strategy, wanted more information about the effects of radiation on humans.
It was the same quest that led the U.S. military to fund dozens of human radiation experiments at American universities and medical centers between 1944 and 1975. Many of these experiments were carried out without their subjects’ approval.
A recently released draft government report, commissioned by Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, called many of those studies “clearly unethical. . . .”
The Casualty Commission’s pioneering work in Japan also was hidden from the Japanese people.
“Starting in mid-September 1945, U.S. authorities in occupied Japan censored virtually all discussion of the bombs,” said John Dower, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The blackout lasted until February 1952.
Why the blackout? Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s censors feared a public backlash against the American occupation, Dower said. They also worried that Japanese leaders might counter revelations about Japanese atrocities at the upcoming war crimes trials with protests over the nuclear destruction of the two cities.
The censorship had negative side effects, both medical and political.
On the medical side, the survivors were unable to publicly express their post-traumatic stress and survivors’ guilt, which psychologists now recognize is necessary for the long-term mental health of people subjected to profound psychic shocks. Also, as doctors learned more about the unique diseases they were treating, they were unable to publish information that would have helped other medical professionals who were treating the hibakusha, as the survivors were known.
Politically, the censorship played a key role in creating the postwar Japanese consciousness that its people were the chief victims of World War II. When the Japanese media finally began discussing the effects of the bombs, the war was long over.
Virtually all the initial public discussions in Japan centered on the A-bomb’s inhumanity, its possible use in the war then raging on the Korean Peninsula and the threat to humankind posed by nuclear annihilation.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki became icons of Japanese suffering, perverse national treasures (that) fixated Japanese memory of the war on what happened to Japan and simultaneously blotted out recollection of Japanese victimization of others,” Dower wrote recently.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki became a way of forgetting Nanjing (Nanking), Bataan, the Burma-Siam railway, Manila and countless Japanese atrocities.”
