The Price of Survival
The dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a story that has no end. The article below tells us just a part of the continuing tragedy of the Japanese women and their families who survived the terrible holocaust of 1945. It was written by Janet Bruin, Editor of Pax et Libertas, the journal of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and sent to ISIS by Claire Ryle of the Radiation and Health Information Service.
We are assured that a nuclear explosion "does not mean the end of the world", and that "many can ·survive if precautions are taken in good time".
But what does it mean to survive a nuclear explosion? Shizuko and Kazua, two women from Osaka, know only too well. For the past 13 years they have worked ceaselessly to set up the 'Women's Section' of Atomic-Bomb victims. "We are the only living proof of the disastrous effects of nuclear weapons, they say, "so even though it is painful for us to recount our miserable stories, it is the least we can do to warn people about the grave threat to world survival which is being intensified by the arms race. Our suffering will not have been in vain if it can help to eliminate this threat".
Their first task was to seek out other woman in Osaka, who, for 35 years have suffered in their daily lives and critical life choices, a vicious circle of illness, psychic pain, social discrimination and poverty due to the loss of their husbands or decline in their own earning power. Suffering not only the burden of their own physical and mental stress, but the additional fear and guilt that at any moment their children could be stricken with a fatal disease. With the help of peace organisations and informal contacts these 2 women secured, "against the regulations", a list of officially certified bomb victims in Osaka. They offered love, understanding and concrete assistance where previously no service or real responsibility had been under taken by any government.
Over the past ten years several hundred bomb victims, men and women, have come for personal counseling, and information about the complex web of medical, financial and social benefits available to them. Working with lawyers, the Women's Section is at present studying the A-Bomb Sufferers' Relief Measures Law and considering the feasibility of bringing legal action against the government.
Victims turned activist in the struggle for world survival, they worry that the lack of recent publicity about the damages and after-effects of the bombings may well reflect a well thought- out conspiracy aimed at forgetting about them, justifying the huge stockpiling of armaments and, and keeping the world's people from learning about their real dangers. Many survivors are busy writing their memoirs to serve as historical documents as well as warnings of the consequences of the existence and use of nuclear weapons.
August 6th, 1945. Shizuko Takagihad left Osaka to enroll in a new women's college ·n Hiroshima. After the morning gathering ended she went up to a lecture room where a sudden, searing flash and a ferocious blast altered her life irrevocably. The building collapsed around her. Bleeding profusely from the splinters of glass which had lodged in her face, neck and arms, she managed to crawl out in time to escape the rapidly approading flames and reached an airport where she lost consciousness. Had she not come to by dusk, her body, along with countless others, could have been sprinkled with gasoline and ignited on the airfield in a mass open-air cremation. For Shizuko, the next few days were spent crawling around makeshift barracks administering first aid. "Sick people kept arriving and medical supplies were scarce," she remembers. "My job was to pick maggots from festering wounds and to apply cooking oil with a stick to hundreds of people whose burns were so severe that even the best medical attention
could not have saved them."
Toshiko Nakamura, mother of six children, was straightening her family's air raid shelter on a hillside near her home in Nagasaki on August 9th. She saw a sudden flash. Looking out of the shelter she saw disaster. Strong trees had snapped, their branches hanging limply and everything in her neighbourhood was ablaze.
"There was no way I could approach my burning home, and I had no alternative but to run with the few ghostlike forms which had emerged from the flames, "she recalls with horror. "When I returned the next day my house was still smouldering. I was almost driven mad by the possibility that my whole family was buried there".
Alone, dazed, sick and grief-stricken, she wandered the streets like a sleepwalker, checking bulletin boards for notice that any of family had survived. She has never recovered from the shock and sorrow of that one split second in Nagasaki.
Equally tragic were the lingering deaths from radiation disease by which Toyoko Fujikawa lost eleven of her relatives in the course of a few weeks. Toyoko and her husband had returned to his family's home after the bombing, she having sustained a hip injury from the blast and he in seemingly perfect health. After two weeks he developed radiation illness. "The doctors had no clue as to treatment," she says. "Their only advice was to keep him cool and feed him fresh food. I nursed him carefully but even the recommended treatment became impossible when his mouth swelled so severely that he could not take nourishment. He died within a week".
"Then I took care of my uncle's family. All of them were sick and went insane. I felt totally helpless. I watched them die one by one".
For many women there was not only the grief of childrens' deaths during and after the blast, but the burden of anxiety and guilt over children born since. No one knew at the time about the effects of radiation on the foetus.
Kazue Miura Lad lost her father, a brother and a sister in the blast; a few days later her mother died. Kazue somehow recovered, and later married. Her first child was stillborn. Two children have been born to her since then. It wasn't till her daughter was 14, Kazue says, that "she asked me the question I so dreaded hearing: "Mother, why did you give birth to me? You are a bomb victim, so you should not have brought me into the world"'. It was a question she had long anticipated, "but no amount of emotional preparation could have softened the blow of those few words". For her, this was the saddest moment of her life.
"My daughter, born long after a war she had nothing to do with, is a victim of that war no less than I am."
The effects of radiation on the second generation were gradually and tragically unfolding. Most of the women who were exposed to radiation during their pregnancy lost their babies. Of the few children who survived in the uterus, some were born microcephalic and retarded. Of the women who conceived within five years after the bombings, almost all had miscarried or had stillbirths. Research has shown that the incidence of leukemia, anemia, retardation, soft and fragile bones, in addition to a variety of other debilitating ailments, has been high among the children of survivors.
Of all the difficulties the women themselves have endured, none compare in intensity to anxieties over the health and happiness of the second generation of bomb victims. No damage done to them, they feel, could match the cruelty of the bomb's effects on their children.
The status of 'hibakusha', bomb victims, has meant years of suffering for some 370,000 Japanese men and women. An out· break of terrifying illnesses often of permanent duration followed in the wake of the bombs. It has meant social isolation, with discrimination in jobs and marital arrangents. Special survivors benefits have been granted, but all too often not before a lengthy legal battle has been waged on behalf of clients. That these struggles have been necessary reflects the fact that no government has ever apologised or taken responsibility for compensating survivors for the damage done to them. ''When I applied for a bomb victim's health insurance card," says Toshiko Nakamura, "the official sarcastically remarked that I was lucky since the card would give me everything I needed. I was furious I threw down the card and screamed, ''Who asked for such a card? Give me back my husband! Give me back my six children!"
The work of the Women's Section in Osaka has spread, and the need for its services recognised by the City of Osaka; it has been given an office and a modest yearly grant.
The group~ central belief is emphatic that the question of nuclear weapons is much too important to be left to the generals, whose job is war, the arms manufacturers whose deadly products yield profits, or the politicians, many of whom seem to believe that the country's economic health depends on both. They urge people all over the world to join them in working for disarmament. The Women's Section have offered their testimony knowing that if we are silent we only increase the risk of nuclear catastrophe."There must never again be victims like ourselves."
"My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world. ''
- Adrienne Rich