Bequeathed deformity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The charred statue of Our Lady was in Urukami Cathedral in Nagasaki when the bomb dropped. Photo: Fr Jim Mulroney SSC

The charred statue of Our Lady was in Urukami Cathedral in Nagasaki when the bomb dropped. Photo: Fr Jim Mulroney SSC

Usually an enjoyable meander on a hot summer afternoon, I walked with some haste down the narrow street. The fronts of small shops and aging homes lay open to the footpath to capture any cooling movement of air. Friendly greetings emerged with invitations to stop for a chat.

However, on this day there was some urgency. The teenage daughter of a parishioner was ill, but I knew not why nor how serious.

This densely populated area nestling under the flight path of Osaka’s Itami Airport mostly housed a migration from Nagasaki. The drift of people had begun in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb that exploded over the city on 9 August 1945, but with limited subsequent redevelopment in the devastated area, the drift had continued right up to the early 1980s.

To others in the city, the new-comers, with their quaint accent and rural dialect, were either a source of comedy or an unwelcome invasion competing for jobs and housing. They clustered into ghetto-like zones characterised by small manufacturing, building and repair services. The Nagasaki assortment tended to work together, employ and support each other.

The teenage girl had a fever, although mild, serious, because both her parents had been exposed to the nuclear explosions that had taken the lives of so many in Hiroshima and Nagasaki some 35 years previously.

Her mother had been a child on the outskirts of Nagasaki. She suffered badly from headaches and, despite her strict diet, flabby obesity.

The father had been a teenage conscript in the Imperial Japanese Army around the Hiroshima area on its fateful day of 6 August 1945. His head was bald, not the least sign hair had ever hosted the sweep of a comb across its dome. His face smooth, like a child with no trace of razor or sign of beard.

As I stepped from the street through the open window, he emerged from the bath with naught but a towel around his waist, revealing a chest and stomach covered by the stretched, smooth, shiny skin bequeathed by extreme burns.

Like so many survivors of nuclear fallout, both mother and father suffered from weakened immune systems, which they bequeathed to their children. The teenage girl was more affected than her younger brother and, on this day, even her mild fever was deemed serious, as without medical attention it would not easily abate, meaning acute danger of pneumonia.

When a call to a faithful neighbour with a small delivery van went unanswered, I returned to the church to pick up the parish car and drive her to hospital.

Triage brought her straight to the top of a longish queue at outpatients, reflecting the concern over the young girl’s malady.

As I waited while the family consulted with doctors, the ever-faithful neighbour arrived. A burly, always jolly man, we chatted as we sat.

The Japan rugby team was on tour and playing on the television. It caught his attention. “We used to play that game for training when I was in the army,” he told me.

He had been a boy soldier during World War II. He explained they were hungry days and as punishment, an officer’s meal would be placed before the losing team at mess. “It steamed of meat and fish, things we never saw,” he explained, “but we were not allowed to touch them.”

Training camp led to a hazardous voyage to what is modern day Sarawak, now part of Malaysia. “We were given guns, but no ammunition,” he told me. “When we returned to camp, we would be beaten and abused for not dying for the emperor.”

He carried his own war scares, aches and pains, but was truly grateful for the simple life he now enjoyed, saying, “Don’t talk to me about heaven, I am already there!”

But he also carried the burden of support for his surviving younger brother, who had been on the family farm on the outskirts of Nagasaki when the bomb exploded, so the faithful neighbour understood well the struggle of the parents of the teenage girl.

A doctor emerged. He spoke with gravity, explaining that the young girl was being admitted and the parents would stay awhile with her. He described her complaint as common in children born to survivors of the bomb (or hibakusha as they are known in Japanese), but as her body matured, her system should eventually adjust.

What about her future children? “That,” the doctor explained, “depended on many factors. Who she married being a big one.” He figured it would take some 200 years for the residue to flush completely from the lineage.

Lest we forget, what had been the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall is today a decimated ruin known as the Genbaku (explosion) Memorial Dome. A preserved memory of the deformity of wartime destruction, it stands in stark contrast to the beauty of construction of the peace in this now beautiful city cradled by its surrounding mountains.

However, the Memorial Dome not only recalls the deformity of timber, brick, steel and concrete, or that of the mangled people of the day, but also the deformity bequeathed to those yet to be born. In some, visible, but in others hidden from the eye.

Almost four decades previously, Hiroshima had wondered at the leaflets calling for surrender falling from enemy aircraft in place of the bombs of previous weeks. Some attributed the few days of calm to their strong Buddhist faith, others to the lobbying of second and third-generation Japanese Americans who had originated from Hiroshima.

What was not known was that a far more insidious plan was being hatched. The Allied Forces wanted the destructive power of this new bomb, dubbed Ultimate Weapon by author, Edward T Sullivan, to have maximum effect.

So there was surprise on the relaxed sunny morning when the voice of Masanobu Furuta broadcasting a warning of approaching enemy aircraft was suddenly cut off by an eye-stabbing flash followed by a heaven-splitting roar, leaving bodies charred, corpses scattered and the half-dead meandering aimlessly, their fried skin drooping like cobwebs from face, hands, arms and legs.

A former mayor, Setsuo Yamada, described the moment as “a landmark in man’s history,” one that ushered in generations of both visible and invisible scars of an extent conducive to “the annihilation of mankind.”

The teenage girl of the 1980s carried the invisible deformity within her body. Although not noticed by the casual observer, a carefree childhood had been sacrificed for an anxious one of caution, confinement and pain.

Well, may we say with Pope Paul VI,

“War, never again!”.

Columban Fr Jim Mulroney is the former Editor of the ‘Sunday Examiner’ in Hong Kong and now resides at the Columban house in Essendon.

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