Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician’s Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands

201 Pages·1995·11.43 MB·English

by  James N. Yamazaki

CHILDREN OF THE ATOMIC BOMB
Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society
Editors: Rey Chow, H. D. Harootunian, and Masao Miyoshi
CHILDREN OF THE ATOMIC BOMB
An American Physician's Memoir of Nagasaki,
Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands
JAMES N. YAMAZAKI with Louis B. Fleming
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 1995
The costs of publication for this book have been supported in
part by a 1994 Hiromi Arisawa Award, given to Duke University
Press for publication of an outstanding work on Japan.
© 1995 Duke University Press All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00
Typeset in Berthold Bodoni Antiqua by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
CONTENTS
Foreword by John W. Dower VII
Acknowledgments XI
Prologue xv
1 Nagasaki 1
2 Born in America 12
3 Pearl Harbor's Impact 21
4 Love and War in 1944 30
5 Homecoming and the Bomb 42
6 To Japan at Last 51
7 Getting Organized 59
8 The Thunderbolt 69
9 Expanding Research 76
10 Through Guileless Eyes 86
11 Lobbying and Researching 94
12 Emerging Answers 104
13 The Genetic Puzzle 118
14 Farewell in Hiroshima 126
"The Peacemaker" 145
Appendix 147
Glossary 149
Notes 161
References 169

FOREWORD
fohn W Dower
When Dr. James Yamazaki visited Japan in 1989, he attended a
meeting of mothers in Hiroshima who were parents of "pica babies."
Pica is a familiar euphemism to most Japanese, referring to the
blinding flash of the atomic bomb and conveying a vivid sense of
thermal burns and radiation poisoning. The "pica babies" were chil
dren born with abnormalities, including mental retardation, after
being exposed to radiation in the womb when the bombs were
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were forty-four years old
in 1989.
Dr. Yamazaki marveled at the quiet way the now elderly mothers
of these retarded child-adults told their stories, and he grieved over
the uncertainty that haunted them concerning what would become
of these children of the atomic bomb when they, the parents, died.
We, in turn, can only be impressed by the quiet way he himself tells
his own remarkable personal story, in which this is but a part.
This is a story of striking juxtapositions - a snapshot of an Ameri
can life, as it were, that captures in a single frame racial prejudice in
the United States, the horror of the war in Europe, and the human
impact of the atomic bomb. And yet we read this brief personal ac
count, chapter after terse chapter, with a persistent sense of how
decent and constructive the human spirit can be. James Yamazaki,
pediatrician and medical researcher, made an early commitment to
making children whole. Son of an Episcopal priest, his own vision
has been consistently humanistic, his moral sense as solid as a rock.
viii Foreword
There are compelling subthemes here, captivating vignettes. Like
thousands of other second-generation Japanese-Americans, Dr.
Yamazaki fought for his country while his parents were incarcerated
behind barbed wire in one of the now notorious U.S. internment
camps. Captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, he too
experienced prison camps, as well as bombardment by U.S. aircraft,
not once but twice. Sent to occupied Japan in 1949 to study the
effects of nuclear radiation on children, he and his family were dis
criminated against by the British Commonwealth forces occupying
Hiroshima, whose military facilities and social events were reserved
for persons "of European descent only." His experience of the dis
parity between professed democratic ideals and actual practice only
strengthened his embrace of the ideals.
Subsequently posted to Nagasaki, apparently as a kind of exile
for protesting such racist policies in Hiroshima, Dr. Yamazaki em
barked on research concerning the medical effects of the atomic
bomb without ever being informed of the existence of earlier U.S.
scientific reports on this subject. Such obsessive secrecy was stan
dard practice and had ramifications that extended beyond the scope
of the present account. The policy that led the U.S. government to
keep even its own qualified researchers from knowing about prior
studies also kept important information about the human effects of
the bombs out of the hands of Japanese doctors laboring to tend to
the victims. It was not until 1951, near the end ofthe postwar Allied
occupation of Japan, that Japanese researchers were even permitted
to present papers on the medical consequences of the bombs. De
coding the full significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been an
ongoing struggle ever since August 1945.
Today, a half century later, Nagasaki is barely remembered outside
of Japan as the target of the "other" bomb. Hiroshima itself exists in
memory, if at all, as little more than a towering, symmetrical, even
aesthetically pleasing, mushroom cloud. In the United States there
has emerged an almost pathological aversion to confronting what
Foreword IX
actually took place beneath the mushroom clouds. In the phrasing
of a Senate resolution of September 1994 condemning the attempt
of the Smithsonian Institution to present an exhibition emphasizing
the human toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombs are said to
have helped "bring World War II to a merciful end:' They were the
last act in a terrible conflagration, and the enormity of Japan's ag
gression and atrocities, the fanaticism of its resistance, made such a
denouement inevitable and appropriate.
In the pages that follow here we encounter a patriotic veteran's
very different view of the war and its legacy. The indiscriminate
use of lethal weapons against entire populations that World War II
unleashed is appalling. Mercy is nowhere to be found when listen
ing to the story of a bereaved mother from Hiroshima or Nagasaki,
or encountering a microcephalic child, stunted and malformed in
the womb.
For many survivors of the bomb, the curtain never has closed
on the so-called last act of the war, and never will. Dr. Yamazaki
notes and calls attention to nine different forms of cancer caused
by radiation exposure. Also, while there is at present no statistically
significant evidence of long-term genetic effects from the bomb, the
psychological trauma of fearing that this may in time emerge has
been, for some victims, overwhelming. In Japanese parlance, such
invisible legacies of the bomb sometimes are referred to as "keloids
of the heart," "leukemia of the soul."
In Japan, the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometimes IS
evoked in a manner that portrays the Japanese in World War II as
mere victims. The bomb, in such usage, becomes a kind of nation
alism - a way of forgetting or canceling out the great suffering
the Japanese caused others. To most Japanese, however, the bomb
clearly transcends nationalistic history. It is only natural that they
focus not on the mushroom cloud but on the human agony beneath
it, and feel compelled to offer cries for sanity and peace.
That is what Dr. Yamazaki also has done, not as someone who ex-