Acknowledging the human toll of nuclear war

This week — Wednesday and Saturday — marks the 80th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

I wanted to know about Japanese experiences in the aftermath, so I looked for books in the library. There was disturbingly little. Most books were about scientists who created the bomb, or American politicians and military leaders who ushered in the use of this weapon of mass destruction. They were largely glorified.

But there was a glaring absence: Japanese people. At the end of 1945, the bombs had killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki. Most were civilians, including 38,000 children. In Hiroshima, 270 of the city’s 300 doctors were killed or injured. Yet Japanese people are largely left out of U.S. history and are reduced to faceless statistics.

Those near the bombs’ epicenters were obliterated by blasts hotter than temperatures on the sun. Survivors suffered burns that shredded their skin to ribbons. The injured moaned beneath rubble, begging to die.

The horrors continued long after the blasts. Survivors suffered from cancer and other agonizing effects of radiation.

Where were the stories of lives lost? Or of survivors of the world’s only nuclear attack? Where were the stories of children playing on a summer morning, mothers making breakfast — all oblivious to the bombs?

There’s a reason for this gross lacuna. After the attack, the U.S. government "went into overdrive to contain the human cost of their new weapon," according to the book “Fallout” by Lesley M.M. Blume.

U.S. officials deliberately blocked journalists from going independently to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and censored reporting. About 240,000 U.S. troops would occupy Japan and control access.

The U.S. also downplayed the grievous aftereffects. Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, told a Senate committee that radiation poisoning is a "very pleasant way to die."

"Fallout" documents how journalist John Hersey was struck by the lack of human stories after the U.S. news cycle had moved on.

He fell out with Time magazine, where he had been a war reporter, so he went to an upstart publication then known for satire: The New Yorker. Months later, Hersey managed to quietly visit Hiroshima. He interviewed six survivors, including two doctors, a mother of three, a 20-year-old factory clerk, a Japanese pastor and a German priest. They recounted their anguish and nightmarish scenes: skin peeling off a man’s outstretched hand like a glove; a mother who wouldn’t let go of her decomposing baby.

Hersey’s article "would be the first to depict the Japanese victims as ordinary human beings — or human beings at all — a then-revolutionary approach to the subject of the atomic bombings," wrote Blume.

Up until publication, The New Yorker kept the article under wraps. Top editors created a dummy issue so that most staff didn’t know what was planned.

In August 1946, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to Hersey’s 30,000-word narrative, which illustrated the human cost of nuclear war in heart-wrenching detail.

It was quickly published as the book "Hiroshima", which has sold millions of copies and sparked campaigns that helped contain nuclear weapons, according to Blume.

Yet eight decades on, there is still a dire lack of Japanese perspectives. Author Caren Stelson had a wake-up call about that gap in 2005. She heard survivor Sachiko Yasui speak in Minneapolis about the bomb that decimated Nagasaki when she was 6.

Yasui’s 2-year-old brother died when a stick speared his head. Within weeks of the blast, her brothers, 12 and 14, died of burns and radiation sickness. Her family couldn’t afford medical care, so her sister died of leukemia at age 13. Eventually her parents succumbed to cancer. In her early 20s, Yasui was diagnosed with thyroid cancer but survived.

When Stelson heard Yasui’s story, she recalled, "I realized, as an American, I knew a great deal about the Holocaust, what happened and who survived, but precious little about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ... I was sure I was not the only American to admit that."

Stelson was so moved that she went to Nagasaki five times to interview Yasui.

I spent six years writing Sachiko’s story for our young people in America to fill in the historical void in their understanding," Stelson told me. In 2016, she published a book for young readers called "Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor’s Story."

There is still a pitiful dearth of Japanese perspectives about the bombings. But with Stelson’s book, at least one story can be remembered, along with Yasui’s all-important reminder in its epigraph: "What happened to me must never happen to you."

On Wednesday, the Japanese Cultural Center of Chicago and Japanese Arts Foundation will host a lantern ceremony at Jackson Park's Osaka Garden, formerly the Garden of the Phoenix, to acknowledge the atrocities of the bombings and harm caused on both sides of the war. On Saturday, the humanitarian group Chicago Nightingales will host a ceremony at Trickster Cultural Center in Schaumburg.

Amy Yee is an economy reporter for the Sun-Times. She is author of “Far From the Rooftop of the World” with a foreword by the Dalai Lama.