'The cross I've carried': Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors share experiences in New Mexico

On Aug. 9, 1945, 6-year-old Chiyoko Motomura was playing on a veranda at her family’s Nagasaki, Japan, home. Her mother, aunt and grandfather were weeding the rice fields while her grandmother was preparing lunch when they heard a lightning-like crack.

“Bachiiiiing!” Motomura, now 86, said through a translated PowerPoint presentation at the University of New Mexico’s Zimmerman Library on Wednesday. “A bright flash of light exploded in front of my eyes ... and with a loud thud my small body was slammed into the garden.”

Motomura’s grandmother rushed over and threw herself over her and then carried her to an air raid shelter even as she had shards of glass pierced in her back.

“At that moment, there was a strange fireball, a roaring noise, and an explosion of wind,” she said. “The silence that followed remains in my memory even now.”

The presentation was made as members of the Nagasaki Prefecture Hibakusha Health Handbook Holder’s Association visited Los Alamos and UNM this week to meet with the public about the lasting effects of nuclear bombs.

The group of 10 included a handful of hibakusha, people who survived the atomic bombings, as well as people whose parents or grandparents were present when the bomb was detonated. After their New Mexico visit, the group will journey to Hawaii and visit Pearl Harbor, according to member Kazuhiro Ihara.

Sunday is the 84th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing, which motivated the United States to become more directly involved in World War II. The U.S. built and tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The U.S. is the only country to have used the weapons during armed conflict, dropping one on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and a second on Nagasaki on Aug. 9. The bombs killed an estimated 213,000 with the blasts and brought an end to World War II. The majority of those killed were civilians.

Two days after the bomb dropped, Motomura said, they went to the bomb’s hypocenter to look for other relatives.

“I tried to search for relatives, but all I could find were charred corpses, making it impossible to identify them,” Motomura said. “It was only from the pattern on her pants, which had barely survived the burn, that I finally realized it was my aunt.”

Motomura said her grandmother died six months later.

“I feel guilty,” she said. “All because she protected me. That’s the cross I’ve carried for 80 years. I am who I am today because of my grandmother’s life.”

Sawa Yamanishi, an association member whose grandmother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped, said “To make the world free from nuclear weapons, international connections are very important, not just the political side.”

‘We lost everything’

Dr. Masao Tomonaga, 82, was 2 years old when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. His home was within 2 miles of the detonation.

“The whole area was devastated during the one-night firing,” Tomonaga said. “So our family escaped from this corner to a nearby shrine, and the next day we left Nagasaki. We lost everything.”

Within 1 mile of the bomb, many people were killed instantaneously or suffered severe burns. Acute radiation sickness also affected survivors within the following weeks. Tomonaga has dedicated much of his career to understanding the long-term effects of radiation.

In his third year in high school, Tomonaga decided to study medicine, a choice driven by surviving the atomic bomb. He has spent a career researching leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes to understand how radiation affects the body.

The first two years after the bomb, many of the new leukemia patients were children, with the highest incidence among people who had been within 1 mile of the bomb. Researchers also found an increased incidence of cancer among people within 1.2 miles and 3 miles of the detonation.

Tomanaga worked on a lifetime cohort study of leukemia cases, which found that excess childhood leukemia cases peaked within five years after the radiation exposure. With some other cancers, the instance elevated gradually and persisted over a longer period of time, which Tomanaga hypothesizes is related to stem cells being affected by the radiation.

Many survivors also suffered from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, he said.

“The psychological effect is very, very severe,” Tomanaga said, referencing a 1995 World Health Organization questionnaire that showed a continued relationship between distance from the bomb and increased rates of depression and PTSD. “… So you can imagine their whole life was in a simple word, terrible, but they survived bravely, and they established their new families and new houses.”

There are fewer than 100,000 survivors remaining, and within the next 20 years that number will likely become fewer than 200, Tomanaga said.

Hours after Tomanaga spoke, the association hosted a workshop where people were seated in groups and shared their thoughts on the atomic bomb and its fallout.

Inside the Zimmerman Library’s Waters Room was artist Yuko Monden’s over 19-foot acrylic painting titled “Nagasaki.” On one end it depicts the city during the aftermath of the bombing, while the other end shows a peace statue that serves as a reminder of what happened.

At the end of her talk, Motomura asked, “Is what I experienced as a 6-year-old just an old tale of an ordinary life not being protected? Is it OK to leave this as an old tale?”

“No,” she said. “ ... There are many conflicts in which lives are not protected. There are people who are calling for nuclear weapons to be used again in these wars.”