After I finished school, I went to Osaka. Living and working at the small ear, nose, and throat clinic of an acquaintance, I worked for my nursing qualification, which I received two years later. Some time after that the doctor at the clinic was called up and sent to the front. I thought he would soon be back and in the meantime went to live at the clinic of a good friend of his. As it became more and more apparent that the doctor would not be returning for a considerable time, I went to work in a military hospital in Hiroshima Prefecture at the invitation of a former classmate.
The hospital, a specialized institution for tubercular soldiers, was in the town of Ono, near the island of Miyajima, one of Japan’s most scenic spots. My family had made me promise to stay there no more than three years. At the end of that time I went to work at a military-run cooperative hospital near Hijiyama Park in Hiroshima.
This hospital treated both military personnel and civilians. There were isolation wards for contagious diseases, a gynecology department, and outpatient service. Compared with the Ono hospital, it was a complex institution. I lived for a while in the nurses’ dormitory there but later rented a house with my dormitory roommate. Even after we both married, she continued living with us, since her husband was a sailor on the battleship Yamato and was rarely home.
On the morning of August 6 an air-raid alert sounded just after seven, when I was in the midst of flurried preparations for work. The all-clear soon sounded, however, and I left the house at my usual time. It was when I was squatting down putting on my work shoes in the changing room at the hospital that the brilliant flash came.
I clearly remember seeing the flash through the window, but nothing else remains in my memory. I fainted. When I came to, I found myself buried under the blankets used by nurses on the night shift. The blankets had been piled on top of the lockers, and when the lockers toppled over, the blankets must have tumbled down neatly on top of me.
I was terrified and went out into the corridor. The interior of the hospital was transformed. Tiles, plaster, glass, chips of wood had fallen and made a great mound on one side of the corridor. As I began to regain my sense of who and where I was, I grew aware of the patients’ screams for help. However, the doctors were not yet at the hospital, and there seemed nothing to do but wait. Then I thought of taking some of the patients to the air-raid shelter and, after doing so, ran outside.
There the tragedy of the atomic bombing was spread before my eyes. Five or six little boys, seven or eight years old, came running up, their bodies trembling, and begged me for medicine. “It’s so hot!” they cried. I saw that the skin on the upper half of their bodies was peeling off and hanging in strips that looked just like the skin you scrape off a new potato. Abruptly I asked them, “Did you go out without shirts?’’ They were wearing absolutely nothing above the waist. “We were wearing shirts,” they replied. When I looked carefully, I could see the remnants of their clothes embedded in their upper bodies. I quickly dressed the burns as best I could.
Looking back toward the hospital, I saw that outpatients had suddenly begun to congregate. Injured people were lying wherever there was room, in the corridors or on the concrete floor of the entrance hall, so that there was hardly room to walk. Most of the injured were suffering burns, but in no time our stock of medicine was exhausted, and all I could do was walk around with a bottle of olive oil, painting the wounds with a brush. We asked the names of the injured, posted them on a noticeboard outside the hospital, and rushed around trying to get water for those who were crying out for it. Very often we were too late, and by the time we came back the person was beyond help. It is impossible to describe the scene. I can only compare it to hell.
There were only about half the usual number of regulars at work that day, and few of the doctors were there. When I think back, we were not really functioning as a hospital. I have no idea how we managed.
Several hours passed. I felt as if I were in a trance. Toward evening my husband came to meet me and we set off for home. I was worried that our house had burned down, but luckily it had escaped the fires. I found it strange that although we were without electric light, the house looked bright inside. When I went in, all I could see was mud—the tatami floor mats had completely disappeared. At first I could not understand what had happened, but when I had recovered my calm and could look around properly, I realized that the blast had blown off the roof. The ceiling had fallen cleanly into one place, and we could see the stars above. The tatami mats were buried centimeters deep under fallen objects. That night we remained on the alert for further air raids, staying outside in the street with our neighbors. None of us slept a wink.
Sakae Hosaka lives in Tokyo with her husband, a director of the Tokyo Council of A-Bomb Sufferers Associations.
The next day we discharged all patients who could possibly return home. All those remaining were people who had been injured in the bombing. Although technically we had admitted them, there were not enough beds for all, and most patients had to be placed on the floor.
As the days passed, the mass of patients gradually diminished. The hospital, which had been full of sound, grew silent. Everyone was dying. A bonfire was built in a vacant lot near the hospital, and the bodies were piled on it. Oil was poured over them and ignited. Each day more and more of the vast crowd of people became ashes. Only a peculiar smell remained. Such a thing could no longer arouse emotion. Our feelings were numb.
We moved to Konoura on Etajima, an island about ten kilometers south of Hiroshima, where my husband’s unit of the Kamikaze Special Attack Force was stationed, and I commuted to the hospital by boat. Before many days had passed, however, I began to run a fever, and since it did not subside, I found myself too weak to continue at the hospital. For some reason I could not discover, a rash appeared on my body, and my eyesight began to fail. When I think about it now, I realize it was probably due to the atomic bomb. At the time somebody had said it would be seventy years before any plants would grow again in Hiroshima.
While I was resting at Konoura, a relative of one of the officers in my husband’s unit was brought to us suffering from burns and the effects of radiation. The burns covered more than half his body, and maggots were breeding in them. Though we removed as many maggots as we could, more remained, a moving mass beneath his pale skin. He suffered greatly, but there was no effective treatment we could give him. The most pitiful thing about it, when I think back, was our powerlessness to do anything.
The terrible thing about radiation is that nobody knows how or when it will make its effects felt. I have known someone who had virtually no health problems in thirty years die suddenly of leukemia. Whenever I fall ill, I am afraid I will never get well again. My husband, also a victim of the bombing, contracted pulmonary tuberculosis in 1947, and it cost him the most important time of his life. He is now suffering from diabetes and is resigned to having illness as his companion the rest of his days.
Our life since moving to Tokyo in 1949 has not been easy. Our daughter, born in 1948, has been anemic since childhood. Many times she has almost fainted when taking a bath and has had to have injections. The problem became more severe when she reached adulthood. When she married and became pregnant, she was advised by the doctor to take a dietary supplement, since there might be complications at the baby’s birth.
I have suffered from pains in the lower half of my body for more than twenty years, and when I stand up suddenly, things go black. I am fearful when I hear people talk of preparing for old age. Right now we can do little but try to make the present a little brighter for ourselves.
Is it right that people should make weapons that could destroy all life on this planet? We are now over sixty. We will continue to warn of the dangers while we can still move, but we need the help of the young. Take over where we leave off!
This essay first appeared in somewhat different form in the monthly magazine Dharma World in March 1984.
