ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 75: Truman's 'Human Sacrifice' to Subdue Moscow
August 3, 2020
In this introduction to the memoir of a Nagasaki bombing victim, historian
Peter Kuznick shows why the bombs were dropped and how some victims' anger
propelled the Japanese anti-nuclear movement.
By Peter Kuznick
Sumiteru Taniguchi was one of the "lucky" ones. He lived a long and
productive life. He married and fathered two healthy children who gave him
four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He had a long career in
Japan's postal and telegraph services. As a leader in Japan's anti-nuclear
movement, he addressed thousands of audiences and hundreds of thousands of
people. He traveled to at least 23 countries. The organizations in which he
played a prominent role were nominated several times for the Nobel Peace
Prize.
Many of the more than 250,000 who lived in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 were
not so lucky. Tens of thousands were killed instantly by the plutonium core
atomic bomb the U.S. dropped that day from the B29 Bockscar, captained by
Major Charles Sweeney.
Photo of Nagasaki bombing taken by Charles Levy from one of the B-29
Superfortresses used in the attack. ( Office of War
Information/Wikipedia.)
The bomb, nicknamed "Fat Man," exploded with a force equivalent to 21
kilotons of TNT and wiped out an area that covered three square miles,
shattering windows eleven miles away. Some 74,000 were dead by the end of
the year. The death toll reached 140,000 by 1950. Included among the victims
were thousands of Korean slave laborers, who toiled in Japanese mines,
fields, and factories. Since then, atomic bomb-related injuries and
illnesses have claimed thousands more victims and caused immense suffering
to many of the survivors.
The scene of death and destruction defied description. Corpses, many of
which had been charred by the blast, lay everywhere. Susan Southard, in her
groundbreaking book Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, describes the scene
that U.S. occupation troops encountered when they landed on September 23,
1945: "The Urakami Valley had vanished from existence, corpses were burning
on cremation pyres, skulls and bones were piled on the ground, and people
were walking through the ruins with beleaguered and empty expressions."
Among the troops was Keith Lynch, a sailor from Nebraska. Lynch wrote to his
parents that he had just seen "a sight I hope my children, if I am so
fortunate, will never have to see, hear of, or ever think of. It was
horrible and when you get to thinking, unbelieveable..Such a thing as I saw
yesterday cannot be described in words. You have to see it and I hope no one
ever has to see such a thing again."
The death toll was even higher and the destruction greater in Hiroshima,
which the U.S. had obliterated three days earlier with a uranium core atomic
bomb. There, some 200,000 were dead by 1950. The Nagasaki bomb was more
powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima, but damage was limited by the
fact that the bomb missed its target and that the mountains surrounding
Nagasaki, which is located in a valley, contained the blast. However, in
Urakami Valley, where the bomb landed, nearly 70 percent of the population
perished.
Lingering Questions
Questions about the atomic bombings have persisted ever since those fateful
days in August 1945. Renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow asked President
Truman in a 1958 television interview, "When the bomb was dropped, the war
was near to ending anyway. Was this the result of a miscalculation of the
Japanese potential? Was our intelligence faulty in this area?" Truman
correctly denied that he had miscalculated or that the intelligence had been
faulty. He knew exactly what he was doing. For months, in fact, Allied
intelligence had been accurately reporting Japan's growing desire to quit
and the fact that there were alternatives to using atomic bombs to end the
war. On July 6, 1945, in preparation for the Potsdam Conference, the
Combined Intelligence Committee of the Combined Chiefs of Staff issued a top
secret "Estimate of the Enemy Situation." The section on the "Possibility of
Surrender" clearly stated:
"The Japanese ruling groups are aware of the desperate military situation
and are increasingly desirous of a compromise peace, but still find
unconditional surrender unacceptable..a considerable portion of the Japanese
population now consider absolute military defeat to be probable..An entry of
the Soviet Union into the war would finally convince the Japanese of the
inevitability of complete defeat."
Truman recognized the growing desperation of Japanese leaders, whose
citizens were becoming increasingly demoralized. The U.S. had firebombed and
largely destroyed more than 100 Japanese cities, leaving millions homeless.
With the food supply shrinking and the transportation system in tatters,
starvation loomed. Energy supplies had run so low that new Japanese pilots
could barely undertake the training flights needed to prepare for battle.
U.S. forces had decimated Japan's air force and navy. And, as the July 6
report indicated, Japanese leaders were looking for a way out and American
leaders knew it.
Nagasaki, Japan, before and after the atomic bombing. (US National Archives)
Truman described the intercepted July 18 cable between officials in Tokyo
and Moscow as "the telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace." Based on
other recently intercepted cables, his close advisors concurred. They knew
that giving the Japanese assurances that they could keep the emperor would
likely bring surrender. Secretary of War Henry Stimson pushed Truman and
Secretary of State James Byrnes to drop the demand for unconditional
surrender and inform the Japanese that the emperor could stay. Most of
Truman's top military and civilian advisors joined Stimson in that endeavor.
General Douglas MacArthur, Southwest Pacific Supreme Commander, later
declared, somewhat overoptimistically, that the Japanese would have happily
surrendered in May if U.S. leaders had changed the surrender terms.
But that was not the only way to induce surrender without use of the atomic
bombs. U.S. leaders could also have waited for the Soviets to declare war
against Japan and begin the invasion of Japanese-occupied territories and
perhaps Japan itself. Truman was confident that this would do the trick.
When he got Stalin's confirmation at Potsdam that the Soviets were coming
in, he wrote in his diary on July 17, "He'll be in the Jap War on August 15.
Fini Japs when that comes about." He wrote to his wife the next day,
exulting, "We'll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who
won't be killed!"
Opening the Path to Ultimate Destruction
But Truman's crime goes beyond slaughtering innocent civilians. Making
Truman's actions totally indefensible was the fact that Truman knew that he
was beginning a process that could end all life on the planet and said so on
at least three occasions. While at Potsdam, most famously, he reacted to an
in-depth briefing on the incredible power of the Alamogordo bomb test by
shuddering, "It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates
Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark."
Many scientists knew he wasn't exaggerating. Physicist Edward Teller had
been pushing for immediate development of hydrogen bombs for years. Fellow
Hungarian Leo Szilard warned that the destructive force in such bombs could
be almost unlimited in size. Los Alamos scientific director J. Robert
Oppenheimer had earlier warned top government and military leaders that
within three years the U.S. would likely have weapons between 700 and 7,000
times as powerful as the relatively primitive bomb that would flatten
Hiroshima.
In less than a decade, scientists were indeed testifying before Congress
about the feasibility of developing a thermonuclear explosive with the power
of 700,000 Hiroshima bombs. Insanity was the order of the day. As Lewis
Mumford wrote, "madmen," calmly, rationally planning annihilation, had
seized the levers of power. As Sumiteru Taniguchi understood, they have not
relinquished it since.
The question that plagues many historians is not whether the bombs needed to
be used to prevent an invasion that was not even scheduled to begin for
another three months against a foe that had clearly been defeated.
Obviously, they did not. Seven of America's eight five star officers in 1945
are on record saying as much.
Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman's personal Chief of Staff, said that in
using the atomic bombs, the U.S. "adopted an ethical standard common to the
barbarians of the dark ages." Even the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in
Washington, DC acknowledges that the vast death and destruction wreaked by
atomic bombings "made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the
Soviet invasion of Manchuria.changed their minds." The question is not
whether the atomic bombs were militarily or morally justifiable-they clearly
were not. The question is why Truman chose to use them when he knew the end
of the war was imminent and said so repeatedly and knew they were putting
humanity on a glide path to annihilation.
As historians have increasingly come to realize, Truman had been obsessed
with the Soviet Union since April 13, 1945-his first full day in office. His
close advisors, most of whom had little if any influence upon Roosevelt,
pushed him to act firmly to challenge Soviet actions in Europe. Truman's
confrontation with Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov on April 23, in which
he erroneously accused the Soviets of having broken their Yalta promises,
marked how dramatically the wartime alliance between the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R. had deteriorated in the 11 days since Roosevelt's death.
The Real Target
Yalta Conference 1945: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. The Kodak Kodachrome
photograph was not colorized. (US National Archives/Wikimedia Commons)
James Byrnes, who became Truman's Secretary of State in early July but had
been his most trusted advisor since his first day in office, and Gen. Leslie
Groves, the driving force behind the Manhattan Project, both asserted that
the Soviet Union loomed as the real target behind the bomb project. Byrnes
told three visiting scientists in late May that the bomb was needed to
reverse Soviet gains in Eastern Europe.
Groves appalled physicist Joseph Rotblat, the future Nobel laureate who quit
the project a few months later, when he said in March 1944, "You realize of
course that the main purpose of this project is to subdue the Russians."
Groves stated on another occasion, "There was never from about two weeks
from the time I took charge of the Project any illusion on my part that
Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis."
Sumiteru Taniguchi concurred with that assessment. In his moving memoir, he
writes, "Some studies point out that the U.S. wanted to test the uranium and
plutonium-type bombs to show off their military muscle and take the
advantage in the post-World War II diplomacy. I agree with this
perspective." He understood fully and says directly that "nuclear weapons
are weapons of annihilation." When he died in August 2017, 72 years after
the atomic bombings, his anger had not abated. Those who work closely with
Hibakusha (atomic bomb-affected persons) have often heard them say that they
don't condemn U.S. leaders; they condemn war.
In Akira Kurosawa's moving 1991 film Rhapsody in August, when the 80-year
old grandmother Kane, whose husband had been killed in the Nagasaki bombing,
learns of her four grandchildren's concern about her suffering at U.S.
hands, she explains, "it was a long time ago that I felt bitter about
America. It's been 45 years since grandpa died. Now I neither like nor
dislike America. It was because of the war. The war was to blame." This
sentiment was especially pervasive in Nagasaki where the response to the
bombings was deliberately depoliticized by a form of Christian apologetics.
Some Forgave the US
Postcard of the Memorial Service Held at the Urakami Roman Catholic
Cathedral, Nov. 23, 1945. (Published by the Nagasaki City Office.)
Visitors to Nagasaki quickly discover that the bomb missed its intended
downtown target near the Mitsubishi shipbuilding and munitions manufacturing
headquarters by two miles. It exploded instead above the Urakami Cathedral,
East Asia's largest, in the center of the biggest Catholic community in
Japan. Nagasaki's Catholic community dates back to the 16th century, but,
after flourishing briefly, its members were persecuted and driven
underground. The community didn't reemerge until the Meiji government lifted
the ban against Christianity in 1873. There were approximately 14,000
Catholics in Urakami at the time of the atomic bombing. The one who did the
most to shape the city's postwar narrative was Catholic doctor Takashi
Nagai.
Nagai converted to Catholicism in 1934 after a one-year stint as a Japanese
imperial army surgeon in Manchuria. During his second military tour from
1937 to 1940, he served in Nanjing at the time Japanese troops were carrying
out the brutal massacre, commonly known as the "Rape of Nanjing." Upon his
return to Japan, Nagai was decorated with the Order of the Rising Sun for
his "bravery." Back in Japan, he served as Dean of the Department of
Radiology at Nagasaki Medical University where he was diagnosed with
leukemia in June 1945. He suffered another major blow two months later when
his wife was killed in the atomic bombing, leaving him to raise his two
young children.
Nagai worked tirelessly and heroically to help the victims of the bombing at
a time when doctors and medical facilities were in desperately short supply.
But, as Yuki Miyamoto has explained, it was his Biblical interpretation of
the bombing that proved his most enduring, and controversial, legacy. This
was best captured in a lecture he gave during a mass on November 23, 1945 in
which he stated,
"It was the providence of God that carried the bomb to that destination.Was
Nagasaki, the only holy place in all Japan, not chosen as a victim, a pure
lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the
sins committed by humanity in the Second World War? Only when Nagasaki was
burned did God accept the sacrifice. Hearing the cry of the human family. He
inspired the emperor to issue the sacred decree by which the war was brought
to an end."
Nagai called upon Nagasaki's Catholics to "give thanks that Nagasaki had
been chosen for the sacrifice."
Living in a tiny 43 square foot hut with his two young children, the
charismatic Nagai, his health rapidly deteriorating, wrote fifteen books
before his death in 1951. His classic work, The Bells of Nagasaki, was
published in 1949 with the blessing of the occupation authorities and turned
into a popular movie. Publication had been delayed for more than two years
due to the strict censorship U.S. authorities imposed on discussions of the
atomic bombs. GHQ, the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers, insisted
he change the title from his original choice The Curtain Rises on the Atomic
Age. With its new title, the book quickly became a bestseller and helped
popularize the idea that the bombing was "God's Providence" and the Nagasaki
Catholics were deliberately chosen for this "redemptive sacrifice."
In other writings, Nagai shifted the blame for the atomic bombing from the
Americans to the Japanese themselves: "It is not the atomic bomb that gouged
this huge hole in the Urakami basin. We dug it ourselves to the rhythm of
military marches..We turned the beautiful city of Nagasaki into a heap of
ashes..It is we the people who busily made warships and torpedoes."
As Tomoe Otsuki has shown in her dissertation and articles, Nagai's message
of "forgiveness" and "reconciliation" was one that U.S. occupation
authorities were more than happy to propagate. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the
Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, had sought to replace Shinto
influence in Japan with Christianity. Shinto, he believed, abetted
militarism, while Christianity undergirded democracy. "Democracy and
Christianity have much in common," he averred, "as practice of the former is
impossible without giving faithful service to the fundamental concepts
underlying the latter."
Under MacArthurs's command, GHQ officials worked hard to assist Nagasaki's
Catholics during the postwar reconstruction of the city, paving the way for
the city's new identity-an identity that Nagasaki governor Sojiro Sugiyama
happily embraced two years after the bombing when he declared, "Nagasaki is
the land of Christian martyrdom." As a result, the saying caught on that
"Ikari no Hiroshima, inori no Nagasaki"-"Hiroshima rages, Nagasaki prays."
Others Could Not Forgive
Taniguchi was part of a different Nagasaki. He raged rather than prayed.
When I met him in 1998, the year that my American University students and I
first added Nagasaki to our study tour in Hiroshima and Kyoto, I asked him
what he thought about Harry Truman. He minced no words in expressing his
deep disdain for Truman. He expressed no hint of being willing to forgive
those responsible for the atomic bombing, which he considered cruel and
unjust, even barbaric. He saw nothing positive resulting from the suffering
that he and others had undergone and deplored the nuclear sword of Damocles
that has hung over all humanity since August 1945. There is nothing nuanced,
ambivalent, or qualified about his feelings on this topic. As he writes in
his memoirs, "There are people who made the atomic bomb, people who ordered
its production, people who ordered its use, and people who rejoiced at its
use. I don't regard these people as humans."
Taniguchi spoke to my students almost every August between 1998 and his
death. His testimony was powerful. It was also unforgettable. That his
presentation to my students focused largely on the 1945-1949 period is
completely understandable. He was horribly burned in the bombing of
Nagasaki. He was a 16-year old postal worker delivering mail on his bike
when the bomb exploded. Burns covered his entire back. He remained
bedridden, lying on his stomach, for one year and nine months. The pain was
so intense and unrelenting that he begged nurses and doctors to kill him.
"Lying on my stomach with my chest wounds pressed down into the bed-the pain
was excruciating," he recalled. The bedsores covering his chest, back,
sides, jaw, and knees were so deep that portions of his heart and ribs were
exposed. He could not move his neck or right arm. Pus poured from his
maggot-infested wounds. Though no one expected him to live, he did and on
March 20, 1949, three years and seven months after the bombing, he was
finally discharged from the hospital.
Marine Sergeant Joe O'Donnell arrived in Nagasaki soon after the bombing
with orders to provide a photographic record of the bombing's aftermath. He
arrived at the temporary relief hospital at Shinkozen, to which Taniguchi
had been moved, on September 15. There he encountered the horribly burned
teenager. O'Donnell photographed Taniguchi's burned body. He recalled, "I
waved the flies away with a handkerchief, then carefully brushed out the
maggots, careful not to touch the boy's skin with my hand. The smell made me
sick and my heart ached for his suffering, particularly because he was so
young. I decided then that I would not take other pictures of burned victims
unless ordered to do so."
O'Donnell hid 300 images from U.S. occupation authorities and brought them
back to the United States, where he stored them in a trunk for nearly a half
century before ginning up the courage to look at them. Even then, he found
them so disturbing that he joined the ranks of activists fighting to abolish
nuclear weapons.
Photograph of Sumiteru Taniguchi's back injuries taken January 31, 1946 by
team of Lt. Daniel A. McGovern and Lt. Herbert Sussan. (Currently exhibited
at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.)
Meanwhile, despite being in constant pain, Taniguchi tried to resume a
normal life. On April 1, 1949, he returned to work. His back, which had not
yet completely healed, was covered with scars. His legs and bottom were
covered with keloids. He had limited movement in his left arm. The left side
of his chest was deeply gouged from the bedsores. As he writes in this
memoir, he felt "hatred towards war and the atomic bomb" and "profound
anger" toward government authorities and adults in general for the wartime
lies that he and others had been fed.
Humiliation
So this is no tale of Christian forgiveness. Taniguchi knew who and what to
blame and stated it openly. Among the targets of his anger was the Atomic
Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), which the U.S. occupation authorities set
up in Hiroshima in 1947 and Nagasaki in 1948 not to treat the atomic bomb
victims but to study them. Initially curious about the research, he
volunteered to be studied. But after being examined, he was told, "No
abnormality existed." No abnormality? Incredulous and furious at this "truly
merciless human experimentation," he never again set foot at the ABCC. Like
so many other Hibakusha, he was outraged over the humiliating treatment he
received.
Back at work in the Telegraph Office, he faced discrimination from both
management and fellow employees. The better educated and higher paid office
workers looked down upon the delivery workers. On one occasion, when
Taniguchi and other telegraph delivery workers formed a band to play music
at the send-off for a fellow worker who had been drafted, the office workers
mocked their poor performance.
"They treated us like idiots, and I was so angry," Taniguchi recalled,
adding, "We took them to a shrine behind our office and beat them up."
Taniguchi was clearly not one to turn the other cheek or behave like a
"sacrificial lamb." He joined the labor movement to fight for equal wages,
explaining, "I could not stand the discrimination I witnessed against equal
human beings." His colleagues, he reported, "often said I had a strong sense
of justice or that I had guts." In Taniguchi's case, it was not an
either/or. He had both.
But Taniguchi had not yet gotten involved in Japan's fledgling anti-nuclear
movement. The Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb tests in March 1954 would change
that. The uproar over the nuclear contamination of the crew members aboard
the Lucky Dragon No. 5 fishing vessel convinced Taniguchi that the time was
right to organize for the abolition of atomic and hydrogen bombs. On October
1, 1955, he, his friend Senji Yamaguchi, and 14 other atomic bomb survivors
who had also had surgery at Nagasaki University founded the Nagasaki A-Bomb
Youth Association.
Organizing
From its inception, the association worked closely with the Nagasaki A-Bomb
Maidens Association. The two organizations merged in May 1956, forming the
Nagasaki A-Bomb Youth and Maidens Association with Yamaguchi as president
and Taniguchi as vice-president. The next month, in June 1956, saw the
formation of the Nagasaki Council of A-Bomb Survivors (Nagasaki Hisaikyo),
which Taniguchi would chair for many years before stepping down in 2017.
Hisaikyo often joined forces with Gensuikyo, the Japan Council against A and
H Bombs, which had formed in September 1955 from the merger of the World
Conference against A and H Bombs, the National Council for the Signature
Campaign Against A and H Bombs, and the Organizing Committee for the World
Conference. Japan was abuzz with anti-nuclear activity and Taniguchi was in
the forefront of the organizing efforts.
Though active in the anti-nuclear movement, Taniguchi had not yet spoken
publicly about his own struggles as a victim of the bombing. In August 1956,
he attended the World Conference Against A and H Bombs in Nagasaki. On
August 9, Chieko Watanabe addressed the assembly of 3,000 people on behalf
of the Youth and Maidens Association. As a 16-year old, Watanabe had been
mobilized as a student and was working at the Mitsubishi Electric
Manufacturing Company when the bomb exploded. A steel beam fell, breaking
her spine and leaving her a paraplegic.
For 10 years, she remained secluded in her home until four A-bomb maidens
visited her. At the World Conference, her mother carried her to the podium,
from which she tearfully pleaded, "Please look at me in this miserable
condition. We must be the last victims of atomic bombs. Dear friends from
around the world, please work together and abolish all A and H bombs." All,
including Taniguchi, were deeply moved. The entire hall, he writes,
"exploded with applause." This was particularly moving, he remembered,
because "in fear of discrimination and prejudice, the hibakusha had kept
their mouths shut for a long time."
Taniguchi's opportunity came the next day in front of a smaller workshop. It
was a life-changing experience. He writes, with simple elegance, "Words
began to pour from my lips as though a dam inside me had broken-what had
happened on 'that day,' the three years and seven months of hospitalization,
the pain on my back, and the accumulated suffering and resentment. It was
the very first time I had spoken in front of a large number of people, and I
was not sure if my talk conveyed what I wanted, but I received great
applause from the audience."
That day was not only a milestone for Taniguchi, it was a milestone for all
Hibakusha, 800 of whom attended the conference. The attendees founded the
Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Survivors Organizations (Nihon
Hidankyo), which would go on to lead the fight for Hibakusha medical care
and other rights and benefits. Taniguchi would later become a co-chairperson
of Hidankyo.
Taniguchi's memoir operates on at least two distinct though tightly
intertwined levels. On the one hand, it is the story of his involvement in
and leadership of the anti-nuclear movement. In that regard, it provides
revealing new insight into the history of the antinuclear movement in Japan.
Over the years, Taniguchi worked with virtually all the leading Hibakusha
and antinuclear organizations. He saw the squabbles and feuds and played the
role of peacemaker, understanding that the common interests and objectives
far outweighed the differences and that in unity there was strength. And the
movement, he believed, had not gotten the credit it deserves.
While the movement has not succeeded in eliminating nuclear weapons as it
has striven to do, the Hibakusha, through their prominent and highly visible
participation, have helped stigmatize nuclear weapons and convince the world
that such weapons should never again be used.
Challenges
On the other hand, it is the story of the extraordinary challenges Taniguchi
faced socially and psychologically to deal with the personal tragedy that
almost destroyed his life. Among the challenges that he and so many other
Hibakusha faced was dealing with the often disfiguring physical scars that
the bombings had caused. In the memoir, Taniguchi describes the persisting
sense of shame he felt when people stared at the scars on his face. He tells
of his insecurity around women, which was reinforced by being rejected for
marriage by five or six different potential partners. He tells of marrying
Eiko ten days after meeting her and the trepidation he felt during their
honeymoon, fearing she would leave him after seeing his horribly scarred
body. They remained happily married for more than 60 years before Eiko
passed away in 2016 at age 86.
Taniguchi's sense of shame at being seen in public was eased somewhat by
plastic surgery. But the thought of taking his shirt off in public, even at
the beach, continued to mortify him. In the summer of 1956, male and female
members of the Youth and Maidens Association went by boat to a secluded
beach, where, for the first time, they were able to shed their clothes in
public without having people stare at them scornfully. Taniguchi recalls,
"As hibakusha with visible scars, we had been afraid to show our bodies in
bathing suits for fear that people would look at us coldly and with
disgust." But since they were all Hibakusha, the inhibition was gone. "We
were so excited," he writes, "like little children."
The thought of exposing his body in front of non-Hibakusha, however, was
still unimaginable to him. Finally, one day, a co-worker urged him to shed
his long-sleeve shirt at the beach and he decided he was ready to take the
plunge. As he ran topless to the beach, he "knew people were staring at me
in surprise but I didn't care. I was crying in my heart, 'Look at me and
think about why I became like this. Don't turn your face away.'"
But Taniguchi's life changed dramatically in 1970 when the Asahi Shimbun
published a photo taken by a U.S. soldier on January 31, 1946 of Taniguchi's
raw, red, scarred back as he grimaced in pain. The photo came from 16mm
color film footage that had been found in the U.S. National Archives. A week
later, the shocking footage was broadcast on Japanese television. Up to that
point, Taniguchi had been active in the anti-nuclear movement but had not
been a prominent national leader. However, when a British TV crew came to
interview him, he removed his shirt and displayed his scarred body. After
that, his life would never be the same. He was catapulted into a leadership
position and was in constant demand as a speaker. The image of his back
became one of the most universally recognized reminders of the horrors of
nuclear war and his passionate involvement in both the fight for Hibakusha
rights and the nuclear abolition movement have, as he himself and other
Hibakusha say, "brought him back to life again" and imbued his life with
special meaning.
When Taniguchi addressed my students, as he did with other groups, he held
up the large color photo of his raw red back. The photo itself is more than
most students can bear. And then he removed his shirt, revealing a heart
that could be seen beating through his ribs and a back covered with scars.
The natural instinct of the students was to turn away, but, out of respect,
they tried to choke back their tears and not avert their gaze, looking at
Taniguchi's disfigurement just as he wanted them to and understand more
deeply the abomination of nuclear warfare that Taniguchi had been trying to
convey.
In his memoir, Taniguchi shares his extraordinary life with us. Despite his
having undergone dozens of surgeries, undertaken extraordinary daily
measures just to stay alive, and endured endless suffering, Taniguchi's
story is inspiringly life-affirming. It is the remarkable chronicle of a man
who had gone beyond personal tragedy to dedicate himself to the struggle to
make sure that life will continue on this planet and that others will never
need to suffer the way he has.
Taniguchi ends with a simple plea, but it is the one that motivated him for
more than 70 years: "Let Nagasaki be the last atomic bombed site; let us be
the last victims. Let the voice for the elimination of nuclear weapons
spread all over the world." At a time when the threat of nuclear war is the
greatest it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis almost six decades ago,
this simple plea carries a poignancy that must be heard. Human beings and
nuclear weapons really can no longer co-exist.
This article forms the Introduction to the English language translation of
The Atomic Bomb on My Back: A Life Story of Survival and Activism by
Taniguchi Sumiteru, to be released on Aug. 9 by Rootstock Publishing. It was
published on Consortium News with permission from its author.
Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies
Institute at American University, and is co-author (with Akira Kimura) of
Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japanese and
American Perspectives, and co-author (with Oliver Stone) of The New York
Times best-selling The Untold History of the United States (books and
documentary film series).
