Reflections of a Hiroshima Survivor

by Shigeko Sasamori

(This article is based on notes taken on October 24, 2008 at a Pacem in Terris sponsored talk by Shigeko Sasamori, a Hiroshima survivor who was one of the “Hiroshima Maidens” brought to the U.S. in 1955 by Norman Cousins for reconstructive plastic surgery for disfiguring burns caused by the atomic bomb. She was on a speaking tour in the U.S. sponsored by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation.)

On August 6, 1945 Shigeko Sasamori was 13 years old and was a young school girl in Hiroshima. She was in her first year of junior high school and the students at her school were part of a program to help widen some of the streets in the city in order to provide better escape routes for the citizens of Hiroshima in the case of a bomb attack. At that time the citizens of her city did not know anything about atomic bombs, but they did know about the fire bombs that were being dropped on Tokyo and Osaka. Older people would tear down houses to widen the streets and the students collected the rubble and cleared it away.

August 6 was the first day of Shigeko’s work outside of her school. The night before she and her family had heard an airplane overhead, so her mother and father took the family to an air raid shelter. When it was all clear they went back home, but it was late so she did not get very much sleep. The next morning, she had to wake up in a rush to get to school for the work brigade. In her haste, she put her good trousers on top of her old ones which was lucky, because the added layers of cloth protected her legs from getting burned.

The sky was a beautiful blue around 8:15 a.m. when she heard a plane. She called out to her girlfriend to look up at the sky and the nice way that the plane was flying. They both looked up. Shigeko saw something white [a parachute] drop from the plane. Next she heard and felt a tremendous boom, then a powerful, strong wind that knocked her down, and then everything went pitch black and was silent. She was a mile away from the epicenter.

She does not know how long she was unconscious, but when she starting coming to, it was like a fog that is lifting. She could start seeing people, but they were completely changed. They looked horrible. It was a completely different scene from the way the world had looked before. People were coming out from the epicenter and, although she still could not hear anything, she followed them. At first she thought that a fire bomb had been dropped, because she saw so many people who were burned and naked. She joined the throngs of people who were heading to the river. It was so hot, she thought they were going to the river to cool off. Many of them had no skin and some had their skin coming off. It was so horrible, she could not think straight. She couldn’t imagine what had happened. The first sound that she heard was a baby crying. The baby was hurt and burned and the baby’s mother was bloody and her skin was falling off, but she was trying to nurse her baby. That sound opened her ear and mind and she realized that the bomb had dropped on top of them.

The people she was following said that they should go to the other side of the river as far away from the center as they could go in case a second bomb was dropped. They struggled on and finally came to the schoolyard of a school that had been destroyed. She lay down under a tree and went in and out of consciousness. When she was conscious, she would say her name and address, hoping that somehow word would reach her parents. It was good that she did this, because she did not realize that she was burned beyond recognition. She lay there for five days and four nights with no food, no water, and no medication.

Her parents came looking for her five days after the bomb was dropped. Fortunately, they had only a few bruises, but they had not been hurt. Her father had been fishing and was at the fish market with his friends. When he heard the plane he told his friends to run with him into the concrete section of the market, but they stayed outside and they were all killed.

Before her parents arrived, Shigeko had a vivid dream. In it she saw pumpkin flowers and a well. She had a heavy body, but gradually she saw the well turn into a stream, then into a river, and finally the ocean. Then her body became a jet and it flew into a beautiful, shiny, golden room. Her body was light and her mouth had a good taste; she was so happy. She did not see anything, but she was floating in the air and it was a wonderful, good feeling. Then she heard her name, “Shigeko,” and everything became dark and she felt pain. It was her parents’ voices calling her. Then she heard a voice say, “She has a strong heart that is why she survived.” Her parents took her home.

While she was being carried home, she was able to open her eye a little and she could see that fires were still burning five days after the bomb was dropped. When her parents found her, her face was swollen and so badly burned and charred that it was black. One third of her body was burned – all of her face, neck, back, half of her chest, shoulders, arms, and both hands. Her fingers were fused together. It was a miracle that she had been able to walk and run over a mile to the schoolyard where her parents eventually found her. Most of her other schoolmates were killed.

When they reached home, her father had to cut off her charred hair and cut off the burned black skin. Underneath the skin was yellow plus from infection. Her parents applied cooking oil on it, because it was the only thing that they had. A year and a half later, she was able to go outside for the first time. While she was recovering, she heard terrible stories about people who were terribly burned, but still alive, who were unable to be rescued. The neighbor told them that her daughter was caught under debris from the house, but the neighbor was unable to clear it away. The daughter told her mother that she must not waste time trying to save her, but needed to take her two little children and run to safety. The helplessness of people who could not save and rescue their loved ones and other people who were still alive but were trapped, still haunts survivors. Shigeko thinks that such situations were much worse than her ordeal. She was terribly wounded, but she was lucky her family was alive, healthy, able to care for her, and nurse her back to health. So many others were not as fortunate. Hiroshima was a dead city. It was like hell, burning with terrible smells in the city. When people had to walk into the city, they had to keep swatting away black flies.

Norman Cousins, who was the editor of the Saturday Review magazine, was much influenced by John Hersey’s novella, Hiroshima, which was published in the New Yorker magazine on August 31, 1946. Cousins became an advocate for nuclear disarmament. He visited Hiroshima and when he got back to the U.S., he started the Moral Adoption Program. He had seen so many orphans in the city, that he began persuading Americans to adopt them. He came back to Hiroshima in 1953 and saw young women who had been disfigured by the bomb. It was during that visit that Shigeko was introduced to Norman Cousins by Rev. Tanimoto who had invited the young women to come to his Christian church for the meeting. When Cousins returned to the U.S., he felt that he had to do something for them and he set about raising money and persuading plastic surgeons at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City to perform surgery on 25 of the most severely burned young women. Many of them like Shigeko had been operated on in Toyko, but the scar tissue kept growing back and they were known as the “Keloid Girls.” By the time Shigeko met Mr. Cousins, she had had twenty operations done at Toyko University Hospital by plastic surgeons who had succeeded in restoring some movement in her neck and fingers. Cousins raised the funds for doctors from Mt. Sinai to go to Hiroshima to examine and determine which of the young women could come over. In 1955 a group 25 girls came over for reconstructive surgery and become known in the U.S. press as “the Hiroshima Maidens.” Shigeko was one of them and she said that when they arrived at the airport in New York, the Quaker families that were hosting them brought their children with them to greet them. The smiles of the children broke the ice, and soon she and the others were laughing together. Two girls stayed with each family and she felt that she was lucky to be placed with such a good family.

When Shigeko arrived in the States, her skin, chin, neck, and chest were stuck together. She also needed extensive surgery and skin grafts on her face. They opened her lips, but all of these skin grafts had to be done in stages and it took a long time. After her long course of treatment, she and the other Hiroshima Maidens prepared to return home. Norman Cousins interviewed each one of them individually, and when he found out that Shigeko wanted to become a nurse, he urged her to come back to the U.S. in the future to study nursing. She came back in 1958 to study nursing at Cedars-Sinai Hospital and stayed with the Cousins family and became one of the members of their family ever after.

Shigeko was very happy when the war ended. After it ended, many U.S. soldiers came to Hiroshima. At first she was scared because the Japanese people during the war had been brainwashed that the Americans were monsters. The first time that she went out from her house, her mother gave her a mask to wear over part of her face. The exposed skin was such red new skin, that children ran up to her and said, “Give me chewing gun.” She told her mother about this and she explained that they thought that she was an American and since the U.S. soldiers were handing out gum and other treats to children, they thought she could too.

One night they had a big typhoon and a bridge was washed out. They heard a knock on the door and when her father opened it he saw two U.S. soldiers. They could not speak Japanese and her father could not speak English. Her brother had started learning English at school, so he was able to communicate a little with them. They were lost and needed to get back to their camp. Her brother and father led them back to the base. The next day, the soldiers returned and brought with them lots of goodies as a thank you gift. They came back often to visit after that and her mother cooked for them and they became friends.

Shigeko is often asked if she is angry at the American people. She says that she is not angry at people, but she is angry at war. If a mother has a son, he is not born to go to kill people. He comes into this world to do good things and to have a happy life. Now is the time for us to work together, so that there will be no more war. She feels that God spared her life, so that she could tell people, “No more War. Don’t use nuclear weapons again. Never again!”

Shigeko Sasamori, an A-bomb survivor who now lives in California, is part of the Speakers Bureau of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation. She appeared in Steven Okazaki’s HBO film, “White Light,Black Rain” (2007) and spoke in Delaware on October 24 along with Steven Leeper, the Director of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation at St. Andrew’s School and at Limestone Presbyterian Church in Wilmington. They were here in conjunction with the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Poster Exhibit which the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation has given to Pacem in Terris which in turn will made it available to other groups who wish to display it.

Pacem in Terris would like to thank the following groups and individuals for making this exhibit and tour possible:The City of Hiroshima, the City of Nagasaki, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, Akira Yamaima, Shozo Fujiwara, Hiroshima Peace Volunteers, Keiko Takenaka, Heiwa no Kane no Tsudoi, Nara YMCA, CCU of Fukushima Prefecture, Yoshiyuki Mido, Heisei Shinto Kenkyukai, and Masahiro Kubota, Gary Mathena who initiated the exhibit in Delaware, and Harvey Zendt from Delaware Pacem in Terris.

[Editor’s note: This article is largely based on notes that she took at Limestone Presbyterian Church and she regrets that these words pale in comparison to the power of Shigeko’s words in person.]