After the bombthey envied the dead

Press, 14 August 1984, Page 16

After the bomb—they envied the dead

“The Hiroshima Maidens,” by Kazuo Chujo, describes the ordeal of women whose faces were badly burned in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. ANNE CHISHOLM, “Observer,” reports.

In Japan, the people who were in Hiroshima. on the morning of August 6, 1945 when the atomic bomb was dropped are known by a special word: hibakusha (bomb survivors).

A new book has recently been published in Tokyo which has drawn attention to a particular small group of women survivors, “The Hiroshima Maidens,” 25 young women who were chosen, 10 years after the explosion, to go to America for plastic surgery to their hideously burned faces. Kazuo Chujo, a reporter with the “Asahi Evening News” and himself a hibakusha, sought out as many of the women as he could find, and asked them about their experiences then and their lives since.

When the bomb fell, the women were aged between six and 20. The majority of them were 12 or 13. (A disproportlonal number of secondary school children, boys and girls, were killed or injured in the explosion because they had been brought to the centre of the city to help with fire prevention work.) Of the original 25, three have died; the rest are now in their forties and fifties. Over half the women married; between them they now have 19 children and four grandchildren.

Three live in North America; the rest are back in or near Hiroshima.

Chujo did not find it easy to track them down or to persuade them to talk. Only nine agreed to be interviewed and most asked that their real names should not be used. “The women live semisecluded lives, as if they were guilty of something,” ,he says.

Despite plastic surgery, their faces are still drastically disfigured. Chujo found them defensive, especially towards, journalists, still obsessed with their lost looks and with their terrible past. “The great majority of these women still hide from the eyes of others, refuse to communicate, show little confidence in themselves.”

Each individual story is so painful to read that it seems hardly surprising that the women have found the experience a burden. Michiko, aged 13, captain

of her class, looked up as the bomb went off. Her face was so badly burned that all the skin peeled off like a mask.

The following day, as she lay semi-conscious, she heard a soldier remark, “Look, here’s another dead schoolgirl. Should we burn this one next?” "I’ve no doubt that more than one person was cremated alive,” she says now. She was only recognised by her train pass on a string round her neck.

A classmate of Michiko, Yukiko, told Chujo what she felt when she looked at her face in the mirror for the first time. “What I saw was the most ghastly image I’d ever seen in my life . . . The original body given me by my mother had simply ceased to exist. In its place was a new, ugly me born of the atomic bomb. ' “It was a an extremely painful encounter ... I envied the dead.”

Many of the girls, and their relatives, wondered then and still wonder if they were lucky to survive. Michiko r s grandmother looked after her devotedly, but asked her shortly before she died, “You have had to live with your terrible face. Are you really happy you survived?”

Another girl whose face

was welded down on to her neck by scar tissue when her burns healed was told by the doctor who first saw her what bad luck it was that she had not been killed.

Other girls were ostracised or taunted when they tried to resume normal life with their hideous faces.

One, with a huge scarlet growth on her cheek, was nicknamed “red monster.”

Many of them wore masks for years. “Whatever people say, the face is what counts if you’re a woman,” says one of the unmarried survivors, bitterly. However, as many as 13 of the Hiroshima Maidens group eventually married (two of them to Americans).

One of the criteria for choosing the girls sent to America for treatment was that they should be physically and mentally healthy apart from their facial injuries. Anyone suffering from “blood or marrow disease” was automatically excluded.

Large numbers of hibakusha, including people uninjured in the explosion who went into the ruins to look for their families or to help the injured, developed radiation sickness in the years afterwards. Kazuo Chujo recounts how the Hiroshima Maidens project grew out of the

efforts of a handful of exceptional people in Japan and America.

The two key figures were a Japanese Christian minister called Tanimoto, and the American pacifist editor, Norman Cousins.

The Mount Sinai hospital in New York looked after the girls for nothing, and the top surgeons who operated on them repeatedly — one girl had in all 28 operations — were also not paid. The girls were assigned in pairs to ordinary families in and around New York, organised by a leading Quaker, Mrs Ida Day.

She and all the host families were moved and impressed by the girls’ stoicism: “Every single girl said "Thank you doctor” the moment she came out of the anaesthetic.”

One of the Japanese who accompanied the group, Mrs Hatsudo Yokoyama, was struck by how rapidly their morale improved. "I couldn’t detect the slightest trace of the bitterness and lack of self-confid-ence they had displayed in Japan.

“The most wonderful thing was that the girls underwent a spiritual recovery in America.

“This was perhaps more important than their physio-

logical recovery through surgery.” All but three of the Hiroshima Maidens were back in Japan within 18 months (one died during an operation, two others decided to stay on).

For the past 30 years they have been trying to lead ordinary lives and avoid attention.

All have positive and happy recollections of their time in America, but Chujo’s interviews convinced him that emotionally they have continued to suffer unnecessarily.

“In their native country, where they were once again treated like freaks and eyed with envy for having received special treatment abroad, the women quickly reverted to their former insecure selves.”

They have consistently resisted all attempts to involve them in anti-nuclear campaigns.

Two of them said to him: "If I can really do something to bring peace I don’t think I’ll remain in the background. But look at my terrible ugly face. For me, what I feel about my looks goes deeper than my commitment to peace. Call it female psychology, if you like.”