Katie Koontz Magazine Master Class Japanese Memory Keepers: The

Setsuko Thurlow can still see the blueish-white flash.

“Then, my body started flying up in the air,” she said during one of her recent presentations at the College of William and Mary. “I still have that sensation.”

The day was August 6, 1945. The place was , Japan. 13-year-old Setsuko was at the army headquarters when the atomic bomb dropped. She was part of a select group of students chosen to be decoding assistants. They were one mile from the bomb’s hypocenter.

Mobilized by the army, thousands of other students were working in the city center at that time.

“By the time I came out of the rubble, the building was on fire,” she said. “That meant about 30 girls who were with me in the same room were burned to death alive.”

What Setsuko witnessed in the aftermath of the bomb is almost indescribable. In the grim darkness, void of morning light, she saw the immediate effect of the destruction. Charred bodies of unrecognizable human beings stumbled past. Some carried their eyeballs. Most collapsed onto the ground as their intestines burst out of their stomachs.

“We learned how to step over the dead bodies and escape,” she said. “And a strange thing: the silence.”

In the end, Setsuko lost nine of her family members and 351 of her schoolmates. Now, 74 years later, Setsuko continues to tell her story, as painful as it may be. She is a hibakusha, a survivor of Hiroshima and , who must preserve this memory. The hibakusha fight to make sure this devastation is never forgotten by sharing their firsthand experiences with the world. However, remembering these traumatic events can be very difficult. The numbers of hibakusha continue to decline and with them their testimonies.

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A Difficult History

World war had been raging for several years by the time the A-bombs devastated

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States entered World War II in 1941 after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

“It is important to keep in mind that Japan is not a victim of this war that was ended almost 75 years ago,” Jim Walther, Museum Director of the National Museum of Nuclear

Science and History, said. “Japan had attacked China and Korea, subjugating and murdering the citizens there. The Japanese military was brutal, even more so than the Nazis in many minds.”

Here Walther refers to the 1937 Rape of Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese War.

According to the BBC, the Japanese murdered 250,000-300,000 Chinese people during this massacre.

Memories of war are complex. All sides experienced horrific losses.

“Japanese civilians had already suffered tremendous casualties in the US fire bombing of their cities,” he said. “Our B-29s had burned dozens of cities to the ground by the time we used the atomic weapons to shock the Japanese military into realizing that they could not prevail and they must surrender.”

Some see the bombing as a necessary act of war. Hibakusha like Setsuko can attest to the human damage caused by these attacks.

“Certainly, Hiroshima attack I remember was indiscriminate mass murder of innocent civilians: children, women and elderly,” she said. “But I found many Americans at that time, maybe even today, incapable of thinking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as atrocities.”

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As someone who experienced the carnage firsthand, it can be difficult for Setsuko to be challenged on the effectiveness of the bomb. According to Walther, world wide deaths decreased dramatically after World War II, even taking into account recent wars and conflicts. But at what cost?

Life in the Aftermath

After the atomic bombs, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to face a new set of challenges. Setsuko lost much of her hair. Babies were born deformed. Visible scarring led to social discrimination.

“The people from the neighboring community came into the city in search of their loved ones or to provide some rescue, but they too became contaminated by the radiation,” she said.

“So, it’s not just the people who were there who were victimized, the people who came in to rescue became victimized too.”

But still another issue arose during the seven years of U.S. occupation following the end of the war. This time, the survivors’ memory itself was under attack.

“They started confiscating survivors’ personal writings like diaries, correspondence,”

Setsuko said. “All the people who had such pain just had to express their pain, so they write tanka or haiku. All these have to be taken away: photographs, films, even medical charts, all these things were confiscated. They were shipped back to the United States. So not only the hunger, homelessness and discrimination and all the social ill survivors experienced in the post- war period, but there was such strong psycho-social political oppression for that following seven years while under the occupation force.”

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Remembering traumatic experiences is not a simple task. For some time after the atomic bomb struck Hiroshima, Setsuko lived in a state of shock. Her sister and her four year old nephew were fatally injured in the attack and died several days later. She watched as the soldiers dug a hole in the ground for the bodies, poured gasoline on them and lit them on fire.

“For a long time this memory troubled me because I remembered I stood there in a stunned way,” she said. “Not even a drop of tears. What kind of human being am I? I couldn’t even shed tears for my dear sister and the little nephew, 4 year old child.”

Later, Setsuko learned about the psychology behind the shock she and others experienced.

“The horror was so massive, so grotesque, that was the only way I think our psyche was protected,” she said.

Setsuko knew that she was in a unique position to share her story with others, even if it was difficult.

“If I don’t speak and share the firsthand information what those nuclear weapons do to humanity, who could?”

Fighting for the Future

The history of nuclear weapons that followed World War II is both complex and unfinished. Many hibakusha devote their lives to fighting for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not exist in a vacuum. After the war, the United

States conducted testing both at home and in the Pacific.

“Preventing the spread of communism and preserving democracy was what was at stake,”

Walther said. “Might still be if you watch the news.”

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Extensive testing of nuclear weapons in the forced many into exile.

Even today, Marshallese cannot return to their homes. The levels of radiation are still too dangerous.

The 1954 Bravo test at Bikini Atoll was the largest ever detonation by the United States of a . In the United States, reporters asked for Setsuko's opinion about the Bravo test.

“The media people asked my opinion about what the US hydrogen bomb test at the

Bikini Atoll meant,” she said. “Freshly out of college, very naively, I honestly shared my feeling that the testing should stop. Testing means more sophisticated nuclear weapons and Hiroshima and Nagasaki is more than enough, now the Bikini and this got to stop. Then the next day I started receiving unsigned hate letters. That traumatized me, but I think that that experience once again strengthened my vow to go on. And it was not easy.”

Setsuko spoke wherever she could: church basements, womens’ groups, schools. She now works with ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. ICAN pushed for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). In 2017 the passed the treaty. Setsuko was in attendance.

“I just remained in seat,” Setsuko said. “I was stunned. The whole thing happened so fast and the tears started pouring down.”

Later in 2017, ICAN received the Nobel Peace Prize. Setsuko accepted the prestigious award on their behalf. She credits young supporters for their work with the organization.

“Younger people led the movement,” she said. “They were well informed people about nuclear weapons, full of energy, such creativity and skilled with technology.”

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Looking forward

Setsuko is optimistic about the future. However, she believes there is still much to accomplish.

“How do we preserve the memory?” she said. “This is a very top priority issue for the city of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They’re trying very hard to get the people to write what ever they experienced and remember and recruiting the volunteers to learn from surviving people so that they can act as a storyteller of the original survivors.”

Setsuko continues to share her experience with the world. She encourages other hibakusha to do the same. She has participated in a Peace Boat voyage, which is a Japanese

NGO dedicated to the promotion of world peace. Peace Boat invited 100 survivors to join one of their three-month journeys at sea. During this time, Setsuko met with all the survivors on board to hear their stories. Some were reluctant, as they either were too young to remember or were not yet born at the time of the attacks.

“But I encouraged them,” she said. “Maybe you don’t remember, maybe you didn’t experience that, but you grew up in a special environment where your parents experienced this and that and talked about this and that. Sharing that experience. You grew up in that environment. Just talking about that itself would be a starting point. Until then they had never shared their experiences.”

Walther says it has been almost twelve years since they last hosted a hibakusha to speak at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. As the years tick by, no one knows how much time remains to hear the hibakusha speak.

“Our energy must be devoted to the prevent of similar things ever happening again,”

Setsuko said. “What we suffered should not be repeated ever anywhere on earth.”

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Setsuko will never forget the trauma she experienced as a thirteen-year-old student. She is working to ensure the world remembers Hiroshima too, even after the hibakusha are gone.

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