Children of the Ashes

CHILDREN OF THE ASHES THE PEOPLE OF HIROSHIMA AFTER THE BOMB By Robert Jungk On 6 August 1945 the life of the Japanese city of Hiroshima was utterly shattered by the detonation of one nuclear weapon - an atom bomb dropped by an American plane over the city centre. Today Hiroshima is busier, larger and richer than before the bomb dropped. But there still remain the physical and emotional scars of that terrible day forty year’s ago. And the rebirth of Hiroshima was neither easy nor painless. The survivors of the bomb - many of them injured and affected by lingering radiation sickness -met with a horrifying indifference from other Japanese and from the American occupiers. Indeed, as the years went by, many of those disfigured by the bomb were made to feel ashamed of their injuries. Children of the Ashes is Robert Jungk’s classic account of the rebuilding of Hiroshima. The slow, grudging recognition of the problems facing the survivors is illuminated by the stories of three people - Kazuo M., a young boy who was given to commit a senseless murder, Ichiro Kawamoto, who was one of the few to continue to care for those suffering from radiation sickness, and the frail, crippled Tokic Uematsu, who was scared to marry the man she loved in case their children would be affected by the radiation from the bomb. In 1980 Robert Jungk revisited Hiroshima, and that journey gave rise to new observations on the state of the city a generation after the bomb. In an age when one H-bomb has a power 1,000 times that used in Hiroshima, this book is also a horrifying warning. ‘Terrible . compassionate . superb historical journalism’ FROM JAMES CAMERON’S INTRODUCTION Jungk was born in Berlin in 1913, and grew up there. Owing to his Jewish birth and political opinions he was deprived of his German nationality by the Nazi regime in April 1933 and was imprisoned in the same year. On his release, he went to study at the Sorbonne from 1933 to 1936. He worked on documentaries in France and Republican Spain. After working illegally in Germany he had to move to Czechoslovakia, where he set up an anti-Nazi agency. When Prague fell, he moved to Switzerland, where he was again imprisoned for a period. He took his PhD in Modern History at Zurich University and during the war he wrote for Weltwoche and The Observer . He has written a number of internationally renowned books on the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war: Tomorrow Is Already Here, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, Children of the Ashes and The Nuclear State. He now lives in Salzburg. FOREWORD I know why I am writing this foreword: it is an exorcism, a penance. I dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima. And so did you. If not, it was done in our name. Who pushed the button no longer matters. It never really did. After less than half a century the words 'atom bomb' and 'nuclear war' have been absorbed into accepted legend, a sort of macabre mythology; they have now the meaning only of a sort of imprecation, or curse. We still do not know on whom the curse was visited, except that for a generation \f has inescapably haunted all mankind - most of whom had no part in it, millions of whom are even now unaware of its existence. That could have been said of virtually every living soul until that morning of 6 August 1945. Even after that, much of what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki could only be a matter of horrified speculation - and without any possible grounds of experience. The Atom Bomb was wholly unprecedented; never before in the history of warfare, indeed of mankind, had a catastrophe of such dimensions been imposed by one society (which for a long time could not possibly be aware of what it had done) upon another. A handful of technicians in Washington and Nevada had taken unto themselves a power hitherto reserved for Nature - or some might say for God - of sending to Doomsday 150,000 human beings in a fraction of a second. It had never been done before, so no one knew what the result would be. Nor, for a considerable time, was anyone allowed to know. After the Bomb a wall of secrecy was clamped around Hiroshima, while the soldiers and the Experts moved in uneasily to find out what they had wrought. The outside world was aware that it had lived through some sort of shattering military punctuation-mark, after which nothing in international affairs could ever be the same - but the detail was shuttered in secrecy, in Security, and, not impossibly, Shame. done, but the effects of what they had done on their human That all this finally changed was largely due to the writings victims and their environment. Thus he went to the obvious of Robert Jungk. His contribution to our knowledge and place: Hiroshima, chosen as the scene and subject of the understanding of this special period in our dismal human most terrifying destruction the world has ever known - then, as record is unique. Not only had this extraordinary aberration indeed now, inhabited by the Children of the Ashes. of history never been so well and delicately defined; such a Years ago Robert Jungk was one of the first men to realize definition had never previously been even tried. That Hiro- that the Bomb and the Hiroshima catastrophe were not, as shima today is not merely a name, a map-record, a target, a most people considered, just a military masterpiece, an symbol, but a society of human people of flesh and blood, extension and glorification of high explosive, but a phenom- selected by fate and a handful of Generals to be the test-tube enon different not just in degree but in kind from anything for an experiment in destiny, is largely due, today, to the ever seen before, and that after August 1945 nobody, but obsession of this one man. nobody, could ever live to see the world the same again. Over the years Robert Jungk's Children of the Ashes has I can claim - ruefully rather than with pride - to be one of achieved such fame and acclaim that it cannot be necessary to the few people who have personally witnessed the explosion define its purpose, its scope, its origins. of three Atom Bombs. Mine were fired not in anger, but in As an articulate Austrian-born anti-Nazi Berliner, Robert rehearsal for anger to come. Two were in the Pacific Ocean Jungk was marked for the endless pilgrimage of dedicated emptiness of the Marshall Islands, in Bikini. (It is to me an European democrats in the Fascist generation - from Ger- enduring irony that the name should later have been given to a many to France, to Czechoslovakia, back to France, to beach-costume of fun and fantasy. After nearly 40 years the Switzerland, to Central Europe as an Observer correspondent, name still holds horror for me.) somehow or other squeezing in a PhD in modern history at The third was in the empty arid wilderness of Woomera, in Zurich. It is the familiar story of the committed humanist Australia, for which one has fewer regrets. At all three I was who, like many of us, found his focus in the most abrupt and one of the official civilian observers - a privileged dramatic demonstration of war taken to its obvious con- journalist, I was told. I write this today carrying a cancer not clusion: elimination. Until 1945 it could have been argued, at impossibly acquired all those years ago in the lovely-horrible a pinch, that warfare could invoke certain qualities - Pacific atoll of Bikini, or the desert of Australia, or even, just bravery, human dedication, loyalty, personal sacrifice. After perhaps, in the poisonous ruins of Hiroshima itself. It is of Hiroshima this could no longer ever again be said. From absolutely no consequence now. Whatever it was, I must 1945 it became clear that 'war', as the world had known it, have asked for it, which the people of Hiroshima did not. was gone forever; what was left was a finger on a trigger, and But it was that Bikini experience alone that allowed me to oblivion. become part of the original concerned group of people, most We knew it, and they knew it. And still do, a hundredfold. far more distinguished than I, who became the first committee of But it took Robert Jungk, a generation ago, to tell us what it CND - the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - which would be like. flourished in the Fifties, faded for a while, and is now in a new This book was not Robert Jungk's first essay into this resolution born again, vigorously and meaningfully enough to macabre subject. He had already written his detailed study of have gravely worried the Government of the day. (And, atomic scientists, Brighter than a Thousand Suns. This was, of indeed, not only the British Government, but many of the course, not enough. He then felt it necessary to examine European societies who are resentful of becoming, unasked, equally thoroughly not just what the atomic scientists had launching-pads for the American instruments of the third World War.) The Ashes are gone, but the Children remain. At least for a Jungk in this book was Haruo Hiyoshi, a photographer for while. the local paper Chugodu Shimbun. At the time, he walked That minor chapter of major history is why I have returned back and forth through the ruins of the desolate city, carrying so often to Children of the Ashes.

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