‘It was a massacre’: Hiroshima survivors in Sacramento recall day of death and trauma

First came a blinding light. Then a boom, followed by a mushroom cloud swelling with dust and smoke.

In the span of a few minutes on both Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, two American atomic bombs on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki left a horrific footprint that remains controversial 75 years later.

Survivors living in Sacramento still vividly remember what flesh looks like when it peels away from muscle and how bodies swell and turn black from radiation.

Debate still rages over the justification for the United States’ decision to drop two nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians, a question that the U.S. has historically been reluctant to address. For several years after the bombings, the U.S. government is said to have concealed the extent of the damage and horror they had inflicted on Japanese civilians from the world – including American civilians and soldiers.

About 220,000 Japanese people are estimated to have been killed in the two bombings, although the exact number will never be known due to the thousands of people who were obliterated on impact and those who died years later from radiation poisoning. The vast majority of the people who were killed or wounded were civilians, casualties of a war they hadn’t started and never fought in.

“It was a massacre,” said Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. “Indiscriminate massacre.”

Thurlow, then Nakamura, was only 13 when the first nuclear bomb destroyed the military headquarters where she worked, pinning her under the rubble until she couldn’t move. When she finally escaped, picking her way over dead bodies on her way home, she found that eight members of her family had been killed.

Thurlow, 88, is just one of the dwindling remaining survivors, or hibakusha, with clear memories of the events. All are well into their 80s and 90s.

But by commemorating the 75th anniversary of the bombings, activists and survivors hope that telling their stories will ensure that such horrors remain a lingering memory rather than becoming a future occurrence.

“We concluded our moral responsibility was to share our experiences with the rest of the world,” Thurlow said. “Most of the people are living with their heads in the sand. But I think it’s about time. We really have to confront that reality.”

Survivors remember harrowing aftermath

The nuclear bombs were dropped more than three and a half years after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and declared war on the U.S., leading the U.S. to join Great Britain and the Soviet Union to fight Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II. It is the deadliest war in world history, killing 70 to 80 million soldiers and civilians from 1939 to 1945.

On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, U.S. B-29 bomber pilots dropped the first bomb on the town of Hiroshima. The official reason was to force the Japanese army to surrender and end World War II. Another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later.

Alfred Dote was born in Sacramento and moved to Hiroshima when he was 8. He was 17 and working in the shipyards when he saw a bright light moving horizontally, followed by a massive boom. Suddenly, the city was engulfed in flames.

He had no idea what happened. He and a schoolmate tried to ride their bicycles home, but it was so hot that their rubber tires were melting. So they pushed them on a journey that stretched some five hours as they dodged fires and wound their way through devastation.

“There were so many people walking with their arms out as skin was melting off their bones and faces, asking for help and water,” Dote, 92, said in Japanese with translation from his daughter, Mari Shirasago. “I just remember looking around and seeing dead bodies everywhere and it was so, so frightening. To this day, I will never forget how traumatized I was during this long walk home.”

Harue Okino, 90, was 15 and sitting in her high school classroom when the first bomb dropped. She walked home with two friends, following the railroad tracks because all the buildings along their usual route were burning.

It was still morning, but the skies were dark with dust. People were scattered on the ground and walking around “like zombies,” Okino said. Their skin was browned and hanging off their arms, their lips peeled back so far, she could see all their teeth.

“Some people were laying by the river saying, ‘Help me, help me,’ and asking for water to quench their thirst,” Okino recalled in Japanese with translation from her granddaughter, Samantha Tsuruoka. “Some people were jumping into the river and there were bodies floating in the water. Some people were begging (me) to find their family, but they weren’t even recognizable. The three of (us) would just say, ‘OK, OK!’”

Both Dote and Okino say they lost several loved ones that day. Dote’s 25-year-old sister was killed in the bombing, and one of Okino’s friends who walked home with her fell ill with radiation poisoning and later died.

Dote’s younger brother survived, but was badly burned. He and his parents had to use cooking oil to heal his wounds and maggots to eat the dead flesh because there were no hospitals available nearby, he said.

Many survivors said they were pressured in the years that followed to downplay or cover up what happened and where they were from. Thurlow recalled some people told their sons not to marry women from Hiroshima because many were covered in burns and exposed to radiation, while Okino’s friends and family warned her when she returned to America that she could be denied health insurance if she disclosed she was a survivor.

Through rage and honesty, a slow healing

As Americans living in Japan, Dote and Okino, who both settled in Sacramento, said they were left feeling particularly hurt, angry and deeply saddened. But many survivors swallowed and worked through their anger, believing it was the only way to keep going.

“My parents always kept telling us that we had to try to put it all behind us and move forward,” Dote said. “I knew that I did not have any control over the greater political issues. So, we just did our best to survive with what we had and ‘gaman’ (a Japanese term for enduring the unbearable with patience and dignity).”

Thurlow remembered being numbed by shock, watching with dry eyes as the blackened, swollen bodies of her older sister and 4-year-old nephew were thrown into a shallow grave. Her guilt over her emotionless response ate away at her for years, but her fury and sense of injustice grew the more she learned about the extent of the U.S. government’s damage.

“If you were in the city at that time and saw the kind of human suffering … there’s no human dignity in that kind of memory,” Thurlow said. “To be angry about something, that’s the only natural thing.”

Survivors said that it was only through communing with other survivors and exchanging dozens of personal, painful stories that they were able to begin moving on. Those honest conversations “liberated” Thurlow and allowed her to recognize how her trauma froze her as she watched her family being buried.

“A lot of people just refuse to look back and examine what they experienced on that day and the aftermath,” Thurlow said. “It was too painful.”

Although he no longer carries any resentment, Dote recalled a fresh wave of sadness during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Watching the people running out of the collapsing towers, he was reminded of that “vivid and frightening” feeling he had pushing his bike home that August morning in 1945.

“I see it as something that will always be a part of myself and my story forever,” Dote said. “After 92 years, I have lived through the atomic bomb, being drafted into the Korean War, 9/11 and now a global pandemic, and feel like I have seen it all.”

Sacramento commemorates 75th anniversary with a warning

At 2 p.m. Sunday, several Sacramento-area organizations will hold a livestreamed commemoration to remember the the bombings and call for international nuclear disarmament. Thurlow will give a speech, followed by climate activists and politicians such as Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg.

Supporters of the bombings failed to consider the human and environmental costs, said Dr. Harry Wang, president of the Sacramento Physicians for Social Responsibility. Today, he said, countries with nuclear arsenals are still overlooking the price of warfare.

This ongoing blindness makes it more important than ever for the public to commemorate the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wang said.

“It’s a mistaken allocation of our resources,” Wang said. “People need to be reminded and educated about what are the environmental and human costs of nuclear war.”

Americans also need to reexamine the country’s historical narrative that the U.S. used the bombs to scare off Russian invaders and cut the war short, Wang said. Regardless of any righteous motive, he said, what must be included is the reality that Japanese civilians’ lives were used as a political tool.

“We’re going to have to shift our narrative … about who we are and how we’ve treated people and the environment,” Wang said. “We need to recognize what we did in the 1940s just like how we need to recognize what we did in our country, with its origins. No matter what the intention, we have to look at the effects of those behaviors and how the truth was hidden.”

Eleven survivors still live in Sacramento, according to Bruce Muramoto, president of Sacramento Hiroshima Nikkeijin Kai, far fewer than before. Yet the U.S. has thousands more nuclear bombs at their disposal today than they did 75 years ago, Thurlow said.

She’s glad more people are willing to have frank conversations about the atrocities of the bombings. But as long as the U.S. continues to hold a bulk of the world’s nuclear power, the threat of this horror repeating itself continues to exist, she said.

“We have to study the issue and make up our own mind,” Thurlow said. “Do we want to be killed, burnt up, dissolved like the people I saw in my city? We have to keep … the possibility of keeping this beautiful planet in existence when our children grow up. We have to be able to pass this on to them.”

This story was originally published August 6, 2020 at 5:00 AM.