Japan: To Count the Dead

LIKE all cities at war, its population varied from day to day, hour to hour.

Soldiers in their khaki uniforms shuttled in and out. Students trooped in from the countryside, commandeered to work in the munitions factories. A tide of refugees restlessly washed the streets, seeking sanctuary. Yet many of the ordinary routines of life persisted, and even some of life's small pleasures.

It was the habit of Shigeru Miyoshi, 41, a foundry foreman, and Saburo Goto, 44, a druggist, to go fishing on Sundays. On this particular Sunday the catch was good--a basket of squirming silver carp--and Goto suggested a drink to celebrate. Reluctantly, Miyoshi declined. He was due on the foundry night shift. The two parted, never to see each other again. At 8:15 the next morning, Aug. 6, 1945, the atomic bomb exploded 1,870 ft. over Hiroshima.

A Human Map. Miyoshi was still at work when he saw a blinding flash coming from the direction of his home. "It was as though a million liters of gasoline had been dumped by enemy planes and set afire for a raging inferno." At once, Miyoshi set out for his house. He found himself wandering through an inferno never before seen by man, peopled by the dead and maimed, the terribly burned crying out for death. It took him a day and night to reach the place where his home had stood. Nothing remained but a pile of charred and smoldering debris. In it, Miyoshi found a cremated skull and bits of a maternity waistband, the remnants of his wife, who had been expecting their sixth child. Three of his children, who were at home, had simply vanished. A fourth died a week later of radiation poisoning. Of the original family of seven, only Miyoshi and his eldest daughter, who had been away from home, survived the atomic fire storm. Dead, too, was his friend Goto.

Miyoshi's story is one of thousands being collected by Minoru Yuzaki, a sociologist and research fellow at the University of Hiroshima's Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Biology. His mission: find out how many people perished. A quarter-century after the event (see ESSAY), no one yet knows how many Japanese died at Hiroshima. Estimates range from a low of 68,000 (by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission) to a high of 280,000 (by Chugoku Shimbun, Hiroshima's most influential daily newspaper).

Working with a shoestring grant of $8,300 and a staff of five plus a dozen student volunteers, Yuzaki has been at his task for three years. He sees another five ahead of him. His method: a human map. Yuzaki is rebuilding on paper--house by house, block by block, person for person--the city at the moment of impact.

"We have been asking a set of questions that has become almost a litany with us--who lived in which house and with whom," says Yuzaki. The cathartic response has been overwhelming. When approached, most survivors come "bursting out with a million eyewitness accounts, full of vividly graphic details. All the incidents witnessed that day seem to have been glazed onto their minds." After a nationwide television program on the survey, hundreds of people wrote in with pledges of assistance.

Yuzaki's is a journey through the chronicles of despair. A man came to his office to volunteer the story of a girl who died on the roadside near him moments after she gasped out her name. Did Yuzaki have any records on a Tanaka family? He did: the Tanakas had recently asked for information about their missing daughter. When Yuzaki then told the aging Tanaka of his daughter's death, the father said: "Now, for the first time in 25 years, I may begin to sleep nights in peace." As Yuzaki interviewed a lady who survived the blast, she broke into tears. She was having an affair with a married man, and on that morning 25 years ago, had been forced to leave her lover behind in the burning ruins of their meeting place.

Not everyone approves of Yuzaki's project. Dr. Fumio Shegeto, director of the Hiroshima Red Cross and Atomic Bomb Memorial Hospital, is himself a "hibakusha"--a person exposed to the bomb--and has dedicated himself to caring for the afflicted survivors. Says he: "When the bomb's inhumanity has been proved beyond doubt, to try to count only the heads of atomic dead is too academic to be constructive."

A Thousand Suns. Yuzaki finds he is not only counting the dead but also reconstructing a picture of the past. "The city then was downright flimsy. Nothing compared with its glittering modern looks today." Then, it was a teeming town of some 420,000, with frail wooden shacks clustered along the delta of the Ota River. It was a mobilized city, living in fear of the incendiary attacks being inflicted upon neighboring towns. But, says Yuzaki, "in spite of the war that weighed heavily on the mind of its citizenry, the vital tempo of life was something far more gracious than now. There was a great unity in the purpose of life and in the concept of values that bound them all in a close-knit and often warmhearted society." Today Hiroshima is a booming town of 550,000, replete with modern buildings and modern problems: air pollution, traffic jams, noise. "It was essentially a happy society in 1945," says Yuzaki, "but that great bond seems gone now. Alienation was something forced upon the people from the outside. Now it is generated internally."

Blistered World. According to his highly tentative projections thus far, Yuzaki puts the city's death toll near 200,000. The mortality rate in the immediate area--within a 1,650-ft. diameter beneath the flash point--he puts at 98% or more. Incredible as it seems, he has so far found ten people who were within that deadly radius of death and survived it.

One is Mrs. Katsuko Horie, who as a young schoolteacher was almost directly beneath the bomb. "A thousand suns descended on top of our city," remembers Mrs. Horie. Two others in the classroom with her were killed; she plunged under a heavy desk and was spared. Afterward, she recalls, she wandered through a blistered world she never hopes to see again, finally being carried home on the outskirts of the city later that evening.

Like most survivors, Mrs. Horie bears little animosity toward the nation responsible for the destruction of Hiroshima. "That's beside the point," she says. "What we in Hiroshima learned is that war must be avoided and peace must be preserved. We have paid too dear a price for our lesson to forget it." Hiroshima agrees. In Peace Park, dedicated to the atomic dead, the memorial reads simply: "Rest in peace. The mistake shall not be repeated."

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