Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima

3 Invisible Contamination

NVISIBLE CONTAMINATION 1) The "Epidemic" Soon after the bomb fell—sometimes within hours or even minutes, often during the first twenty-four hours or the following days and weeks—survivors began to notice in themselves and others a strange form of illness. It consisted of nausea, vomiting, and loss of appetite; diarrhea with large amounts of blood in the stools; fever and weakness; purple spots on various parts of the body from bleeding into the skin (purpura); inflammation and ulceration of the mouth, throat, and gums (oropharyngeal lesions and gingivitis); bleeding from the mouth, gums, throat, rectum, and urinary tract (hemorrhagic manifestations); loss of hair from the scalp and other parts of the body (epilation); extremely low white blood cell counts when these were taken (leukopenia); and in many cases a progressive course until death.* These manifestations of toxic radiation effects aroused in the minds of the people of Hiroshima a special terror, an image of a -weapon which not only instantly kills and destroys on a colossal scale but also leaves behind in the bodies of those exposed to it deadly influences which may emerge at any time and strike down their victims. This image was made * The gastrointestinal symptoms appeared first and the hemorrhagic manifestations and other bone marrow effects some weeks later, so that the overall syndrome only gradually revealed itself.1 D E A T H I N L I F E particularly vivid by the delayed appearance of these symptoms and fatalities—two to four weeks later—in people who had previously seemed to be in perfect health and externally untouched. The shopkeeper's assistant, whose parents were killed by the bomb, describes his reactions to the death of two\additional close family members from these radiation effects, and the general atmosphere of death that prevailed: My grandmother was taking care of my younger brother on the fourteenth of August when I left; and when I returned on the fifteenth, she had many spots all over her body. Two or three days later she died. . . . My younger brother, who . . . was just a [fivemonth -old] baby, was without breast milk—so we fed him thin rice gruel. . . . But on the tenth of October he suddenly began to look very ill, though I had not then noticed any spots on his body. . . . Then on the next day he began to look a little better, and I thought he was going to survive. I was very pleased, as he was the only family member I had left, and I took him to a doctor—but on the way to the doctor he died. And at that time we found that there were two large spots on his bottom. . . . I heard it said that all these people would die within three years . . . so I thought, "sooner or later I too will die/'. . . I felt very weak and very lonely—with no hope at all ... and since I had seen so many people's eyebrows falling out, their hair falling out, bleeding from their teeth I found myself always nervously touching my hair like this [he demonstrated by rubbing his h e a d ] . . . . I never knew when some sign of the disease would show itself. . . . And living in the countryside then with my relatives, people who came to visit would tell us these things, and then the villagers also talked about them—telling stories of this man or that man who visited us a few days ago, returned to Hiroshima, and died within a week. . . . I couldn't tell whether these stories were true or not, but I believed them then. And I also heard that when the hibakusha came to evacuate to the village where I was, they died there one by one. . . . This loneliness, and the fear. . . . The physical fear . . . has been with me always. . . . It is not something temporary . . . I still have it now. . . . We find here a link between the early sense of ubiquitous death from radiation effects and later anxieties about death and illness. The hibakusha 's own sense of impending death is also brought out by Miss Ota in her belief at the time that "within two or three days I would die. If 58 Invisible Contamination not within a few days, then within three months or so I would die. "2 The writer-manufacturerwho expressed his willingness to have died in his daughter's place describes the impact upon him...