The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 16 | Issue 21 | Number 3 | Article ID 5213 | Nov 01, 2018

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Ghosts of Hiroshima

Charles Pellegrino

You could not make these landscapes up andhave people believe it. Even as fiction, no onewould believe it. That is why, for over sixtyyears, I kept what I saw to myself… until theday others [who] spoke about it, were calledliars, [supposedly] because the atom bombscould not have happened that way. For peopleunderneath an A-bomb to have becomeshadows on the wall, and charcoals, before theycould fall to the ground, no one wanted tobelieve it. But it happened.

Miyuki Broadwater, a child of Nagasaki

Prologue: BEYOND THE SPECTRUM

In 1948, a former OSS agent named WalterLord—who had interrogated (or, from a certainpoint of view, “interviewed”) many of Japan’ssurviving naval officers—was struggling to turna series of non-job-related interviews into hisfirst book: A Night to Remember.

The book itself was defeating Walter. Althoughhe now had enough material for a second book(fated to become the basis for a film titled,Tora! Tora! Tora!), he feared that neither bookwould ever be published. Walter had not yetfound “the music of the words,” had not yetfound his voice.

About the spring of that same year, he cameacross a novel by another struggling writer,named Morgan Robertson, who in 1898 hadpublished a science fiction story about afuturistic luxury Atlantic steamship—thelargest floating object ever built by humanhands, destined to make its acquaintance withhubris and an iceberg on a cold April night,during its first and last voyage.

The novel was an obscure “penny dreadful”—which, commercially, had failed miserably. Itwas regarded in its day as a story-line soimprobable and so contrived that no readercould be expected to suspend disbelief. As itturned out, scientific and historical realityeventually caught up with and exceededscience fiction.

On a cold April night in 1912, the Royal MailSteamship Titanic struck an iceberg during itsmaiden voyage, just like Morgan Robertson’sfictional ship. It struck on the starboard side,just as Robertson’s ship did. It was filled withsome of the world’s richest and most famouspeople, just like Robertson’s ship.

The science fiction ship was 800 feet long;Walter’s real-life Titanic was 882.5 feet long.Both sh ips were near ly 70 ,000 tonsdisplacement with three large and remarkablypowerful propellers, capable of acceleratingeach vessel above 22 knots. The crews of bothships were complacent about racing ahead atnearly full speed into the night toward an icefield they’d been warned lay directlyahead—because each ship was believed“unsinkable.”

And stranger still, Walter Lord thought, thatMorgan Robertson had named his science-fictional ship, the Titan.

And it happened again.

Decades later, after interviewing Walter aboutthe Japanese experience of World War II, acolleague stumbled upon another strangescience fiction novel—a two-volume story, infact, published by the firm of M.F. Mansfield, in1908.

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Titled, Beyond the Spectrum, the tale read as ifsomeone had thrown open a window,showcasing technology that did not exist in1908. In that year, the most advanced airplanesin the world were “spit-and-glue flimsies”—barely more than glorified kites with motors;and yet the author wrote of a great humanchange arising from a global war fought in theair, on the high seas, and deep under them. Theskies became filled with flying fortresses andgleaming metal fighter planes. At the war’sstart, Japanese-Americans were herded out ofU.S. cities and driven like cattle to internmentcamps, where whole families were held behindbarbed wire and machine gun towers. In thefictional Beyond the Spectrum war, America’sentry into the conflict began on a Decembermorning, when naval forces from the Empire ofJapan bombed Manila and Hawaii from the air.

The war itself, as it stimulated technologicaladvance, led up to a split second that ended upmirroring, as if by prophetic warning, keyaspects of the moment in which our speciesentered its nuclear adolescence.

Beyond the Spectrum concludes its war withAmerica’s development and threatened mass-manufacture of a weapon that blazes forth witha fearful light (including deadly wavelengthsbeyond what the human eye can normallysee—exactly as occurred above Hiroshima andNagasaki). The fictional weapon’s light wascapable of inflicting burns out to a distance ofseveral miles. The 1908 novel describedsmoldering ships limping into port, driven bystokers or anyone else who happened to belocated below deck at the moment ofdetonation, because the flash was so intensethat it burned or blinded officers and crew whohad been on the bridge or anywhere elsetopside.

And, how strange to think that the author ofBeyond the Spectrum died in frustration andobscurity, in much the same way that an 1898novel about “the wreck of the Titan” went out

o f pr in t a lmost as soon as i t h i t thebookshelves: A tale too fantastical to seembelievable, even by the likes of H.G. Wells orJules Verne. “And strangest of all” Walterremarked, “to see, on the cover of Beyond theSpectrum, Morgan Robertson’s name—again.”

The fictional weapon was called a “sun bomb”and it marked the moment at which humanitywas forcefully awakened to the possibility thatcivilization would die of civilization.

T h e r e a l w e a p o n w a s c a l l e datomic—“unleashing the power of the sun”—and it marked the beginning of a challengingnew phase for civilization, filled with peril, butalso with a certain amount of promise. This is aphase through which we seem on the verge (ifwe are wise, and pay attention) of being able tosustain the kind of civilization that can actuallythrive on Earth—and afterward, as H.G. Wellsonce envisioned our kind, we may stand up as achild stands upon a footstool, and reach outamong the planets, and beyond.

Thus begins an inevitable stage in the life ofany electronic civilization’s history, a phasethat (succeed or fail) must be so brief and sorare as to now be happening only once amongall the stars in our galaxy (if other civilizationshave evolved, they long ago succeeded orfailed). With such grace do we move forward,as probably the newest, brightest, and mostinteresting creatures around.

This is the story of a human awakening, of aclock that began ticking at 8:15 AM, August 6,1945—toward what end, no one knows. Trulyno one. Our odyssey begins precisely where itbegan for our entire species—during that firstone hundred millionth of a second above Japan.

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I remember the very strong scent of cherry-wood sap. I remember the cherry blossoms inspring. On August 6, I saw the orchards ofHiroshima aflame. It smelled like cherry pie.

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- Memories of a young girl, Case # 2016-B(1985)

SUNRISE

The day Homo sapiens became adult beganwith unsettling calm and beauty.

As dawn approached, only gentle breezesstirred. Even the usual buzz of cicada songseemed oddly subdued. Southward, the seasparkled like a field of polished beads, brassbright against the universe. On an inland lake,the air was still, with the reflection of a castlereproduced in such exquisite detail, that if koiwere not occasionally gulping at the water’ssu r f ace , t he l ake wou ld have beenindistinguishable from a carefully polishedmirror1.

Near the lake’s shore, during that first chip oftime, turtles were raising their golden eyesabove the koi—each turtlehead, a set of twinperiscopes gazing in opposite directions. Evenreptilian brains would have registered almostimmediately that something had gone terriblywrong with the sunrise—the second dawn ofthe day. Faster than nerves could respond,faster than water could begin to ripple, theturtles were blind and the tops of their shellswere bleached. The mirror-lake reflectedcicadas in flight, and dragonflies, and birds, allblazing forth like dazzling diamonds. One wholeside of Hiroshima Castle also flared, in eerie,stunning silence.

From young Matsuda Toshihiko’s perspective,more than fifteen city blocks south of thecastle, the sun was shining from the north, sobrightly that the Matsuda boy was about toleave his shadow on a wall in his mother’sgarden. He appeared to be bending down toreach for his jacks and marbles, or to pull out aweed. During the next few milliseconds, thewall behind the boy was flash-printed with hisshadow, and also with ghost images of theplants that surrounded him. The leaves, thoughbarely more than paper-thin, were providing

his skin with some small measure of protectionfrom the searing white glare. On the wall printbehind him, marking the moment of the sun’sawakening, could be seen the shadow of a leafthat had just detached from its vine and thoughfalling, would never reach the ground. Nearbylay five glass marbles. They would be founddays later—melted and re-solidified into greenblobs.

Deep within the Matsuda boy’s radius from thehypocenter, young Aoyama Nenkai’s mothermust have been outdoors and already at work,on the same patch of ground she had beenworking every other morning by 8:15. Shetended a temple garden with a half dozenmonks. The vegetable patch was adjacent to aneerily shock-cocooned landmark that historywould one day name, “the Peace Dome.” Onthis particular day, Mrs. Aoyama had saved herson’s life by having suddenly, as if in a panic,rushed him out of their home and away to hisschool’s work detail nearly an hour early.Nenkai’s last memory of his mother was herinexplicable command, “You must hurry.”

“Maybe she had a premonition,” Nenkai wouldreflect, years later. “I just don’t know.” AtMoment Zero and nearly a mile behind the boy,ash and blood-derived steam exploded awayfrom the place where his mother had beenstanding, and from anyone else working in thegarden2. The jets of carbon and steam eruptedat more than five times the boiling point ofwater. Atoms of iron separated from blood.Bones became incandescent. And a momentlater Mrs. Aoyama was not. And the monkswere not. And during the last third of a secondbefore a wave of plasma and compressed airreached the ground, save for shadows of newlyforged carbon steel boiling like coffee on thepavement, save for flaring ash, the peoplewalking nearby were not. And as the blast waveplowed roof tiles into the river and the waterflash-froze many thousands of tile surfacesturning suddenly to lava, the tiles themselvesrecorded for futurity, the thermal shock that

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melted their outermost layers within only onesmall part of a second. And within that sametiny chip of time, the outline of someone sittingon the steps of an office building was traced onthe stone surface lying outside the person’sshadow—traced by a hundred thousand steam-catapulted granite flakes that sprang from therock like kernels of popcorn, almost directlybeneath the false sunrise. The effects on slabsof stone and tile revealed much about whathappened to people near the heart of thedetonation.

Only a short walk from the garden where Mrs.Aoyama and the monks became a vapor in theheavens, in a house where no one and nothingshould ordinarily have survived, ShigeyoshiMorimoto received a quick and intensiveeducation in the strange physics of shockcocoons. Morimoto was one of Japan’s fourchampion kite-makers—which was why he andthe three other “kite-men” had been draftedand transported to Hiroshima to design high-altitude observation platforms for ship convoys.At a quarter past eight on the morning ofAugust 6, 1945, Morimoto was so close to thebomb that had he been located outdoors andunshielded, the gamma rays and the neutronsthat fell upon him would have killed him evenwithout a flash strong enough to burn shadowsonto walls and concrete walkways. The multi-tiered, heavily tiled mansion in which Mr.Morimoto was standing, shook and compressedaround him and the two cousins he had beenvisiting; but the combination of roof tiles andthree layers of thick wooden beams overheadattenuated the gamma ray bursts by a factor ofabout seven, and possibly as high as ten.Rooms filled floor-to-ceiling with shelves ofbooks further attenuated the rays, and also theblast of compressed air that quickly followed.In a sense, the cousins were being safeguardedby their thousands upon thousands of books.They were safeguarded by culture. Thecompression of the upper three floors occurredas if the building had been designed withlifesaving crumple zones of wood and shelves

(or protective shells) of thick paper in mind,simultaneously absorbing and deflecting theforce of the uranium fist, and cocooning theMorimoto family so gently that they survivednear the center of Hiroshima with only a fewminor bruises3.

Another Morimoto relative, thirteen-year oldTomiko, had left her mother’s one-story housein a hurry that morning, after exchanging someharsh words, and slamming the door behindher. At Moment Zero, Tomiko was at a schoolfactory-work assignment, 1.2 miles away fromthe detonation point and preparing to goindoors. She heard a plane’s engines growingsuddenly very loud, and when a silent flashenveloped the world, her entire body wasshielded in shadow. To her, the flash wasred—“like morning sun reflecting off theocean.” Her school training, though intendedfor protecting oneself from a much smallerconventional bomb falling much nearer, actedin conjunction with a shadow thrownpropitiously over her body. She had droppedimmediately to the ground, opened her mouthto let the blast from any sort of bomb press theair out of her lungs without rupturing them,while closing her eyes as tightly as possible,pushing her eyelids into cupped hands. Whenshe looked up again, the factory was gone—notjust hidden behind a sudden storm of smokeand black dust, but simply gone. The buildinghad nonetheless served a purpose, in shieldingher.

Within this very same neighborhood, MorimotoTomiko’s house was also gone, and her motherwith it. She remembered how even in thesedays of strict rationing to the point of a hungerthat never went away, her mother hadmanaged to hoard a small amount of rice, andserve her a breakfast of miso soup andseaweed. She would only realize much laterthat her mother, while claiming each morningnot to be hungry, must have been givingTomiko almost all the food she had saved.

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(I’m not hungry, Mother had said, sending meaway to school with what must have been theonly lie she ever told me.)

And while putting on her shoulder bag for theschool work detail—“I’m so sorry,” Tomokowould lament, decades later, “I was onlythirteen, and as many at that age, often in abratty mood. I had unkind words. And, oh—Inever wanted to tell this: All my life, I havebeen sorry that the last she saw of me, puttingon my shoulder bag, I was angry and slammedthe door. That’s why I want to say to everyone,when you walk out that door, please, please,leave only with a hug, or some word of love. Ihad no idea; but you do not want to be like me.I always, always feel remorse.”

The silent false sunrise did not only smashfactories and crack concrete in Hiroshima. Itsometimes left a crevice one’s soul.

Those witnesses nearest the hypocenter, likethe Morimoto child who would forever regrether last words to her mother, seemed never tohave heard the blast. The kite-maker, Morimotothe Elder, was among those who insisted thatthe shockwave, when it crushed the mansion,arrived as a disconcertingly silent explosion.

Another to whom the false sunrise came insilence was seventeen-year old KuabaraKimiko. She happened to be no more than afifteen minute walk from the Morimotomansion, at the city’s Central BroadcastCenter. Much military-related information waspassing through the center, includingcoordinates for B-29 sightings. The structurewas therefore “bunkered up,” or “hardened”against attack; and all of the glass wasbulletproof.

Kimiko had been made late for work by a seriesof B-29 air-raid alerts—not her fault, but shehad been reprimanded anyway. In thisparticular station, men operated all of theelectronic equipment and the young femaleconscripts from local schools were obliged to

clean the offices, polish the glass, and trim themany rapidly growing bushes that wereobscuring the view outside. On this morning,Kimiko would ordinarily have been outdoors by8:15 AM, exposed to the full fury of the raysand the surge of superheated air; but earlierfly-overs by B-29s, surveying and radioing outweather conditions over the target, had donemore than leave Kimiko quietly seething over ahumiliating and undeserved scolding. Theplanes had altered her schedule, and putanother person outside in her place. And thuswas Kimiko tidying the station manager’s officewhen she heard a voice call excitedly from thecourtyard: “It’s a B-29 flying up there!”

A woman went to the window and saw acommotion in the sky that apparentlyfrightened her. She managed to blurt outfragments of sentences—about seeingsomething like a long silvery light-bulbgleaming in the sunlight and falling fast, fallingreally fast somewhere in the direction of theDome—before she ducked from the window anddove toward the floor, shouting to everyone,“Get down!”

A plane’s engines were droning out there,droning loud, as if it might crash. Kimikodismissed the Get down! order as just anotherof many false alarms she had heard lately, so inthe final countdown to Moment Zero, shesimply wanted to see the plane that had beenmaking all the commotion—becoming moredistant, and less noisy, and doubtless less easyto see with each passing second. A sirenstarted to wail and went dead.

She never reached the window.

“The flash was red,” Kimiko would record—“thesame light that occurs the moment you strike amatch, but far more intense.” In immediateobedience to her air raid training, she coveredher eyes and ears and squatted down on thefloor. The transition from flash to smokydarkness seemed to have occurred within thesame instant, accompanied by the strangest of

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sensations: “In the darkness, I felt as if in astate of weightlessness, with a crackling feelingspreading throughout my body. Not that it waspainful, but it was such a bizarre sensation thatI thought I must be dying.” During theseseconds, Kimiko did not notice the bulletproofglass coming apart or that it had, itself, beentransformed into uncountable thousands oflittle bullets. At least three of the speed-slungfragments cut through her left cheek, butpeople in front of, behind, and beside her wereshot dead.

When she climbed out to the other side of abroken steel door, there were huge cloudswhere minutes before had been nothing exceptblue sky. And the lighting! The clouds, and thecolors, belonged to another planet. And then,as if to emphasize the point, half of a basketballscoreboard crashed to earth like a meteor.Other meteors followed: the lid of a grandpiano… part of a wagon, still attached to aharness and the hindquarters of a horse… theroof of a streetcar… A tennis ball bounceddown from above… A roasted turtle poundeddown, along with dozens of other objects thathad no business being in the sky.

All of this, Kimiko was certain, had begun insilence. She was located just within a one-mileradius from the hypocenter.

“I’m certain,” she would tell history. “It beganwith no sound of an explosion. No sound at all.”

With increasing distance, the noise did growperceptible, then bone-rattling. Almost twomiles away from the hypocenter, almost a milepast Morimoto Tomiko and Kimiko, sixteen-year-old Haruno had been an engineeringstudent at the railway’s streetcar division,where young women were treated with muchmore respect than at Kimiko’s location. AtMoment Zero, Haruno was taking a quickbreakfast break in the girl’s dormitory when ablast that she thought might deafen her, nearlyripped the roof off the building. Outside, acloud in the shape of some hellishly deformed

flower was thundering six miles high and stillrising—and below it, in the direction of home,the center of the city was swirling and boiling,and sending up whirlwinds of flame. Perplexed,and with her ears still ringing, Haruno knewonly two facts. First: “People are injured anddying everywhere, and will need help.” Second:“My mother is directly beneath that cloud.”

On the other side of the mushroom cloud’sstem, at Haruno’s same radius from thedetonation point, a ship designer namedYamaguchi Tsutomu was permanently deafenedin one ear by the blast wave.

He had been living in the city for only a fewweeks, and during each of those weeks, aforeboding grew within him: Hiroshima will bedestroyed today. It seemed to be the lastthought he had before falling asleep, and thefirst thought that came to him when awakenedby uneasy dreams. In those dreams, theEmperor was the harbinger of death. It wasmadness. Incongruous. Madness. Yamaguchi’sparents, like the parents of everyone else heknew—and like most everyone in his owngeneration—had worshipped photos of theEmperor and his family, in much the same waythat ancient Romans worshipped theiremperors as living gods, before their empirefell in flames and ruin. He could not understandwhy during an earthquake or an air raid, eachfamily grabbed and protected its photo orpainting of the Emperor before grabbing itsown life-saving evacuation rucksack. He couldnot fathom how people worshipped a man andhis children, as descendants of the sun itself,based on the mere luck of family rank.

Yamaguchi kept his failure to comprehend tohimself, naturally. Here in Hiroshima, basedmerely on rumors that he once questioned thewisdom of war, the artist Nakazawa Harumihad been abducted by the police for manymonths of foot-breaking and finger-breakingtorture. The artist’s whole family was cut offfrom food rations, and shunned. Possibly

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because his paintings were once hung in thegreat Industrial Hall (the same building whosedome now stood defiantly against the sky),Nakazawa’s family was among the lucky ones.Elsewhere throughout the city, other families,having been pointed at and judged guilty byaccusation alone, simply disappeared.

Yamaguchi, too, was among the lucky ones.Now nearing the end of his twenties, hisscoring on IQ tests and his talent for drawing,combined with his ability to work out thephysics that simplified hull structures evenbefore he sat down to “show the math,” hadcompelled one commander or another to pullhim out of the military reserves, and assignedhim to design ships at various naval yardssouth of Hiroshima. From his many workstations, Yamaguchi concluded, based on theincreasingly primitive materials from which hewas being asked to contrive designs, that Japanhad been running out of everything for morethan two years, and would soon be down towooden hulls and oars—while America, with it’sindustry revved all the way up, must becranking out new ships and planes at anobsessive-compulsive rate.

And I’m a lucky elite, he thought acidly, at leastonce each day.

Two very long years ago, his infant son diedfrom a common cold that degenerated intobacterial pneumonia—which could easily havebeen treated if not for a lack of medicine, evenfor the families of “elites”.

When the government controls the food andfinances of everyone, it quickly runs out ofeveryone else’s money, and food, and medicine.This thought, too, Yamaguchi kept to himself,and for all the correct reasons. When thegovernment sent him and two fellow engineersnorth to the shipyards of Hiroshima, almost noone aboard the train had found it possible todisbelieve the never-ending propagandaexplaining how suffering was only temporaryb e c a u s e J a p a n w a s w i n n i n g t h e

war—notwithstanding certain disturbingrevelations. From time to time, the train’swindows became a gallery of charredlandscapes.

Yamaguchi and his two colleagues, Sato andIwanaga, saw clearly that America’s futuristic“B-sans” owned the air, and industrial centerswere being fire-bombed out of existence at themere will of someone who must be saying, “Justpick a target.” During the train ride, they hadexpected to find most of Hiroshima alreadyfirebombed—and yet, they had arrived at, “aglimmering oasis of life in a vast, nationaldesert of destruction.”

Up to this moment, what had troubledYamaguchi most about Hiroshima, compared towhat he knew was happening to other cities,was precisely the glimmering beauty of therivers and the undisturbed greenery thatsurrounded them. Add to this, the quiet—“aquiet that could be felt.” It was the quiet oneknows if imagining a cheetah stalking its prey,padding about in the forests, waiting for theperfect moment to pounce.

What the young engineer had dreaded evenmore than that dark gallery, was how the trainto Hiroshima took him away from his wife, andfrom his new son—who, this time and at least inthis little corner of history, were both stayingalive and in good health.

After many a phone call to upper managementat Mitsubishi Corp., Yamaguchi and his twofriends had convinced at least one sufficientlyhigh-ranking commander that there was littleto be accomplished in supply-poor Hiroshimaand their skills could be better applied closer tohome, on the better equipped south island thatincluded Nagasaki. This morning, finalclearance for the trip homeward was finally in-hand.

At breakfast, during this last morning of the oldworld, Yamaguchi’s friend Iwanaga had asked,“Should we buy our train tickets today or just

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show up at the station?”

Yamaguchi thought about it for a moment. As ageneral rule, the trains were no longeraccessible to civilians. Service was restrictedalmost exclusively to those traveling on officialgovernment business. “I doubt it will be busy,”he replied, “so we can just show up at thestation and… Oh, no. My name stamp!”

Their schedule for the day had changed sosuddenly that the stamp was still in a desk atone of the Mitsubishi buildings, and Yamaguchiwould need it when he reached the southoffice.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be back within a half hour,”he said, and rushed out.

“Hope the next train isn’t leaving too soon,”Sato had called after him. “We don’t want to bewaiting all day.”

“I’ll be quick, believe me!” He had thought ofadding, We’ve plenty of time, but thoughtbetter against saying it, because he really didnot believe it. Few people wanted to get awayfrom this city more quickly than YamaguchiTsutomu. After running a sixth of a mile alongthe main road, he decided to take a shortcutthrough a potato field and was approaching awoman dressed in a black mompe, when threeparachutes suddenly bloomed overhead andsomething like the power of a thousand flood-lamps flashed before his eyes. Respondinginstantly with his navy air-raid training,Yamaguchi dove to the ground and rolled intothe nearest irrigation ditch, simultaneouslyprotecting his head with his hands. Even withhis ears covered, the sound that came to himwas Earth-shattering. His eyes were closed andburied in mud but he could see and feel theglare of the fireball, as if the light were shiningthrough the back of his skull and striking hisretinas—which, in fact, it was. He would reportlater that it seemed as though the sun hadfallen to Earth, and that even the mountains letout a scream.

The ground roared and quivered, snapped andleaped, tossing Yamaguchi out of the ditch andsome four or five feet into the air. In lateryears, he would be unable to tell for certainwhether it was the ground shock or the airblast or some convergence of both that hadcoughed him out of the ditch and made himairborne. His world became confusion andtumult filled with rushing dust and occasionalclearings in the dust, through which heviewed… “things—irrational things.” At thevery moment he seemed on the verge of fallingback again onto the potato field, the fireballimploded over the city and rose at stupendousspeed, creating a vacuum effect that for asecond or two appeared truly determined todraw the engineer further from the face of theEarth and toward the center of the city; butinstead the implosion merely levitated him forwhat would be recalled as an impossibly longtime on a cushion of air and thick dust, and heguessed that at no point was he any more thansix feet above the ground. Through one of theclear-air openings in the sea of dust—even ashe still drifted over the field—Yamaguchiglimpsed distant rows of houses warping out ofshape and flying toward him in pieces. He feltlike a mere leaf, tossed upon a lake of rushingblack fog. Then, abruptly, he and all the largerpieces of the houses (including whole roomsfull of furniture in mid-flight) dropped to theground. Smaller pieces continued flying towardthe city center without him—and, miraculously,without ever having struck him along the way.

After Yamaguchi regained his composure, herealized he had been dropped into a new ditch,some unknown number of paces from the oneinto which he had dove. Sitting up, and lookingaround while checking for fractured bones, hebeheld a blizzard of burning paper and shredsof smoldering clothing falling out of the sky,flickering like thousands of tiny lanterns andincense burners in the limbs of knocked-downtrees and on the leaves of potato plants. Itappeared to him that the contents of an entireoffice building had been hoisted into the

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heavens, then ripped up, blown apart,scorched, and strewn about. He could not findthe sun—or, at least, not the real sun he hadknown. The blue sky appeared to have beenerased and darkness prevailed, makingYamaguchi feel as if he were in the depths ofthe ocean. Pieces of buildings were still inflight. “I could hear the sound of flying rooftiles shattering in the air,” he would write later– “objects falling, and the noise of all manner ofdestruction. It was impossible to identify eachnoise or its cause.”

Sitting in a mud pool, Yamaguchi becamesuddenly aware that one whole side of his bodywas intensely hot. The exposed skin on his leftarm had been literally roasted brownish-black,like the skin of an overcooked chicken. Eventhen, before he knew anything about atomicbombs, the engineer began to suspect he hadjust survived a heat ray of some sort; and herealized that his white shirt and his light-colored pants had reflected the rays and sparedhim much. The woman in the black mompe hadrun toward the center of the field, where,standing upright, she exposed her entire bodyto the full fury of the flash, while clothed in theall-absorbing equivalent of India ink.Yamaguchi glanced around in every direction,but he never did see a trace of her again.

When the noise and the black dust subsidedand Mr. Yamaguchi looked up again, he saw apillar of fire and ash reaching into thestratosphere. Only much later would he find away to describe it: “Like a giant tornadoenclosed within a volcanic plume, but the baseof it did not move. Only the top of the monsterseemed active, growing higher and wider.”

When this cloud falls to the earth, Yamaguchitold himself, every living thing will die. Hereal ized that even i f he survived thecloud—which soon splashed him with oilyyellow mist, the B-29s might return. Suddenly,all the burning of his body went away, to bereplaced at once by the image of his young wife

and child alone at home. He contrived a plan,then, to find a train or an automobile that wasstill working, or a horse that was still alive and,by any means necessary, to find a way out ofHiroshima, and toward home.

Home, was Nagasaki.

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Author’s Postscript: Yamaguchi Tsutomu leftHiroshima to join history’s most exoticminority: The approximately forty people whosurvived the atomic bombings of bothHiroshima and Nagasaki. Of these forty, he isone of only two known to have been locatedwithin the nearly impossible to survive zone ofGround Zero, each time. Of these two, onlyYamaguchi was exposed above ground, to theeffects of the bomb, both times.

Yamaguchi Tsutomu, The Calming Waters

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In December 2009, as his f i lm Avatarpremiered in Japan, James Cameron and Ivisited with Mr. Yamaguchi, who by that timehad become, to me, one of life’s great teachers.He gave both of us paintings he had created. ToJim: A beautiful dragon in some sort ofstruggle, to keep near him because somethingbad was coming. To me, he gave a painting offireflies near a waterfall, and instructed that Imust keep the calming waters of this paintingnear me, because the storm was coming.

We were honored and surprised to receivethese paintings from Tsutomu Yamaguchiin December 2009. He warned that adifficult time was coming - that Jim (centerwould have to wrestle with the dragon, andthat I should always keep his painting ofthe calming waters, and the fireflies, near(I do).

Maybe, as others in Japan had warned, he knewthat it was a career danger to be writing bookson this subject in America without the“required” chapter justifying the use of theatomic bombs (as for example, the repeatedjustifications in Bill O’Reilley’s book, Killing theRising Sun). Maybe he had heard something ofthe “Nuke Lies” movement in America (whosemembers claim “shadow people” were painted,and “Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not happenthat way”… and, after that, they can start toget nasty). Or maybe, as some say, he had apremonition.

We’ll never know. Mr. Yamaguchi passed awayin January 2010.

In any case, his prediction was correct. A stormof nuclear denialism did come; Jim and Isurvived it. Mr. Yamaguchi’s lessons, and hispainting, “The Calming waters,” are close tome, always.

His lessons are also kept close to J imCameron’s heart. Cameron has written:“Yamaguchi-san felt the blast of nuclear firetwice, and believed that he became one of ahandful of double atomic bomb survivors for areason, so that he could spread a message ofhope and forgiveness. He became a morehighly evolved human. If he could forgive,having become witness to the unimaginable notonce, but twice, then couldn’t anyone,anywhere, forgive wrongs, real or imagined,that drive human warfare?”

In May of 2016, as President Barack Obamawas preparing for his visit to Hiroshima, JamesCameron and I were asked by Mr. Yamaguchi’sdaughter, Toshiko, to write a paragraph for thevisit.

It read: “In Hiroshima there is a ‘Tree ofHope’—which survived the first atomic bomband which is prophesied to continue growinguntil the day humans banish nuclear weaponsfrom the Earth. One day the tree will beforgotten, either because human civilizationhas changed its way of thinking and eliminatednuclear weapons, and the tree becomes justanother tree—or because nuclear weaponshave eliminated us, and there is no one left towater it.”

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Sources

Five double survivors, Tsutomu Yamaguchi,Kenshi Hirata, Kuniyoshi Sato, Akira Iwanaga,

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and Kinnuy Fukui, were interviewed between2008 and 2018. These are among theinterviews that will eventually be included inThe Asah i Sh imbun Messages f romHibakusha Project website (accessible via theC . P e l l e g r i n o h o m e p a g eand http://www.asahi.com/hibakusha/english/).This site has been evolving into the world’slargest English language archive of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki survivor accounts.

The following are the major sources drawn onfor this article. The Matsuda boy ID: nurses ofDr. Minoru Fujii’s mobile rescue team, NenkaiAoyama, July 2008, personal communication(filmed). Purity of U-235 in Hiroshima Device,the effects of the flash: see references chapter1, C. Pellegrino, To Hell and Back: The LastTrain from Hiroshima (hereafter called THaB),Rowman and Littlefield, 2015, including atomicbomb test data, including E. Ishikawa, et al.,The Committee for the Compilation of Materialson Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs inHiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima andNagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and SocialEffects of the Atomic Bombings (Translation:N.Y., Basic Books, 1981), pp32-36, including C.Pellegrino, Ghosts of Vesuvius (Harper, N.Y.,2004), pp.169-238. Morimoto mansion: RobertTrumbull in Nine Who Survived Hiroshima andNagasaki (N.Y., Dutton, 1957), pp 38-39. TheSasaki family: Masahiro Sasaki, Yuji Sasaki,personal communication, 2008-2010, 2016,2018. School children: Norman Cousins,personal communication (1987); also GeorgeAppoldt (with N. Cousins, 1972-1973). Cousinsalso related his recollections of Enola Gay co-pilot Robert Lewis (the latter joined him andvolunteer physicians in assisting/funding theflash-burned “Hiroshima maidens”). TomikoMorimoto (West): personal comm., 2015. 2016,File 2018A, pp 29-32. Kimiko (Kuabara),Hiroshima Nat. Peace Mem. Archive, File2018B, pp17-22. Haruno (Horimoto): HiroshimaMemorial Museum Archive, File 2018B, p 6A.Nakazawa’s father: Keiji Nakazawa, personalcommunication, 2010. Yamaguchi (Tsutomu):

Personal communication, 2008 (with family,2010, 2016), with Chad Deihl (2008-2011); seealso Trumbull (Nine Who Survived: pp 28-29)and Ari Beser, Nuclear Family, Amazon Books(2015).

Suggested Further Reading:

Ari Beser has perhaps one of the most unusualfamily interconnections in all of humanexperience - including one of the HiroshimaMaidens and a grandfather who became theonly crewman to be aboard the atomic strikeplanes, above both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.His book, The Nuclear Family (Amazon Books,2015), should not be missed.

Chad Diehl has filled in a major missing pointin history, covering the different approaches ofthe people, in both cities, of rising from theashes - Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstructionand the Formation of Atomic Narratives,Cornell University Press, 2018. He personallycame to know the Tsutomu Yamaguchi andfamily, and has written a book aboutthis double hibakusha's lifetime of post-nuclearpoetry: And the River Flowed as a Raft ofCorpses (Excogitating Over Coffee Publishing,2010).

Masahiro Sasaki, one of the children survivors,is the author of a new book (with Sue Dicicco) -which provides new details on the life of hissister Sadako, and other children whosuccumbed to the long term effects ofradiation: The Complete Story of SadakoSasaki, (Armed with the Arts, Inc, 2018).

Susan Southard's 2015book, Nagasaki (Viking/Penguin) covers thelives of a half dozen survivors, helping to makesure that Nagasaki does not remain, "theforgotten bomb."

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Update on a Film Project:

Currently, two of the Avatar sequels are deepinto production. The film option (on myHiroshima/Nagasaki books) was renewed inDecember 2017. Although Cameron’s warningto the future about what atomic bombs reallydid, will have to await completion of at least thefirst two Avatar sequels, Cameron recently hadthis to say, during an interview with journalistIan Punnett: “When I do focus on Hiroshima,then I will huddle with Charlie and whateverexperts I can. Charlie put me in contact with anumber of people in Japan, and I was privilegedto go over and meet a couple of the survivors,most memorably, a man named TsutomuYamaguchi, who was a double survivor, whohad become a peace advocate. I met him only afew days before his death from cancer, ofcourse. He sort of passed the baton to Charlieand me, so we have a sacred trust to, at somepoint, make this film.”

Charles Pellegrino, with Jesse Stoff, producedthe original math and modeling that predictedthe discovery of icebound seas under certainmoons of the outer Solar System—including thewater geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus

(verified in 2005). The now-accepted “EuropaTheory” —which linked Stoff’s and Pellegrino’s1975 math to the 1977 discovery of deep-oceanhydrothermal vent life by Robert Ballard’steam, led to Pellegrino joining Ballard duringthe autumn 1985 robotic expedition to the EastPacific Rise. This expedition also led by chanceto Titanic submersible dives, followed by a bestselling trilogy about the Titanic expeditions.

The author and co-author of several NY Timesbest sellers (Her Name, Titanic, The JesusFamily Tomb, The Last Train from Hiroshima,and the 1998 novel, DUST), he is also thescientist whose “dinosaur cloning recipe”became the scientific basis for the Jurassic Parkseries. Pellegrino’s three decades of researchinto history’s most exotic minority—fortypeople who survived the atomic bombings ofboth Hiroshima and Nagasaki—was publishedby Rowman and Littlefield as, To Hell andBack: The Last Train from Hiroshima. The bookhas been published in more than a dozenlanguages. In December 2017, James Cameronrenewed his option on “Last Train” and, afterthe Avatar sequels are complete, announcedthat he hopes to make this his Schindler’s List.

Charles Pellegrino is the author of twenty books, including the New York Times bestseller HerName, Titanic, and Ghosts of the Titanic, which James Cameron used as sources for hisblockbuster movie Titanic and his 3D Imax film Ghosts of the Abyss. With BrookhavenNational Laboratory physicist James Powell, he designed the Valkyrie anti-proton-triggered-fusion configuration for space flight (introduced in AAAS 1986 Symposium Proceedings andanimated in 2009 by James Cameron for the Avatar films, in which Pellegrino served as ascientific consultant). With Powell he also worked closely with Senator Spark Matsunaga onthe U.S./Russia Space Cooperation Initiative during the 1980s, as a means of helping toreduce the probability of nuclear war. Pellegrino is probably best known as the scientistwhose “dinosaur biomorph recipe” became the scientific basis for the Jurassic Park series.

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Notes1 Koi are colored mutations of the common brown carp – interbred for their colors.2 The content of human blood is essentially seawater. At only 500 degrees C (as in the marina,AD 79, Pompeii’s sister city of Herculaneum), people vaporize, essentially instantly. At thislocation in Hiroshima, it was closer to 1500 degrees C (15x the boiling point of water). Theseare temperatures at which the entire water content in one’s body flashes to vapor in 1/20th ofa second. Death occurs in 1/200th of a second, with no perception, at all, of pain.3 Crumple zones (originally invented for the Lunar Module) are engineered into cars. Theygradually absorb the force, compressing the entire impacting area of a vehicle – or, in thiscase, a building that serendipitously had crumple zones built into it, facing the blast.