Janet Nakakihara, 91, tells her Hiroshima bombing story in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, a restraint that forces her listener to fill in the emotional blanks, feeling terror and revulsion and anger as each detail warrants.
And it’s the manner of her telling – not just the story itself – that many view as a matter of life or death.
Though many military leaders and scientists and politicians describe themselves as experts on the subject of nuclear war, that assessment might not be entirely accurate. Instead, people who hope to eradicate such weapons argue that survivors of the two bombs detonated 80 years ago this week over Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and others, like Nakakihara, who witnessed the attacks first-hand, or the 67,000 U.S. military members who were ordered into the nuclear zones weeks after the blasts – are the true experts.
They’ve experienced actual nuclear war, not a fictionalized idea of it. Many have suffered from it, too, in disease or despair or both. Many have struggled for many decades to explain what they saw and felt, to themselves and to the world.
And those experts, advocates note, almost universally say atomic bombs should never be used again. It’s why there’s a race underway to preserve their stories – and the emotional power they hold – to carry on their fight against nuclear proliferation.
“The survivors’ stories are unique because they’re the only people who know, really, what they’re talking about. And when you hear from them, directly, you sort of understand how horrible it was. It’s very powerful,” said 17-year-old Manon Iwata, a high school student from Pasadena and co-founder (with twin sister Kanon Iwata) of Teens 4 Disarmament & Nonproliferation, a nonprofit that encourages young people to learn and share the stories of nuclear bomb survivors, a group known in Japan as hibakusha.
“When they’re gone, if we don’t remember or listen to them, we’ll be closer to repeating what happened.”
One voice
The basics of what happened to Nakakihara are clear: On Aug. 6, 1945, she was 11 years old and her name was Janet Tamura, a fourth-grader living on Mukaishima Island, roughly 60 miles east of Hiroshima City, Japan.
At 8:15 a.m., as she hung up a rag that she’d used to help clean a classroom – upper-grade kids did that then, Nakakihara explains – she saw a flash of light and, a few beats later, she heard a deafening “thud.”
“Everybody was outside, screaming. I went out, too, and looked in the sky. And there was this big cloud, multi-colored, rising up and up,” she said.
“It was almost pretty.”
Also see: 80th anniversary: A look at the memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
She noted, even as a kid, that the cloud was rising over Hiroshima. That’s where she’d been living just a month earlier, until her mother read pamphlets dropped from U.S. planes that warned how Hiroshima, host to a military station, soon would be subjected to bombings that were becoming common in Japan. Soon, mother and daughter moved in with family on the island.
“It was war. We had watched Tokyo burn, or heard about it,” Nakakihara said, referencing the firebombing of Japan’s biggest city that had killed an estimated 80,000 people, mostly civilians, just five months earlier.
“But we had no inkling about this. Nobody knew about atom bombs.”
Hours after the thud and the cloud, people started arriving on the island. They described how much of Hiroshima City, a city of about 350,000 people, was obliterated.
“That was hard to believe. We all heard only one boom.”
Though Japanese citizens in mid-1945 were familiar with the military devastation of fire bombings and other conventional weapons, the horrors described by people leaving Hiroshima sounded new.
Buildings were knocked flat or seemingly vaporized. Cars and trucks were blown off roads. Houses were swallowed by flames that seemed to roll through the air. Survivors were walking through town, dazed, with their skin dangling from their backs or arms or scalps. Most would die slowly.
Nakakihara heard the stories but said little. It all seemed far-fetched.
“I’m sure everyone talked about all of that, later, but I don’t recall. I was very young.”
Soon, she said, people in Japan took up a name for the event – pikadon – or “flash boom.”
And flash boom turned out to be the most effective killing device ever invented.
An estimated 60,000 died in the single blast in Hiroshima, and about 40,000 more died three days later when a similar bomb was detonated over Nagasaki. And the dying didn’t end with the flames. By the end of 1945, radiation exposure would kill an estimated 70,000 more people in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki. And, in the decades since, lower-level radiation exposure from the bombs would lead tens of thousands of people who lived in or near the blast zones – or who were ordered into the cities to serve as military peacekeepers – to develop cancers and other diseases.
“My mother’s cousin’s baby died in the bomb explosion. Their house collapsed on them. Her cousin happened to be on a bus, and the bus exploded, and she was thrown into a river. But she survived,” Nakakihara said.
Within days, her mother went to Hiroshima to bring food to relatives.
“I think she found some, but their homes were destroyed,” Nakakihara said. “My husband thinks it’s why she developed cancer, later in life.
“But I don’t know if that’s true.”
What happened next for Nakakihara was similar to what happened with many of those who were direct survivors of the blasts, the hibakusha.
She landed in Southern California.
Nakikahara explained that before World War II, she and her parents lived in Oxnard, and that she was an American citizen, born to immigrant parents in Los Angeles. The family was visiting Japan and was caught by surprise when the attack on Pearl Harbor drew America into the war, and they were not allowed to return. Her father, who spoke English well, was drafted into the Japanese army and eventually served as an interpreter for the Australian military.
Nakakihara returned to the United States with relatives in 1948, and her parents came a year later. The family re-settled in Oxnard and, later, moved to Ventura. Today she lives in La Palma.
During the post-war period, and throughout the 1950s, many hibakusha made a similar trek, often fleeing discrimination they faced in Japan because they were perceived as damaged and unhealthy because of the blasts.
Today, Los Angeles is believed to have the most hibakusha outside of Japan.
Other voices
About halfway into the new documentary “Atomic Echoes: Untold Stories of World War II” (airing this month on PBS), U.S. Army veteran Michas Ohnstad struggles to keep his composure as he describes what he saw and felt during his time as a peacekeeper in Hiroshima, a role he took on just weeks after the bombings.
About 40,000 Americans were assigned to keep the peace in Hiroshima and 27,000 others were sent to Nagasaki. Today, time – plus a high incidence of cancers related to radiation exposure – has reduced the survivors of that combined mission to fewer than 10 men.
But the story Ohnstad tells to his interviewers – Washington D.C.-based filmmakers and writers Karin Tanabe and Victoria Kelly – isn’t focused on his health.
Instead, he talks about the devastation he saw and the decency he experienced while working in the world’s first and so-far only nuclear war zone. When he describes a Japanese man who worked as a cook for the military even though he’d lost his wife and three daughters in the bombing of Hiroshima, Ohnstad smiles and pauses and shakes his head.
Also see: Here’s how big our nuclear arsenal is 80 years after the first atomic bomb
For Tanabe and Kelly, telling the story of the hibakusha in Japan, and of American Atomic Veterans like Ohnstad (an officially recognized group of mostly enlisted personnel who served in the nuclear zones of Japan, or who were held as prisoners of war near the blast zones, and others who were harmed later by above-ground nuclear testing) was personal. Tanabe’s great-great uncle became the first president of Hiroshima University after World War II, while Kelly’s late grandfather served as a medic in Nagasaki, starting just 45 days after that city was bombed.
“Atomic Echoes” democratizes those stories, giving equal time to American soldiers and to Japanese bomb survivors. The tactic seems to emphasize how much the former enemies now share.
And all of the stories, the filmmakers argue, are powerful weapons against the future use of nuclear bombs.
“In Japan, right now, they’re facing the imminent loss of the hibakusha, so the government has appointed younger people to serve as what they call ‘Memory Keepers,’” Tanabe said. “It’s to make sure they pass down their stories, in detail.”
Kelly, who said her late grandfather suffered emotionally after serving in the nuclear zones, said the movie has forged an unexpected bond, in part by bringing to light the fact that some Americans also suffered as a result of the bombs.
“Not only do the Americans not understand this, but the Japanese are surprised to learn of it,” Kelly said.
“It’s part of why we rushed to do this film, to make sure those stories got out.”
Future voices
In February 2022, when Russia escalated its invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to authorize the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons.
The idea was that Russia might use atomic warfare in some limited capacity, presumably to defeat Ukraine without prompting a destructive response from the United States or the countries of NATO.
None of that hasn’t played out. But such talk is part of what the Union for Concerned Scientists describes as a re-escalation of a nuclear arms race that many thought ended when the Cold War fizzled out.
Though the world has scaled back from a peak of more than 60,000 nukes in the late 1980s, nine countries (the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel) still have an estimated 12,900 such weapons. Today, according to the UCS and others, many of those countries are “significantly increasing their nuclear arsenals in size, capability, or both,” while others, including Iran, are pushing to create their own nuclear stockpiles.
That backdrop played a role in the decision to award the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organization that represents surviving hibakusha.
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told the Associated Press last year that the award was made as the “taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure.”
Frydnes also noted that the hibakusha, in particular, have sacrificed privacy and “chosen to use their costly experience” to warn the world about the reality of nuclear weapons.
Pasadena high schooler Manon Iwata also sees value in that “costly experience.”
“Before our ninth-grade year, my sister and I did a lot of volunteering at retirement homes. And we met many hibakusha, and heard their stories,” she said.
“When we saw all that, and felt that raw emotion, it became important to us to learn about what happened and to share that with people our age.
“We aren’t telling people how to think, or what to say, but we are giving them information that hopefully they use to make up their own mind,” she added. “Younger people are more open, and more willing to learn about these things, than others might think.”
Iwata argues that American history classes gloss over the bombings. And because of that, she said, many people her age aren’t aware of the costs, or of the calculations that drove the decision to drop two nuclear weapons.
Time is taking away the real experts. At one time, Japan formally recognized about 650,000 hibakusha; today, that number is believed to be about 85,000.
What isn’t going away – yet – is the power of their stories.
The Iwatas’ website offers photos and as-told-to stories from several hibakusha who live in the Los Angeles area.
“When other people my age read those stories, they feel the way my sister and I felt when we first heard them,” Manon Iwata said.
That site has been replicated by younger administrators in a half-dozen communities around the world.
One of those is in Ukraine.
“I think the woman in Ukraine hasn’t been able to keep up with it as much as she’d like because of the war that is ongoing,” Iwata said.
“But I know they’re eager to maintain the message. Where they are, it’s particularly important.”