Hiroshima Maidens Remembered : Author Traces the Life Paths of Surviving Blast Victims

NEW YORK — It was such a natural response. The plane flew overhead, and without thinking, they looked up at it. Reflexively, they raised their arms to point up at it or to shield their eyes from the bright morning sun.

Very few residents of Hiroshima remember exactly what happened in those next few moments just after 8 a.m. that Aug. 6, 1945, except that the light was so incredibly blinding. Many lost their sight, their eyes melted from their heads. Within one day, more than 100,000 people were dead from the effects of this first atomic bomb to be used against a civilian population. Countless thousands were permanently disfigured. Many of those who had pointed up at the Enola Gay, for example, were left with their joints locked forever in strange, back-to-front angles. Their arms, faces, necks--any exposed areas--were seared into hideous distortions.

In this context, it is difficult to talk about luck. Was the mere act of survival a gesture of good fortune? Did fate hand out a favor to the young women, teen-agers when the bomb exploded, left so disfigured that they saw no alternative but to hide, their chances for marriage, employment, any semblance of a normal existence destroyed?

But luck was a word used by and about the 25 young women who came to be known as the Hiroshima Maidens. Lucky? “It’s just that I was unlucky that day, because I was looking up at the plane,” said Hiroko Tasaka Harris, now married and living in Baltimore. “On the other hand, I was lucky to come to this country. That is what is so interesting. You never know what comes to you.”

Out of all the thousands scarred by the bomb, these 25 young women were the blast victims chosen for a daring joint experiment in medicine and international relations. Under a program spearheaded by U.S. humanitarian and Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins and the Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto of Hiroshima, these 25 women were brought to the United States 10 years after the bomb for reconstructive surgery and a chance at a new life.

“At the time,” said Rodney Barker, author of a new book on the subject, “The Hiroshima Maidens” (Viking: $16.95), “it seemed like they were major international figures.”

But what surprised Barker, covering a demonstration at Colorado’s Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant as a free-lance journalist in 1979, was that among fellow reporters, “not a single one had heard of the Maidens.” It seemed odd, because during their stay in America, they had appeared on national television, been featured in magazine and newspaper articles and received gifts from corporations, foundations, individuals. For a time, living with Quaker families in the New York area, and undergoing operation after operation performed by volunteer physicians at Mt. Sinai Hospital here, they had experienced, in their way, a peculiarly American kind of celebrity status.

Rodney Barker’s own interest all those years later was understandable. His family had, after all, played host to two of the young women at their home in Darien, Conn.

“After they got back,” Barker remembered, “there were Christmas and birthday cards now and then, post cards, things like that, and then nothing.” For Barker, 9 years old when Suzue Oshima and Misako Kannabe stayed with his family, the story of the Hiroshima Maidens was “one of those things lodged in the back of your mind with a kind of half life of its own, waiting to burst forth again.”

Suspicious of the Press

Carefully, for they were “understandably suspicious of any member of the press who intended to write about them,” Barker set out to track down the surviving Maidens, and to trace the paths their lives had taken. From the start, Barker understood that his project was fraught with much the same paradoxical quality that had marked the original Hiroshima Maidens program itself. For “if the project were going to be successful,” he said, “that meant that these women could go back and lead ordinary, normal lives.

Barker realized, too, that he was dealing with women whose lives had undergone a series of shattering transformations. First, there had been the bomb and the ensuing ostracism survivors often encountered, even in war-ravaged Japan. Later, stepping out of what Barker terms a “10-year nightmare,” they had been immersed dramatically into a buoyantly optimistic 1950s American culture where anything seemed possible, where “Queen for a Day” and “This Is Your Life” seemed to capture the national temperament. For some, the expectations of a total surgical makeover were technologically, medically impossible, and so their hopes could not comport with reality. Finally, there was re-entry into a Japanese society where their welcome was, as Barker described it, “double-edged.”

“On the one hand,” Barker said from his home in Forestville, Md., “I think that as a result of coming to America they felt a sense of profound reconciliation, and this was a feeling they were able to arrive at that other survivors might not be able to attain. You have to understand that part of the dilemma that survivors in Hiroshima faced was in being set apart. Yet here these women had to come to the enemy country, of all places, to find the acceptance they were seeking.

“And yet when they got back to Japan, here they were feeling the desire to communicate what happened to them, and they were not fully comfortable because they were still disfigured people, the press was constantly hounding them and the people in the community were feeling kind of resentful that these women had been singled out.”

Some married, some had children, some remained single. They took jobs. As best as possible, Barker said, they put the awful memories aside and assumed what might be thought of as normal lives. Physically, this is not always easy, since for most, the scars remain--and prominently. “It is still very apparent that they have had something wrong with them, like they were in a very bad fire, or worse,” Barker said.

“What has happened is that their keloids, the scars that gave them the most trouble early on, have really softened and have lost their reddish hue. The skin grafts have now almost ballooned in some cases, and that has to do with the tendency of abdominal skin (the area from which most of the grafts were taken) to put on sort of fat. When you have to go to massive injuries that are that old, and you have to replace the underlying tissue as well--basically there are limitations to what can be done. They could go back in now and scrape that out, but most of these women don’t want any more operations.”

A Hiatus in Heaven

To be sure, “If you asked me to go through those operations now,” Hiroko Harris said, “I don’t think I would do it.”

Still, some recollections were coveted. “If the atomic bomb was evil in remembrance,” Barker writes, “their American experience took on aspects of a hiatus in heaven.”

One reason may be that the project itself transcended any kind of international animosity, and managed to operate without the shadow of some great cosmic cloud of guilt. “In a way this really is the ultimate reconciliation story,” Barker said. ‘It’s a story that does not even suggest American guilt. The country that had the technical genius to build the bomb also showed that it had the compassion to try to heal the human misery.

“I think what’s so important here are the different attitudes, like between Cousins and Dr. (Arthur) Barksy (the physician who ran the medical end of the Maidens project). Cousins thought the bomb was a mistake, a crime, a stain on this country’s history. Dr. Barsky on the other hand felt it had shortened the war and thus saved lives. The point is, they were able to come together on a higher level.”

For Barker, one interesting phenomenon has been the response to his book. It is not that America lacks curiosity about these women it dubbed the Hiroshima Maidens, but so often, Barker said, “they don’t hear specifics. All they hear is Hiroshima, bombing, and they get on the phone, and right away they’re ready to fight World War II again.”

Still, he said, maybe dredging up those horrors does have certain very clear benefits. “What I wanted to do,” Barker said, “was create an approximation of a kind of personal relationship with the survivors. If I can tell a story, a true story that engages readers on an intimate level, then what they remember becomes part of their personal experience as well, and will influence their attitudes toward who we currently can see as our enemy, and our attitudes toward the bomb.”

That experience, Barker reasons, “compels them to reject the idea of it ever happening again--without moralizing or politicizing, without saying that what happened was right or wrong.”

Feels No Anger

In Baltimore, Hiroko Harris said she felt no anger 40 years after that fateful day in August. “How can you be angry?” she asked. “Who is there to be angry at? Not the United States. So many Japanese killed American people, too.

“If you asked individual people about the bombing,” she said, “I don’t think anybody would want it. It’s war that’s bad, not the people.”

Harris paused. One giant stroke of luck that fell her way as a result of the Maidens project was her meeting with Harry Harris, the Baltimore cab driver who courted her relentlessly and finally became her husband.

Still, said Harris, “I hope nobody ever has an experience like this again. Never again.”