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Dr. Kiyoshi Hama is an emeritus professor of the University of Tokyo and the National Institute of Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan, where he was director general. Dr. Hama is a former president of the National Institutes in Okasaki and a member of the Japan Academy.
This column was originally published in the Bangor Daily News on Aug. 6, 2005. Dr. Hama died in 2019.
I saw far more people die as a young medical student than most clinicians experience during their entire careers. As a medical student at Kyushu University in Fukuoka City, I participated in the rescue and treatment of patients burned in the indiscriminate attacks on the city with incendiary bombs dropped from American B-29s on April 9, 1945. But this was nothing compared to the horror I was to witness four months later in Nagasaki where I joined a relief team sent by my medical school three days after the United States dropped the atomic bomb.
Earlier during the war, I saw film clips at the movies of Japanese heavy bombers over Chinese cities; I confess with bitter remorse that I could not imagine the terror of the Chinese people who were subjected to this bombing until I saw the dreadful state in Nagasaki. For this reason, I feel that I, too, share guilt for the merciless actions of the Japanese military during World War II. Still, I wish to relate what I saw and experienced in Nagasaki, hoping that each reader will consider this tragic history. I am deeply concerned that the awful experiences of World War II were ignored by people in many countries, even in Japan.
Six days before the end of World War II, on Aug. 9, 1945, Nagasaki was attacked by atomic bombardment and over 40,000 people were killed immediately. The main Medical College and Hospital in Nagasaki were less than 500 yards from “Ground Zero,” and most doctors in other areas of Nagasaki City were injured or killed so my medical school organized a rescue team.
As our train neared Nagasaki on the morning of Aug. 11, injured people filled the platforms of stations close to the city. These people stood very quietly, and were covered by white ointment or had peeling skin and tattered clothes. The gloomy atmosphere that permeated the crowds and injured as we neared Nagasaki was different from anything we had ever experienced.
When the train entered a valley on its final approach to Nagasaki, we gasped at the sight of the inferno that the earth had experienced. Not a single spot of green remained. The ground was completely burnt up to the very ridges of the mountain surrounding Nagasaki. Nothing living moved under the starkly bright sun, and an ominous silence hung over the area.
We hiked to the rescue center at Suwa Shrine near city hall. On the way to the center, we passed burned bodies that were already decayed and swollen. Their faces were featureless, “melted” by the nuclear blast. Dead passengers, partially burnt to the bone, were seated in the ruins of a train that we passed.
We were not told that the bombs used to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomic bombs; they were simply called “new bombs.” Should another attack from the “new bomb” occur, we were told, we should run into a shelter after seeing the flash, and then we would be safe. The terrible sights before our eyes told us that this instruction was nonsense.
Some of us then went to a relief station that the local army hospital had set up at the Yamazato Primary School, which was located less than 500 meters from the epicenter of the nuclear attack. Several hundred injured people were at the relief station, and their injuries were so terrible that we could not find any real way to treat them. We tended to urgent needs: applying zinc ointment to general burns, removing pieces of broken glass that were stuck all over patients’ bodies, sterilizing wounds, correcting and setting broken bones, giving heart stimulants to dying patients, and providing opium for intolerable pain.
Neither doctors nor nurses remained at the rescue station overnight, because there were no lights or even candles left in the bombarded area. The next morning, we found many dead bodies in the corridor, on the stairway and around the treatment desks. These people probably could not bear the agony of death and crawled out during the night to try to find someone who might provide treatment or relieve their pain.
Many of our patients were Christians, because Yamazato was a Catholic area. In their dimly lit rooms before sunset, even those patients who were so terribly weakened that they could not stir an inch tried to raise the upper part of their bodies for evening prayer. These patients died, one-by-one, over a few days. A long time passed before I realized that I could see the final dignity of a human being in this scene of evening prayer by people who had been deprived of everything: rights, properties, families, futures, their very lives.
When the relief station at Yamazato closed at the end of August, I moved to the Sinkohzen relief station. There, patients who had seemed likely to recover lost their vigor during September. Most suffered from anemia, and their hair fell out. Patients watched helplessly as radiation sickness progressed. Small spots (subcutaneous hemorrhages) appeared in their limbs and breasts, followed by high fever and bleeding gums; massive bleeding from the nose, mouth and anus; and finally, excruciating pain and death. Patients who developed these small spots subsequently experienced the same symptoms and died, without exception, within several days. It was heart breaking to see the terror in the faces of these men and women who had watched their neighbors die, as red spots appeared on their own skins.
It was also hard to provide patients with nourishment, because there was a severe lack of food in Japan. We asked some firemen to supply us with seawater, and then we collected sweet potato leaves, which we boiled in seawater and fed to the patients to provide them with essential salts. Sweet potatoes were too expensive for us; we could only use leaves.
These things penetrated the marrow of my heart. I learned the unfathomable value of an individual human life in Nagasaki, and my utter powerlessness, the limitation of medical science, and the hateful vice of war, which had robbed so many healthy people of their lives.
Today, some powerful countries continue their thermonuclear arms race, and other countries are making desperate attempts to buy and develop nuclear armaments. More than 100,000 atomic bombs have been produced on the Earth, and many have much greater destructive power than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Currently, some politicians advocate the development of atomic bombs with more limited and/or controllable effects. But such bombs will still be dirty and dangerous.
This terrible type of attack should never again be used against human beings, or against any other form of life. I cannot help but wonder whether humans have enough wisdom to learn from history, when I see this sad repetition of destruction and massacre.
Today, my generation across the world is aging and retiring. People of my generation perpetrated or permitted serious crimes against humankind and nature. I beg you, the younger generations, to pardon our mistakes. At the same time, I tell you urgently that you face a situation similar to the one we experienced in the 1930s and early 1940s. I beg you not to make the same kinds of mistakes that we did.