JAPAN: 13th Anniversary

Early one morning last week 30,000 Japanese, carrying wreaths, incense sticks and bits of white paper folded into the shape of flying cranes, poured into Nakajima Park in Hiroshima on the northern shore of the Inland Sea. The waning moon still hung in the brightening blue sky. There was no wind, and the promise of a hot day. Said one Japanese, looking skyward: “It was a morning just like this when the bomb fell.”

The crowd massed before a huge, circular grass mound under which are buried the thousands of unidentified victims* of the first A-bomb drop exactly 13 years ago. Green wreaths were soon piled about the mound; a forest of incense sticks smoldered fragrantly. A bell tolled, signaling a minute’s silence—but some women wept aloud. Then, watched by the silent crowd, Hiroshima’s Mayor Tadao Watanabe released 800 doves. Ten black-robed Buddhist priests began a solemn, monotonous chant of prayers that would continue until sundown.

644 Cranes. The crowd broke up, some to file through the Peace Memorial Data Hall, a chamber-of-horrors museum containing mementos of the day Hiroshima died. Others congregated around the 10-ft. statue of Schoolgirl Sadako Sasaki. Sadako was two years old when the bomb exploded, and only half a mile from the explosion’s center of impact. Yet she was apparently unharmed, and grew into a lively, likable child. In 1955, one month before graduating from grammar school, she developed the extreme lethargy that is the forerunner of “atom sickness.” Hospitalized, Sadako began folding scraps of paper into flying cranes—Japanese legend holds that a sick person who makes 1,000 paper cranes will recover. Sadako got only as far as 644, and died.

This year the memorial services were marked with a new bitterness. The Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun editorialized: “We hope these commemorative events will bring home to those concerned with the dropping of the bomb that they were guilty of acts so shameful that Japan will never forget them.” Said Mayor Watanabe: “We now view the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, no matter for what purpose, as a crime committed against mankind.” And he added: “We have become frightened.”

The Fright. What was frightening Japan was the sudden sharp rise in leukemia deaths among supposedly uninjured survivors. In the year preceding last week’s anniversary, 65 in Hiroshima and atom-bombed Nagasaki died of “atomic sickness.” In the previous twelve months, the total deaths had been 36; in the year before that, 20. Another statistic was just as chilling: of 32,000 children born in Hiroshima in the past 13 years, nearly one in six was deformed or stillborn. U.S. Dr. George B. Darling of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission protests that “the incidence of abnormal births to parents never exposed to atomic radiation is higher than the layman suspects, and it’s understandable that when one of these occurs in a family with a history of radiation exposure, radiation should be blamed.” But Darling concedes: “We are trying to measure the effect of something new that nobody really understands.”

For the bomb survivors not yet struck down by atom sickness, the worst damage appears psychological. Many of them try to conceal their identities because they often find themselves shunned. Says one Japanese bitterly: “People are afraid of us. They think we are going to fall sick and become a burden, or contaminate them. We know now how lepers feel.” In a public-opinion poll, 40% of Japanese questioned said they would not marry a bomb survivor; 80% of those who would said they would refuse to have children. But the most gnawing fear of the survivors was expressed by one of them: “Each morning when I wake up, the nightmare recommences. How do I feel? If I find that I am even the slightest bit tired, then I imagine that the dread onset of ‘lethargy’ has begun.”

But, just as the world seems able to push from its mind the memory of the Abomb, so does Hiroshima itself. While the 30,000 pilgrims attended the commemorative service last week, nearly as many crowded into a nearby ballpark for a baseball game. As night fell, big bright neon signs flashed invitations to amusement centers. The broad Ota River glittered with floating lanterns, and fireworks burst their colored lights against the sky in celebration of the joyous Buddhist Festival of Lanterns. Adjoining the grisly Peace Memorial Data Hall in Nakajima Park is a modern, air-conditioned hotel that caters to the 7,000 foreigners who annually visit Hiroshima, and the more wealthy of the 2,000,000 Japanese visitors. In addition to tourists, Hiroshima lives by the brewing of beer and the building of ships—and, ironically, by the manufacture of howitzers by Japan’s biggest gunmaker, Nihon Seiko, whose sales last year grossed $61 million and gave employment to more than 1,500 Hiroshima citizens.

*In the atom bombing of Hiroshima, 71,379 died. In the U.S. fire-and-bomb raid on Tokyo six months earlier, the dead totaled 83,793.