Medicine: Young Ladies of Japan

In Manhattan’s Mt. Sinai Hospital last week, plastic surgeons removed the dressings from the face of a 23-year-old Japanese girl named Shigeko Niimoto and noted with satisfaction that her extensive skin graft had been an almost perfect take. The contours of the girl’s face were almost normal again.

In other Mt. Sinai rooms and in a dozen Quaker households near Manhattan, 24 other young Japanese women were waiting their turn to undergo plastic surgery, some for the second or third time. They all had one thing in common: ten years ago they were on the streets of Hiroshima within a mile of ground zero on the day the first atom bomb was dropped.

A Blinding Flash. Shigeko was the youngest and prettiest of Oyster-Fisherman Masayuki Niimoto’s three daughters. The two elder sisters and their brother were away from Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Shigeko was on her way to the Hiroshima Girls’ Commercial High School, where she had just entered the freshman class. As she crossed the Tsurumi Bridge, someone called “Look!” It was a few seconds before 8:15 a.m. Shigeko turned. Then: “A blinding flash, and I fell to the ground. I covered my eyes with my hands. As I struggled to get to my feet, something [the shock wave] threw me down harder and blew me several yards. I blacked out. I don’t know for how long. When I came to, it was no longer bright sunshine but dark like dusk, gradually changing to smoky red. My kimono from the waist up was in shreds . . .”

Despite agonizing burns about her head, neck, chest and arms, Shigeko made her way to an aid station. There, three days later, her mother found her. With doctors all but wiped out—and the few survivors helpless against disorders they could not diagnose—Mrs. Niimoto took charge. When she tried to remove the tatters of Shigeko’s clothing, the burned skin and flesh came off, too. Morning and evening for a month, Mrs. Niimoto anointed her daughter’s seared flesh with cooking oil and carefully washed her eyes with bicarbonate of soda. When the ash-grey tissue peeled off, Shigeko’s skin was shiny and smoothly lifeless. Eyebrows, lashes and hair were gone. Worst of all, her chin had all but disappeared, and the lower half of her face looked as though it had been melted into her throat.

Months later Shigeko was still bald and beet-complexioned, so she was dubbed Aka Oni (Red Devil). After a nurse ordered her burned hands bandaged, they became gnarled like briar roots, and she lost the use of fingers and hands alike. For Shigeko’s was one of the stubborn cases suffering both contractions and keloid growths (in effect, tumors of scar tissue). Shigeko could not work. She had no hope of marriage. And at the Nagaragawa Methodist Church she met scores of other girls in like plight. The Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto called them “The Hiroshima Maidens.”

An Accepted Fact. Japanese plastic surgeons did their best: at Tokyo University Hospital, Shigeko had 20 operations, regained some movement in her neck and fingers. But the scar tissue kept coming back. Then U.S. Editor (The Saturday Review) Norman Cousins heard of the “Keloid Girls,” began a campaign to get them another chance. The Hiroshima Peace Center Associates, a private philanthropic group, agreed to sponsor 25 of the most badly scarred Hiroshima Maidens on a trip to the U.S. for surgical treatment; the New York Quakers offered to find them homes. In charge (without fee) of the long, arduous program of surgery at Mt. Sinai are three of the nation’s top plastic surgeons: Dr. Arthur Barsky, Dr. Bernard Simon and Dr. Sidney Kahn.

In the intervals between operations (three or four may be needed for each patient), the girls pass from one Quaker home to another for visits. They are in such demand that the families vie with each other for the chance to put them up. Said one host: “When the girls first moved in, we looked for signs of homesickness or some uneasiness in their attitude toward us. But they couldn’t be more cheerful or more delightful as guests.” The girls have picked up enough English to get by without an interpreter; they have adopted sleek Italian hairdos, colored ballerina slippers and other U.S. fashions. Above all, they no longer shrink from meeting people as they did at home.

To the attendant doctors, these signs of mental healing are as important as the surgical gains. Although facial deformities are being improved, and the use of frozen hands and limbs gradually restored, plastic surgery can never totally efface the marks of the terrible seconds under the bomb. Shigeko and the others quietly accept this fact. Said one of the girls to an interpreter shortly before she was wheeled into the operating room: “Tell Dr. Barsky not to be worried because he cannot give me a new face. I know that this is impossible, but it does not matter; something has already healed here inside.”