MUGAMUCHŪ: Under the Nagasaki Mushroom Cloud

Taniguchi Sumiteru’s ‘red back’ as he stayed in Shinkōzen Elementary School turned temporary relief hospital after the bombing of Nagasaki, September 1945. (Courtesy of Joe O’Donnell; Colored by Jordan J. Lloyd of Dynamichrome)

On August 9, 1945, at precisely 11:02 in the morning by Japan’s local time, a five-ton plutonium bomb had detonated in the Urakami district—the northern part of the city of Nagasaki from the prefecture of the same name. A blazing flash had sparked above the Urakami Valley, igniting a fireball that measured about 300,000 centigrade, and an explosion equivalent to a power of 21,000 tons of TNT. At that moment, Taniguchi Sumiteru, a student-mobilized sixteen-year-old during this incident, was riding his red bicycle to deliver postal mail around the Sumiyoshi-machi area when, in an almost instantaneous manner, he was catapulted forward by an intense force. He was struck down against the pavement to which he felt trembling as if an earthquake had hit Nagasaki. Waiting for the tremor to stop, he turned his head to regain awareness of what happened: Taniguchi saw charred bodies of the children whom he earlier passed by playing in the distance, and who assumedly were then laid dead meters away from him. His bicycle busted in its various parts as the mails scattered around him in turn. The skin on his left hand had been peeled and his back had been melted, torched by the immense heat which he was yet to know from that exact moment. A smoke forming a mushroom cloud—the color of vivid red-orange to black—then enveloped the prior bright morning sky. At the extent of where Taniguchi was, the Urakami Valley had been instantly set on fire with the scorching air passionately moving through the area. It was only sixty seconds after Fat Man had been exhausted and Taniguchi was clearly two kilometers away from the hypocenter to where the temperature had reached almost 4,000 centigrade, incinerating within seconds 90% that it passes within a half kilometer.

The photograph above showed no other than Taniguchi himself, or more so, the one in a thousand aftermaths of the last atomic bomb used deliberately against civilians in the current world history. His injured body was caused by the thermal radiation emitted by the bomb, which contains about 30%-50% of total energy after setting off. The burn is much more than a third-degree classification as the temperature sent out immediately from the detonation point is approximately comparable to the core of the sun. In the above photo, Taniguchi’s skin at the back had become entirely nonexistent while the prior dangling skin in his left hand had been removed when he ran in a mountain tunnel for immediate protection—overall exposing his inflamed tissues on the burned area. Ironically, Taniguchi never felt any sensation when he sustained his injuries immediately after the bombing. However, his health had dwindled, his wounds became pus-filled, and had then infested with maggots. Proper treatment to his wounds including all the rescued individuals from the affected area was not provided straightaway seeing as that all the official hospitals and the majority of the medical staff in Urakami had been wiped out by the bombing—as these hospitals with the medical staff inside were located only a mile from the hypocenter. Taniguchi and other survivors have to be transferred to other hospitals outside the city of Nagasaki while altogether waiting for their surviving families or their death to find them.

Taniguchi only felt the immense pain of his wound during his medication on almost every day of his more than four years stay at Ōmura Naval Hospital. Every time the instrument cart looms, he would start to cry. When the gauze is being removed from his back to clean his wound, he screamed in pain and pleaded with the nurses to let him die as the agony remained unbearable. His back and hand injuries would later be saddled by severely infected bedsores his body additionally accumulated for laying in his stomach for years since the bombing in Nagasaki.

After much improvement, however, Taniguchi came back to Nagasaki: to function, to live, and to never forget. He devoted much of his life post-war to advocating the embedding and lifetime effects of the atomic bomb on the human mind and body with his manifestation as the surviving evidence. Along so is his activism to completely outlaw nuclear weapons—to hope that those will never be used again in the history of humanity and that in his words: “They [nuclear weapons] can never safely coexist with humans.”

While Taniguchi is only one of the many in Nagasaki, this dehumanizing event is also one of the many that called for a rigid international humanitarian law. Due to the devastating quality of the atomic bomb used, in Norton-Bates phrases: it had ‘warped the humanitarian debate’. When nuclear weapons were used in 1945 against civilians, there was a disagreement about how the law of war could and would be applied to these weapons. Public discussion regarding nuclear weapons throughout 1945 and towards Cold War had only focused on the issue of its proliferation and their defense dimensions. Even so, the emphasis of the discourse is progressively moving to consider their repercussions on IHL and the potentially devastating humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons—thanks to the many efforts of hibakusha[1] and anti-nuclear weapons advocates, both from individual to the organizational level. Since the Japanese populace cannot prosecute the U.S. for the atomic bombing, only morally indict that such action is a war crime, Taniguchi and other hibakushas who were willing to tell the demoralizing story made numerous efforts to protest against the proliferation and even more the utilization of nuclear weapons instead. As an additional fact, while the populace cannot find which to blame, what’s worse is that immediate surviving hibakushas were never afforded medical treatments by the U.S. government when they established a research laboratory[2] in Japan to study them—to eventually know the effect of the atomic bomb they just have dropped—as if those directly affected are guinea pigs in an ill-fated experiment.

In a post-war scene spread to awareness and outrage, several hibakushas and anti-nuclear weapon advocates have worked to establish the legal framework necessary to prevent the worst from happening again. As a result of this massive humanitarian effort, the Geneva Conventions were upgraded and which has then included the addition of the Fourth Geneva Conventions (to protect civilians in times of war) signed in 1949, alongside three additional protocols, and separate treaties regarding nuclear weapons for the next decades. Thus far, legal frameworks may have been gradually established but the ethical question of such an act will never be answered. Then come the immeasurable dismay during the Cold War (particularly from its escalating potential to become the first nuclear war in history), as if the world had not learned yet from then-recent history.

Looking at the photo can make one fall in silence and disbelief that Taniguchi was able to live seven more decades after the bombing. Although this occasion of being alive has also taken him and other hibakushas with lifelong suffering of recurring physical and mental anguish, as in Taniguchi’s words in one of his public dialogues: “We are living with suffering, with the scars of the atomic bomb cursed all over our bodies.” This statement, in fact, remains true—that the effect of such retains even all the way down to the bone when Nagano Etsuko, another Nagasaki hibakusha, discovered that the ashes of his father and two siblings who died after the bombing had all turned into black. A Buddhist monk subsequently told Nagano that the ashes of 20,000 unidentified hibakushas stored in a crate had also gone pitch-black after almost fifty years. If the scars and the internal battle are not enough yet for the survivors, this event spanning half a century shockingly reveals that even the dead can die more than once imaginable.

My preference for Taniguchi’s photograph is only to stimulate a visual substantiation of the devastating effect of nuclear weapons used directly on humans and more than ever, on non-combatants. Equally, to remind us that there is a second city shattered by a nuclear weapon at the end of World War II. However, one photo expresses many things and, as well, represents human suffering to a greater extent even if some were never recorded or even uncovered in public. This is only the instant consequence of whole-body radiation exposure beyond the dose limit for humans, what more of the other possible ends of those who perished forever unknown. If Susan Southard was compelled to write a book (Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War) detailing the during and aftermath of the Nagasaki atomic bombing because of Taniguchi’s avowal to protest the outlawing of nuclear weapons which he did so until the end of his life, I am, in that same manner, moved to write an echo albeit very briefly.

Taniguchi died due to duodenal papilla cancer on August 30, 2017—a month after, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear War had been signed by signatories of several states in the world. As well, the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to his fellow activists, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). He would have been chosen to deliver a Nobel lecture alongside Setsuko Thurlow of Hiroshima. Almost four years after his death, and while I was writing an academic essay about Cold War, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons had since became effective on January 22, 2021, only four days before his birthday. This is all the efforts of hibakusha and antinuclear weapon advocates have championed, more than 75 years after the weapon of mass destruction had been used against non-combatants. However, it is still devastating to think that it took tens of thousands of civilian lives before we grasped that nuclear weapon is actually extremely fatal to humanity. Even more so, it took us more than 75 years to finally prohibit nuclear weapons considering IHL in the frame. Although the TPNW may remain immobile at this moment as current nuclear-weapon states (NWS), particularly the United States, Russia, and China, still refuse on adopting the promises of the agreement.

Meanwhile, this deplorable photograph was taken in a separate personal camera of Joe O’Donnell, being the other camera that he held was used for the official documentation of the effects of the bombing, to be later sent to the U.S. for archival. These official photographs were turned over to his superiors, never to be seen again, while his personal shots would only be known after almost twenty-five years since the tragedy. O’Donnell concluded in those seven months of his life documenting the Nagasaki atomic bombing aftermath that no person should ever see death, misery, and suffering ever again in that way. Consistently, he was the same Joe O’Donnell who had photographed the now historic photo depicting a young boy from Nagasaki with his dead little brother strapped at his back, waiting for his turn at the cremation pyre, exactly in accordance with the Japanese burial tradition—even after suffering a catastrophic circumstance. It was the photograph I first decided to put here, however, the identity of the young boy is still unknown as of this writing and no records had ever been written about him for almost seventy years. Then again, if there is a brief thought I would want to write here with regard to that photo is that children, generally unknowing non-combatants, shall never have to be burdened by the dehumanizing atrocities perpetrated by the adults of this world.

[1] Individuals affected by the atomic bombing: those who were exposed, injured, and have died in the incident or later in their lives due to radiation-related illnesses. Hibakushas who died and were injured in the Nagasaki bombing is estimated to have been around 150,000 by the end of 1945 and this number escalated through the years.

[2] Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) was a research laboratory established in Japan by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1947. It was initially funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to study the effects of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ABCC is succeeded by Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) in 1975. It is now managed by a binational Board of Directors and is funded by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare and U.S.’s Department of Energy to continue its extensive research on the effects of radiation on surviving hibakusha and other matters related to it while affording them of much-needed medication.