80 years on, a Japanese American hibakusha recalls the day the bomb dropped

“The whole city was gone. We knew it was a bomb, but we didn’t know what kind of bomb,” Kakita recalled some 80 years later.

When he came to, he was buried under debris and could smell smoke. Kakita found his brother, who had a small radiation burn on his forehead, but was otherwise unscathed. His grandparents also survived without life-threatening injuries — remarkable given they were living just 1.3 kilometers from the epicenter.

As Kakita, his grandmother and brother sought to escape toward a mountain west of the city along with other refugees, scenes of terror unfolded.

“It looked like a parade of zombies. Everyone was slowly staggering, with tremendous injuries. Some of the people had burns so bad that the skin was dripping from their body,” he recalled.

“Some had broken bones, with bones exposed. One lady had her stomach open. She was trying to hold in her intestine. A lot of people had already died on the roadside,” he continued.

The accounts of Japanese hibakusha at ground zero have been widely reported in Japan and around the world.

But it’s little known that Japanese Americans were among the victims of the bombings — by their own country — with 3,000 of them surviving as hibakusha.

The Hiroshima Municipal Government estimates that around 140,000 people in the city — including Koreans, Taiwanese and American prisoners of war — died by the end of December 1945. Around half of the people who were within 1.2 km of the epicenter died on the day of the bombing, itself, it said.

In the U.S., Kakita’s parents, who were detained in an internment camp for Japanese Americans in Arizona, were convinced their children had not survived.

Regardless, they did all they could to search for their children and parents from afar, and months later, word came that against the odds, all four were alive. Kakita’s parents, who lost most of their possessions during wartime, immediately sought to save enough to bring their sons back home to the very country that had caused the destruction they had suffered through.

But it was not until three years later, in 1948, that Kakita and his brother were reunited with their parents in California.

A complex history

Acknowledgement of Japanese American hibakusha by their own country has been fraught, said Naoko Wake, a professor of history at Michigan State University and author of the book “American Survivors.”

“To raise a question about how Americans of Japanese ancestry were affected by the bomb, raises ethical and political questions that are intensely uncomfortable and inconvenient for U.S.-Japan relations,” she said.

Wake, who has conducted an in-depth study of the political and social complexities following the war, said that there has been limited bureaucratic acknowledgement for the Japanese American hibakusha from their own government.

Howard Kakita (left) with his grandfather and his brother Kenny in 1945 after the atomic bombing
| Courtesy of Howard Kakita

Japan’s signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which came into force in 1952, closed many avenues for individual claimants who were victimized by the war.

When it came to the lingering health effects, survivors who went on to live in the U.S. were also at a disadvantage in the absence of the specialized knowledge of doctors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who had firsthand experience treating the health effects of the bombings.

While survivors in Japan suffered stigma as a result of their bomb-related sickness, those in the U.S. faced fallacies that the illness might be contagious as a result of a lack of experience and understanding. And compared with the situation in Japan, survivors formed a far smaller minority in the U.S.

Today, medical bills for hibakusha-related illnesses for Japanese Americans are subsidized by the Japanese government. It also sends teams of doctors specializing in the treatment of radiation illnesses to the U.S. to give survivors health checkups.

As a result, “American citizens were somehow being treated by the Japanese government,” Wake said.

She noted that this was among the long-term consequences shouldered by Japan as a result of the U.S. having won the war, which in turn contributed to the messy realities at odds with dominant narratives of “Americans-as-victors” and “Japanese-as-victims.”

While survivors suffered physically and psychologically, American propaganda pushed the narrative that it was a necessary evil that ultimately ended the war.

Paul Ham, a historian and author of the book “Hiroshima Nagasaki,” who was granted access to the Truman Library as part of his extensive research, said there was ample evidence to disprove this.

Officially, the bombing was a means of avoiding a land invasion and therefore saving hundreds of thousands of American military lives. Ham is skeptical that an invasion upon a “defeated, exhausted, hungry nation,” would have resulted in such immense casualties.

Howard Kakita (top row, third from right) and his surviving classmates at Misasa school in Hiroshima in 1946
| Courtesy of Howard Kakita

“The postwar propaganda has dressed up the idea, which is alive today in most Americans’ minds — and many people in the West believe this — that the bomb avoided a land invasion,” Ham said.

In addition to the message that the bomb was a strategic necessity, in current public discourse, Japan’s own historic war crimes are sometimes cited as justification.

“I think we debase ourselves and the whole history of human civilization if we accept the Japanese atrocities warranted an American atrocity in reply,” he said, objecting to any rationale that would justify the massacre of innocent civilians.

Lingering effects

After the war ended, Kakita returned to California as the propaganda continued. It was a difficult transition, starting in a new school, learning a new language, living with parents who were essentially strangers to him, and coming to terms with having two new siblings.

Many of his classmates had no idea what he’d been through.

“I’d tell them that I was in the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, they’d say, ‘Oh, what’s that?’” he said.

The horrors of what he had seen were deeply imprinted on him. His memories initially rendered meat, marinara pasta sauce and even the soft flesh of grapefruit inedible. Nightmares punctured his sleep, and he’d often wake up at night screaming.

But eventually, Kakita found a rhythm. He discovered sports, improved his English, and started building long-lasting friendships.

“The junior high and high school period, if I were to look back, they were the most wonderful period of my life. We had dances and house parties. I learnt how to dance. I was a pretty good dancer, actually,” he said, smiling.

Today, Kakita, who talks gently but animatedly, isn’t certain why his nightmares stopped, only that they did at a certain point, which was a relief.

He warned his wife, whom he met while at university, that he may not live very long — like many survivors, Kakita experienced radiation sickness and had temporarily lost his hair. The lingering side effects of such exposure to an atomic bombing remained unknown.

But his wife was undeterred, and this worry didn’t hang over his daily life. With studies, a career designing early computers, and an environment surrounded by friends and family, time passed quickly.

A bridge 1.34 kilometers east of the epicenter of the atomic bomb blast is seen in Hiroshima in an undated photograph taken by the U.S. Army.
| Library of Congress / via REUTERS

When talking about Hiroshima, Kakita has a well-practiced rhythm, having shared his testimony in documentaries, with journalists and researchers and at various events over the years.

But when he mentions the unexpected loss of his 5-year-old son, Randy, to cancer, a pained expression flickers across his face.

“It’s always been at the back of my mind… did my exposure to the atomic bomb and the radiation sickness have anything to do with that?” he said softly.

A present fear

For survivors of the atomic bombing, Japan’s robust diplomatic relationship with the U.S. has at times overshadowed their plight.

Japan has been absent from official meetings related to the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Experts have suggested that the diplomatic risks for Tokyo are too high for it to attend.

In the U.S., too, there are political risks of apologizing for the bombings.

In 2016, when Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima since World War II, then-presidential contender Donald Trump described the visit as “pathetic,” saying “just as long as he doesn’t apologize, that’s absolutely fine, who cares.”

Now, almost 80 years on, America has shown “zero” recognition of any responsibility of guilt, historian and author Ham said.

“Even today, we see the world talking blithely about the use of tactical nuclear weapons…. Have they even read what a nuclear bomb can do? Of course, they have in their military textbooks. But the point that they can speak as if this is a tactical choice in modern warfare, is absolutely absurd,” Ham said.

“It’s a great tragedy that we have these lessons of history, but they’re not learned,” he added.

With a formal apology being unlikely and a risk of a nuclear war swelling with worsening geopolitical conflicts, survivors are doing all they can despite their advanced years to make a rallying cry against the use of nuclear weapons.

The majority of survivors live in Japan, though their numbers have fallen below 100,000 due to age, the health ministry said in July.

In Hiroshima, a group of Japanese survivors have been studying English at the nonprofit World Friendship Center with the aim of spreading their message beyond Japan while they are still able to. The group, which offers tours to visitors, also organizes talks for schools and other groups overseas.

Howard Kakita
| Courtesy of Howard Kakita

Soh Horie, who was 5 years old when the bomb dropped in Hiroshima, feels a sense of responsibility to share his testimony.

“This is my duty for the future generation, the number of hibakusha is decreasing year by year,” said Horie, now 84, who was 3 km from the hypocenter of the blast.

Having reached the age of 87, Kakita remains determined to continue sharing his story despite his years making this increasingly tough. On top of having two healthy daughters and four grandchildren, a fulfilling career, a wife whose name brings a smile to his face and friends with whom he spends his spare time fishing, he has also become a prolific speaker advocating for a nuclear-free world.

With this year marking the 80th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings, he’s determined to do as much as he can to draw attention to the dangers of nuclear conflict, of which there remains an ever present risk.

“Winston Churchill said those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I think it behooves us all to learn from the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and embrace the shared responsibility to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, so that we have a world free of fear of nuclear war happening again,” Kakita said.