World: Japan: To Count the Dead

LIKE all cities at war, its population varied from day to day, hour to hour.

Soldiers in their khaki uniforms shuttled in and out. Students trooped in from the countryside, commandeered to work in the munitions factories. A tide of refugees restlessly washed the streets, seeking sanctuary. Yet many of the ordinary routines of life persisted, and even some of life's small pleasures.

It was the habit of Shigeru Miyoshi, 41, a foundry foreman, and Saburo Goto, 44, a druggist, to go fishing on Sundays. On this particular Sunday the catch was good—a basket of squirming silver carp—and Goto suggested a drink to celebrate. Reluctantly, Miyoshi declined. He was due on the foundry night shift. The two parted, never to see each other again. At 8:15 the next morning, Aug. 6, 1945, the atomic bomb exploded 1,870 ft. over Hiroshima.

A Human Map. Miyoshi was still at work when he saw a blinding flash coming from the direction of his home. "It was as though a million liters of gasoline had been dumped by enemy planes and set afire for a raging inferno." At once, Miyoshi set out for his house. He found himself wandering through an inferno never before seen by man, peopled by the dead and maimed, the terribly burned crying out for death. It took him a day and night to reach the place where his home had stood. Nothing remained but a pile of charred and smoldering debris. In it, Miyoshi found a cremated skull and bits of a maternity waistband, the remnants of his wife, who had been expecting their sixth child. Three of his children, who were at home, had simply vanished. A fourth died a week later of radiation poisoning. Of the original family of seven, only Miyoshi and his eldest daughter, who had been away from home, survived the atomic fire storm. Dead, too, was his friend Goto.

Miyoshi's story is one of thousands being collected by Minoru Yuzaki, a sociologist and research fellow at the University of Hiroshima's Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Biology. His mission: find out how many people perished. A quarter-century after the event (see ESSAY), no one yet knows how many Japanese died at Hiroshima. Estimates range from a low of 68,000 (by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission) to a high of 280,000 (by Chugoku Shimbun, Hiroshima's most influential daily newspaper).

Working with a shoestring grant of $8,300 and a staff of five plus a dozen student volunteers, Yuzaki has been at his task for three years. He sees another five ahead of him. His method: a human map. Yuzaki is rebuilding on paper—house by house, block by block, person for person—the city at the moment of impact.

"We have been asking a set of questions that has become almost a litany with us—who lived in which house and with whom," says Yuzaki. The cathartic response has been overwhelming. When approached, most survivors come "bursting out with a million eyewitness accounts, full of vividly graphic details. All the incidents witnessed that day seem to have been glazed onto their minds." After a nationwide television program on the survey, hundreds of people wrote in with pledges of assistance.