World: Japan: To Count the Dead

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Yuzaki's is a journey through the chronicles of despair. A man came to his office to volunteer the story of a girl who died on the roadside near him moments after she gasped out her name. Did Yuzaki have any records on a Tanaka family? He did: the Tanakas had recently asked for information about their missing daughter. When Yuzaki then told the aging Tanaka of his daughter's death, the father said: "Now, for the first time in 25 years, I may begin to sleep nights in peace." As Yuzaki interviewed a lady who survived the blast, she broke into tears. She was having an affair with a married man, and on that morning 25 years ago, had been forced to leave her lover behind in the burning ruins of their meeting place.

Not everyone approves of Yuzaki's project. Dr. Fumio Shegeto, director of the Hiroshima Red Cross and Atomic Bomb Memorial Hospital, is himself a "hibakusha"—a person exposed to the bomb—and has dedicated himself to caring for the afflicted survivors. Says he: "When the bomb's inhumanity has been proved beyond doubt, to try to count only the heads of atomic dead is too academic to be constructive."

A Thousand Suns. Yuzaki finds he is not only counting the dead but also reconstructing a picture of the past. "The city then was downright flimsy. Nothing compared with its glittering modern looks today." Then, it was a teeming town of some 420,000, with frail wooden shacks clustered along the delta of the Ota River. It was a mobilized city, living in fear of the incendiary attacks being inflicted upon neighboring towns. But, says Yuzaki, "in spite of the war that weighed heavily on the mind of its citizenry, the vital tempo of life was something far more gracious than now. There was a great unity in the purpose of life and in the concept of values that bound them all in a close-knit and often warmhearted society." Today Hiroshima is a booming town of 550,000, replete with modern buildings and modern problems: air pollution, traffic jams, noise. "It was essentially a happy society in 1945," says Yuzaki, "but that great bond seems gone now. Alienation was something forced upon the people from the outside. Now it is generated internally."

Blistered World. According to his highly tentative projections thus far, Yuzaki puts the city's death toll near 200,000. The mortality rate in the immediate area—within a 1,650-ft. diameter beneath the flash point—he puts at 98% or more. Incredible as it seems, he has so far found ten people who were within that deadly radius of death and survived it.

One is Mrs. Katsuko Horie, who as a young schoolteacher was almost directly beneath the bomb. "A thousand suns descended on top of our city," remembers Mrs. Horie. Two others in the classroom with her were killed; she plunged under a heavy desk and was spared. Afterward, she recalls, she wandered through a blistered world she never hopes to see again, finally being carried home on the outskirts of the city later that evening.