The first weapon of mass destruction

It was a fine day without a speck of cloud when Michiko Yamaoka set out for work at 8.05am on August 6th 1945, 10 minutes before the world’s first atomic bomb exploded in her hometown.

The 15-year-old had a 500-metre walk to her war job at a telecommunications office in central Hiroshima. There had been four air-raid warnings throughout the night, but this caused her little worry as Hiroshima had so far escaped any US bombing and, anyway, citizens were constantly bombarded with the message that Japan was winning the war.

At 7.31am a siren had sounded to say the alert was over for another night, and Michiko left home with a cousin who parted company from her to take a tram – and was never seen again.

A high school student, Michiko had been drafted into war work as a telephone operator along with 178 of her classmates. Only 27 of them survive today. As she ambled towards the office, carrying the bamboo spear allocated to girls for defence in case of a US invasion, she heard a plane overhead and turned her face up to look.

“The sun was dazzling and I put my right hand over my eyes to shield them,” she recalls. “At that instant there was a flash of light, it was blueish or yellowish, a beautiful colour. I thought the enemy planes had hit directly over my head and I thought if I die here I am going to die for my country.”

At that point Michiko was 800m from the centre of the atomic blast and heading towards it. In her heart she said goodbye to her mother as she was blown off her feet by a huge blast of wind which knocked her senseless for an unknown time.

When she came to she couldn’t see anything but felt herself trapped under bricks, leaving only her legs free to move. Her left eardrum had burst leaving her permanently deaf on that side.

Michiko screamed because she could hear fire roaring close by but nobody came to help. Voices all round were calling for water and saying they must get to the hills for protection. As she lay there helpless her mother came along the street looking for her only child. She managed to pull Michiko out of the debris, and when the teenager looked around the darkened air, she saw carnage on an unknown scale.

“It was like hell,” she explains. “I did not know how people could look like that. Nobody looked normal. My mother was covered in blood. I saw people with ruptured internal organs spilling out of their bodies.”

In a city of 245,000 people, over 100,000 were killed by the bomb and another 100,000 were injured, many severely.

Michiko was burnt all over, but fortunately she had been wearing a white shirt which reflected some of the heat of the blast away from her upper body, giving vital protection to her internal organs.

Some victims wearing patterned kimonos were left with flower-shaped patterns on their skin – it was later determined that whereas the bomb had seared deep red burns on skin beneath dark fabric, it had been less damaging to the flesh beneath white cloth.

However, Michiko had still suffered appalling burns; flaps of skin were peeling off her exposed arms and her face was so bloated and red that her best friend did not recognise her. “Then I realised how terrible I looked... She called me a ghost, said it was like a ghost was speaking to her,” says Michiko.

Thousands more were suffering as badly, and worse. The force of the blast had flattened the island in the centre of Hiroshima, forcing huge numbers of survivors to jump into the rivers that surrounded them in a bid to escape the raging fire. One of them was the woman who thought Michiko looked like a ghost.

“That friend jumped into the river to escape the heat and she never came out. I did not jump so I was alright,” Michiko remembers. “People were desperately thirsty, but others said not to drink water or you would die, there were so many corpses floating in the river.”

With her mother Michiko made her way to the hills looking for medicine but they couldn’t get any, so they applied cooking oil to her burns instead.

Weeping at the memory, Michiko recalls the maggots eating into the bodies of many doomed burn victims. For a time, the only disinfectant she could think of applying was her own urine because it contained ammonia.

But though she miraculously survived the blast and the immediate trauma, Michiko’s life after the bomb was immensely difficult. Her father having died when she was just three, now she and her mother had no home or livelihood, her head was welded to the left side of her neck and her hands were so swollen and stiff she couldn’t work. Many of the relatives who had visited them the night before the bomb were either dead or dying.

Though plastic surgery would eventually correct the worst of Michiko’s injuries, even today her puffy, reddened hands, stiffened facial skin and balding hair betray her ordeal. At the time, as the raw wounds on her body healed, she developed ghastly keloids – the blubber-like scar tissue which proliferated on survivors’ wounds, and marked them out for prolonged bullying. People feared the survivors of the blast – hibakusha – believing their terrible wounds were infectious and dangerous, an ignorance compounded by the US occupying forces’ draconian censorship of information about the bomb’s impact on human health. “My hands were so red, that everyone thought that if they drank out of a glass I had touched it would be infected,” Michiko says.

Survivors also faced huge prejudice getting work and were passed over as undesirable by the matchmakers who still arranged most marriages in Japan at the time.

Michiko says that after the war she hated the US for dropping the bomb and she hated Japan for lying to the people and telling them they were winning the war, a claim she had fervently believed. But in 1955 she was one of 25 “Hiroshima Maidens” invited to the US for plastic surgery through private American charity.

“When I went to the US I did not want to smile at American people because they were the ones who had dropped the bomb on me, my head was attached to one side and I could not move it for 10 years after the atom bomb,” she explains.

Yet, as she met more and more Americans who apologised for what had happened to her and she herself adopted the Quaker faith of her hosts, she made a decision not to direct her hatred at people any longer. “I decided not to hate them, but to hate war instead,” she says.

After many operations to allow her to regain free movement, Michiko returned to Japan in 1956 and set up a dressmaking school with her mother (who herself was still having pieces of glass removed from her body years after the bomb). The Japanese government finally began providing medical assistance and support to survivors in 1957 as the bomb continued to claim victims through cancer and other illnesses.

In the once more thriving city of Hiroshima Michiko tried to put the past behind her and for many years did not speak a word about her experiences. However, after her mother’s death in 1979 from gastric cancer caused by the radiation she had suffered in the explosion, Michiko decided it was crucial to tell people of the horror of nuclear weapons.

“Fifty-seven years have passed and I still have scars, but though they have faded, the radiation effect will not be erased until the day I die,” she says.

Michiko has suffered from four tumours and says she never knows if and when another cancer will develop. Now 72, she is receiving drug treatment but has refused further operations. Michiko says she does not take part in political anti-war movements, including those recently held in Hiroshima, because she fears being used by political movements whose agenda she does not share, an experience which alienated many survivors in the Cold War era.

However she campaigns ceaselessly for peace by giving talks to young people about the reality of nuclear weapons, shrugging off criticism that she is “too vocal” on the topic.

“As long as I live I want to work to create a world free of nuclear weapons,” she says.