How the atomic bombing of Nagasaki tore apart Japan’s understanding of motherhood

FILE - In this Sept. 13, 1945, file photo, the Urakami Catholic Cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan, stands waste in the aftermath of the detonation of the atom bomb over a month ago over this city. (AP Photo/Stanley Troutman, Pool, File)

When Kikuyo Nakamura’s adult son discovered bumps on his back, she assumed it was just a rash.

Still, she urged him to go to the hospital — better safe than sorry.

Hiroshi, her second son, was born in 1948, three years after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. As a survivor of the bombing, Nakamura had long feared she might pass on health problems to her children.

In 2003, at age 55, Hiroshi went to the hospital. Two days passed without any word from him. Then three. Then a week.

Eventually Nakamura went to the hospital, where her son told her: “‘They’re going to do more tests,” she told CNN.

The results showed he had stage 4 leukemia –– an advanced stage of blood cancer that had spread to other parts of his body. According to Nakamura, the doctor told her that she had given her son cancer –– suggesting the radiation that caused it was passed on through breastfeeding when he was a baby.

When Hiroshi died, six months later, his mother was left to believe she had essentially killed him; a thought that still haunts her more than two decades on.

“I was overwhelmed with guilt and suffering… Even now, I still believe what the doctor said, that I caused it. That guilt still lives in me,” said Nakamura, who is now 101-years old.

Those who are exposed to nuclear radiation are generally urged to stop breastfeeding in the immediate aftermath of an atomic blast. But experts say there’s no concrete evidence that first generation “hibakusha” –– atomic bomb survivors of World War II –– can pass cancer-causing material to their children, years after exposure.

As the 80th anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, aging survivors — some, like Nakamura, more than 100-years old — are sharing their stories of suffering and resilience, while they still can.

Many of them were young women, either pregnant or of childbearing age, when the bombs fell and have lived much of their lives under a heavy shadow of fear and stigma.

They were told by medical practitioners, neighbors, even friends and family that their exposure to nuclear radiation could cause them to have children with illnesses or disabilities –– if they conceived at all.

Even when infertility or a child’s disability had nothing to do with radiation exposure, hibakusha women often felt blamed and shunned.

Those with visible scars from the blasts faced barriers to marriage. Physical wounds were harder to hide — and clearer proof of exposure.

And at a time in society when a woman’s worth was closely tied to marriage and motherhood, this stigma was particularly damaging.

It caused a large number of women survivors –– many of whom had PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) –– to “hide the fact that they were hibakusha,” according to Masahiro Nakashima, a professor of radiation studies at Nagasaki University.

“In a society like Japan — where gender discrimination and male dominance have been deeply rooted — women were especially affected by radiation,” Nakashima told CNN.

Lifelong scars

Radiation exposure did affect some second-generation survivors, depending on the timing of pregnancy.

The embryonic period — generally ranging from weeks 5 up to 15 — is especially sensitive for brain and organ development. Women exposed to radiation during this window had a higher risk of giving birth to children with intellectual disabilities, neurological issues, and microcephaly, a condition marked by a small head and impaired brain function, according to studies from the joint Japan-U.S. Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) –– a successor to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission formed just after World War II.

Other studies showed that women hibakusha faced long-term health risks themselves.

A 2012 RERF study found that radiation exposure from an atomic bomb raised cancer risk for the rest of a person’s life. Solid cancer rates for women at age 70 increased by 58 per cent for every gray of radiation their bodies absorbed at age 30. A gray is a unit that measures how much radiation energy a body or object takes in. For men, solid cancer rates increased by 35 per cent.

Nakamura was 21-years old and was hanging laundry outside around 11am when the bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. She says she was 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) from the epicentre –– a little beyond what experts call the area of “total destruction.”

The young mother saw a bright light, followed by a loud boom and a powerful gust of wind that flung her into the air. When she regained consciousness, her house was wrecked — furniture was strewn everywhere and glass shards covered the floor. She called out to her own mother, who had been helping Nakamura care for her eldest son.

Relieved they weren’t physically wounded, the family fled to an air raid shelter. It wasn’t until the next day that Nakamura grasped the scale of destruction. Relatives living near Nagasaki University, closer to the blast, all died.

Nakamura says she didn’t suffer any effects of radiation exposure. She had her uterus removed four years later, and at age 70, doctors found a tumor in her abdomen, but her physicians told her neither issue was linked to the bombing, she said.

The psychological trauma, however, has stayed with her ever since.

Ashamed of her own exposure, she feared the stigma would also pass to her grandchildren.

“If people knew that my son died of leukemia, especially before they (my grandchildren) got married, others might not want to marry them. I made sure my children understood that. We kept it within the family and didn’t tell anyone else about how he died,” Nakamura said.

But encouraged by other survivors, she finally spoke publicly about her son’s cancer in 2006, three years after his death.

“I received phone calls and even letters from people who heard my story. It made me realize how serious the issue of inherited health effects is in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” she said.

Even though she now knows it’s unlikely she could have caused her son’s cancer, she says as a mother, the feeling of guilt is a burden she’ll forever carry.

“I still feel so sorry. I keep apologizing to him. I say, ‘Forgive me,’” she said.

The children who never followed

The unique burden of hibakusha motherhood is something Mitsuko Yoshimura, now 102-years old, never got to carry.

Separated from her parents and sister at a young age, she always longed for a family. She moved to Nagasaki for a good job in Mitsubishi’s payroll department — just months before the U.S. dropped the bomb, turning the city into hell on earth.

“When I got out to the road, there were people with blood gushing from their heads, people with the skin peeled off their backs,” she recalled.

Being just a kilometre (0.6 miles) away from the epicentre of the blast, her survival was nothing short of a miracle. In the months that followed, she stayed behind to help the injured. But her body suffered too.

“My hair fell out. Whenever I tried to comb it with my hands, strands would come out little by little,” Yoshimura said. She also regularly vomited blood for months after the blast.

Still, she endured. She got married a year after the war ended. Her husband was an atomic bomb survivor, like herself, and their marriage marked a fresh start for the couple.

But the child they longed for never followed. She had two miscarriages and a stillbirth.

Yoshimura lives alone now; her husband having died years ago. In her home in Nagasaki, where photos of children and grandchildren might be, there are dolls — a quiet substitute for what was lost, she said.

At their remarkable age, Nakamura and Yoshimura both know they don’t have much longer to live. But that gives them greater urgency to educate younger generations about the toll of nuclear war.

“People really need to think carefully. What does winning or losing even bring? Wanting to expand a country’s territory, wanting a country to gain more power, what exactly are people seeking from that?” Nakamura asked.

“I don’t understand it. But what I do feel deeply is the utter foolishness of war,” she said.

By Hanako Montgomery.