On two days in August 1945, US planes dropped atomic bombs. On August 6 it was Hiroshima, three days later on August 9 it was Nagasaki. It was the first and the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war. Japan surrendered on Aug 15, ending World War II.
Ayako Ishii was 19 and in love for the first time: She was studying the art of flower arranging in Kyoto and fell for her teacher. It was not to be, for the same reason her many subsequent attempts to find love were not to be.
When the man’s family found out that Ishii was from Hiroshima, they banned their relationship from developing further. Ishii is now 78. Beneath her neatly coiffed gray hair, her eyes glittered, as if they were filled with tears.
Even those who survived the Aug 6, 1945, A-bomb attack on Hiroshima were transformed by it. They were harmed not only physically but mentally, long before post-traumatic stress disorder was even a diagnosis.
Many grew old with no one to care for them, which is why Ishii’s nursing home, Mutsumi-en or “Garden of Amity,” opened in 1970. Now some 600 Hiroshima survivors live in a total of four nursing homes intended just for them.
Ishii was nine on Aug 6, 1945, when the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded about two kilometres from her home. She said she was thrown the distance of three houses by the blast.
On some nights, Ishii said, she still sheds tears thinking about her first love. When she approached 30, she concluded that she was not going to find a husband or have children.
Nagasaki is No Different
Nagasaki, site of the second A-bomb attack, has two similar facilities.
The nursing home has a view of the Motoyasu River that seems peaceful to a visitor, but it seems only to agitate resident Toshio Okada. As he stands on a balcony, his face scrunches up and his body twists as if he is trying to avoid looking at the water.
He remembers fellow students at a Tokyo university gossiping about him when they learned where he was from. Seventy years ago, when he was 10, he saw bodies in a river. They floated upstream and downstream with the changes of the tide.
Masao Nakazawa, a Japanese psychiatrist who has been treating atomic bomb survivors since the 1970s, calls the psychological scars they carry “the worst PTSD in human history.” Despite the pain it brings, talking about their experience is one way to heal, Nakazawa said.
“Garden of Amity” accepts about 30 school visits a year to give a younger generation a chance to meet and listen to Hiroshima survivors. It’s an opportunity Okada never misses.
The students fired questions at first, then grew quieter and just listened, some welling up with tears.
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