“When I became
conscious, it was a dead city.” The college students in the room
are silent as Shigeko Sasamori stands in front of them. It looks as
though she wears light pink lipstick. Up close, the scars around
her mouth, neck and hands are clearly visible.
The
morning American pilots dropped an atomic bomb on her city of
Hiroshima, 62 years ago, Sasamori was 13. It was the first day of
school, and she and other students were out on the street. “It was
beautiful blue sky,” she says. “I looked at the sky, the airplane I
saw, and I told my classmate next to me, ‘Look. That plane is so
pretty.’”
“I saw white things dropping,” she says,
referring most likely to the atomic bomb called Little Boy, which
was dropped by parachute from a B-29 plane. “Next, a very strong
wind knocked me down. Then, I black out.”
With a third of
her body burned, she spent the next five days drifting in and out
of consciousness in a school dormitory, repeating her name and
address and asking for a drink of water. Eventually, she was
reunited with her parents, both of whom survived the bombing. Of
all her family members, she was the only one burned, though her
father suffered from radiation sickness. “He was throwing up,
having diarrhea and purple things coming out.”
Ten years
later, Sasamori and 24 other “Hiroshima Maidens” found themselves
at New York City’s Mt. Sinai Hospital. A group of American
citizens, horrified by the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan, had
sponsored reconstructive surgery for the women. The project was
borne of a friendship between the Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, the
minister at Sasamori’s church, and Norman Cousins, an American
writer and peace activist, who eventually adopted Sasamori. The
doctors and nurses who treated her at Mt. Sinai made her so
comfortable and relaxed, she says, that she wanted to do the same
for other patients. Eventually, she became a hospital nurse,
working with babies.
It’s only when speaking of children
that frequently smiling Sasamori becomes somber. “I see new babies
come into this world, and I don’t want to see them to go to
dangerous wars,” she says in her choppy English, while making a
cradling motion with her arms. “I hold them and I say, ‘Not this
baby — not this baby happen what happen to me.’” Looking back out
at the audience of young people, Sasamori pleads with the students,
“No more war, no more war. Please young people, do not make war. We
need a peaceful revolution.” She tells her story about the bombing
of Hiroshima, she says, not to be a “crybaby, only to touch
the good part of the heart.”
Even when talking of
her visit the day before to Los Alamos National Laboratory —
birthplace of the bomb that destroyed her city — Sasamori
expresses no anger. Instead, she talks of how her body tingled:
“Wow, maybe the radiation is hitting me all over again. You
can’t hear radiation, or smell it, but there is a really wicked
witch there,” she says. “So I say, ‘People working there,
please get out of this city!’”
Sasamori has a second
goal: As a new board member of a Albuquerque-based disarmament
organization, the Los Alamos Study Group, she has come to speak
with New Mexico’s lawmakers. Her hope is that they will join her
call for ending the production of nuclear weapons in the United
States. New Mexico not only helped to spawn the atomic bomb, which
was built at Los Alamos and tested at Nevada’s Trinity Site,
but the state is also home to two nuclear-weapons factories,
including Los Alamos. Today, they manufacture triggers for nuclear
warheads.
The same week of Sasamori’s visit, the Energy
Department announced it had placed one of those triggers inside a
nuclear warhead, which is carried on a submarine-launched Cruise
missile. Currently, the United States stockpiles more than 10,000
nuclear warheads, and about 1,900 are stored on the edge of
Albuquerque, at Kirtland Air Force Base. But though Sasamori tried
to meet with New Mexico’s major elected officials, only the
staff of Democratic Rep. Tom Udall agreed to see her.
She
says she had one question she wanted to ask each of them: “Why is
America still making nuclear weapons?”
Laura
Paskus is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). She is a freelance writer in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
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