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When Nakamura Kiyoshi’s adult son discovered a bump on his back, she thought it was just a rash.
Still, she urged him to go to the hospital.
Her second son, Hiroshi, was born in 1948, three years after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. As a bombing survivor, Nakamura has long feared that she might convey health issues to her children.
In 2003, at the age of 55, Hiroshi went to the hospital. Two days passed without a word from him. Next is 3. It’s been a week since then.
Finally Nakamura went to the hospital, where his son told her: “They’ll do more tests,” she told CNN.
The results showed that he exhibited stage 4 leukemia, a progressive stage of blood cancer that spread to other parts of his body. According to Nakamura, the doctor told her he gave her son cancer — suggesting radiation that caused breastfeeding when he was a baby.
When Hiroshi died six months later, his mother was left to believe that she essentially killed him. The thoughts have been bothering her for over 20 years.
“I was overwhelmed by guilt and suffering. I still believe that what the doctor said, I caused it. That guilt still lives within me,” said Nakamura, now 101.
People exposed to nuclear radiation are generally encouraged to stop breastfeeding immediately after an atomic bomb. However, experts say there is no concrete evidence that the first-generation “Hibakusha” (WWII atomic bomb survivors) can hand over the cancer-causing materials to children a few years after the exposure.
As the 80th anniversary of the US bombings that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are approaching, aging survivors (some like Nakamura, more than 100 years ago, share stories of suffering and resilience, but they can still be done.
Many of them were young women, either pregnant or birth age, who had lived much of their lives under the heavy shadow of fear and stigma, when bombs fell.
They were told by practitioners, neighbors, friends, and even friends and family that exposure to nuclear radiation could lead to children with illness or disabilities.
Even if infertility or child disorders had nothing to do with radiation exposure, Hibakusha women were often criticized and shunned.
Those with visible wounds from the explosion faced barriers to marriage. The physical wounds were difficult to hide – and more clear evidence of exposure.
And in a society where women’s values were closely linked to marriage and motherhood, this stigma was particularly damaging.
It caused many female survivors (PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)) to “conceal the fact that they are Hibakusha,” according to Nakajimajima, a professor of radiation research at Nagasaki University.
“In a society like Japan where gender discrimination and male domination are deeply rooted, women were particularly affected by radiation,” Nakajima told CNN.
Radiation exposure affected some second-generation survivors, depending on the timing of their pregnancy.
The embryonic stage generally ranges from 5th to 15th week, and is particularly sensitive to brain and organ development. Women exposed to radiation during this window are at high risk of giving birth to children with intellectual disability, neurological problems, and microcephaly, and are marked by small brain and brain dysfunction.
Other studies have shown that Hibakusha faces long-term health risks.
A 2012 RERF study found that radiation exposure from an atomic bomb increases the risk of cancer in the rest of the lives of the people. The rate of solid cancers in women at age 70 increased by 58% for each gray color of radiation absorbed by the body at age 30. Gray is a unit that measures how much radiation energy a body or object takes. For men, solid cancer rates increased by 35%.
Nakamura was 21 years old and was doing laundry outside around 11am when the bomb fell into Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. She was five kilometers (3.1 miles) from the epicenter.
The young mother saw the bright light, followed by a huge boom and a powerful gust of wind that threw her into the air. When she regained consciousness, her home was destroyed – furniture was scattered everywhere, with shards of glass covering the floor. She called out to her mother. She was helping Nagamura take care of her eldest son.
Reassured that they had not been physically injured, the family fled to an air raid shelter. Nakamura didn’t know the scale of the destruction until the next day. All relatives who live near Nagasaki University, near the blast, have died.
Nakamura says he was not affected by radiation exposure. She removed the uterus four years later, and at age 70, doctors discovered a tumor in their abdomen, but her doctors told her that neither of the issues were related to the bombing.
However, psychological trauma has been with her ever since.
Shameful of her own exposure, she feared that she would give Stigma to her grandson as well.
“If people knew that my son had died of leukemia, others might not want to marry them, especially before (my grandchild) got married. My children made sure they understood that.
However, encouraged by other survivors, she finally spoke publicly about her son’s cancer in 2006, three years after his death.
“I’ve received it on phone calls and even from people who heard me. It really made me realize how serious the issues with inherited health impacts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are,” she said.
She knows that she is now unlikely to cause cancer in her son, but as a mother, she says that guilt is a burden she carries forever.
“I’m still very sorry. I’ll continue to apologize to him. I’ll say ‘Forgive me’,” she said.
The unique burden of Hibakusha’s motherhood was something that Yoshimura Kousuko, now 102 years old, had not been carried.
She was separated from her parents and sister at a young age, and she was always looking forward to her family. She moved to Nagasaki for a good job at Mitsubishi Salary Bureau. Just a few months before the US dropped the bomb, it turned the city into hell of Earth.
“When I got out onto the road, there was someone gushing blood from my head. Those with skin peeled off my back,” she recalled.
With only a kilometre (0.6 miles) away from the epicenter of the explosion, her survival was nothing but a miracle. In the months that followed, she stayed behind to help the injured. However, her body also suffered.
“My hair fell off. Every time I tried to comb my hands, the strands came out little by little,” Yoshimura said. She also regularly vomited blood for months after the explosion.
Still, she endured. She got married a year after the war ended. Her husband, like herself, is an atomic bomb survivor, and their marriage marked a fresh start for the couple.
But the children they never followed never followed. She had two miscarriages and a stillbirth.
Yoshimura lives alone now. Her husband passed away many years ago. In her home in Nagasaki where photos of her children and grandchildren are there are dolls – a quiet substitute for what’s lost, she said.
At their amazing age, Nakamura and Yoshimura know that both of them don’t last long to live. But it gives them greater urgency to educate the younger generation about the sacrifices of nuclear war.
“People need to think really carefully. What does winning or losing bring? We want to expand our country’s territory, we want the country to gain more power, and then what do people want?” Nakamura asked.
“I don’t understand that, but what I feel deeply is the complete stupidity of war,” she said.
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