Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [125]
Hachiya struggled out of bed on the 11 th. He was buoyed by rumors that Japan had retaliated for the bombing of Hiroshima, annihilating, with ‘the same mysterious weapon’, the major cities of California. He joined his medical colleagues on rounds, ministering to the injured as much as their limited resources would allow. He also left the grounds in search of assistance, supplies, and news. Rumors kept flying: Japan had turned the tide, or was on the verge of being invaded. One proved true—the Emperor would address the nation over the radio on the 15th. At the appointed time, Hachiya and others crowded into an office at the Communications Bureau to listen. They heard an unfamiliar and barely audible voice through the crackle and hiss of static; Hachiya caught only the phrase, ‘Bear the unbearable’. At the end of the broadcast the Bureau Chief, who had been closest to the radio, announced that the Emperor had told the nation that the war was lost. Hachiya was stunned. He returned to the hospital. ‘The one word—surrender—had produced a greater shock than that bombing of our city,’ he recorded. ‘The more I thought, the more wretched and miserable I became.’ The discovery that death by radiation awaited thousands who had appeared to be recovering was still ahead of him.30
It was already hot by 8.00 on the morning of 6 August, so Shin Bok Su, a Korean woman who had come to Hiroshima with her husband eight years earlier, helped her family—grandma, and her children, 7, 4, and 13 months—remove the heavy clothes and protective headgear they had worn in their backyard air shelter the previous alarm-filled night. Su’s husband had gone to work. ‘Suddenly, “pika!” a brilliant light and then “don!” a gigantic noise.’ The world turned upside down. Through the darkness she heard grandma calling for help; she found the old woman lying on top of the baby, trapped by two pillars that had held up the house. Using a knife blade supplied by a neighbor, Su managed to get them free. She could not find the other children. Her husband came home, so covered with soot that she failed to recognize him until he spoke. Fire spread to the house as they dug desperately through the rubble, then soldiers arrived and insisted that they leave, finally dragging them away. They returned the next morning to find the house burned to the ground. Su found the corpses of her children when she discovered a line of buttons from her son’s shirt. Her daughter’s charred form was barely visible, curled next to her brother’s.
‘You couldn’t walk the streets without stepping over the dead.’ A week after the bombing, Su and her husband were told they could pick up their children’s remains at their school. When they arrived, they were handed two yellow envelopes. Then opened them and discovered the vertebrae of adults. They consecrated the bones to the river. Meanwhile, in late August, Su’s husband, who had appeared to suffer no more than a scraped knee, suddenly sickened, and his hair began to fall out. They took the baby and hopped on a freight train, laden with demobilized soldiers, and headed for Osaka and more sophisticated treatment. But the next morning he died: ‘His body turned black. Blood seeped from his skin. He smelled awful.’ A friend told Su that the government was prepared to pay death benefits to those who had lost family members in the bombing, so Su went to the Hiroshima city office and filled out the requisite forms. The clerk looked at the family’s