Suffering—An Inheritance
There is one more lesson that Hirowhima and Nagasaki may be telling us: the fate of the offspring of the victim-survivors. Not all of them inherit the suffering of their survivor parents. In fact most of the hibaku-nisei (the second generation of survivors) are leading a normal life. But some have been stricken always unpredictably. The following is an account made by a high school teacher, himself a survivor in Nagasaki, of his student's sudden death of leukemia.
(The late Mr. Takamitsu Yamashita was born on September 12, 1946. Both of his parents, Suguru and his wife, are holders of the special certificate as victims. Therefore, Mr. Yamashita was born as a hibaku-nisei-survivors' offspring. His parents have never found anything wrong with their health. Takamitsu was born and grew up normally and entered the Nagasaki-Minami High School. I was in charge of his class during his second year. One day in April of that year, he was taken ill all of a sudden. In the afternoon of April 25, 1963, he complained of a headache, dizziness and fatigue during the gym period and returned home. Later I learned that he had been complaining to his mother for the last four or five days saying, "I feel terribly tired." He was taken to the nearby hospital, but his anemia was so severe that he was transferred to Jūzenkai Hospital next day. And there on April 28 he was found to be suffering from leukemia; they said he could live at most two weeks.
Immediately I visited him at the hospital. He looked much better than I had expected and he said to me, "The doctor told me that I have to exchange my bad blood a little. I may be back at school after a week or so. When is the mid-term?" But, on May 31, he was transferred to the Nagasaki University Hospital. On the day of admittance, the doctor rubbed his instep hard and found spots due to the hypodermic bleeding. On the third day, the diagnosis was malignant leukemia of the medulla and lymphatic gland. The blood transfusions continued. The doctor explained that leukemia is cancer of the blood. In that disease, white blood corpuscles in blood make abnormal divisions and in a malignant case they rapidly increase in number. In an ordinary man, one cubic millimeter of blood contains 8,000 white corpuscles, but in Mr. Yamashita's case the white blood count was 300,000...
His condition steadily worsened. He began to bleed first from the gums, then gradually through capillary vessels of the skin and inner organs. Nasal hemorrhage was frequent. After four weeks in hospital, his mouth could not hold a piece of watermelon that his mother put into it. When it fell on the floor, he cried, "I can't eat any longer." He said that paralysis had come to his cheek and entire mouth and half of the tongue. Since he could not move his tongue he could hardly utter exact words. Only the family members who were taking care of him could understand what he was saying. The inability to use his tongue made him unable to swallow food. If one tried to put food, solid or liquid, into his mouth it would not stay there.
His mother tried many approaches and found a successful way to send to his throat milk soaked in a cotton ball that was put in his mouth. Some nutrition through intravenous injection, milk and fruit juice through a cotton ball to the throat, and his strong will for survival plus his family's devoted care—these factors together may have helped prolong his life from two weeks to two months.
For some unknown reason, he sometimes felt like his brain and chest were burning terribly. That brought him a pain that made him writhe in agony. When it happened there was no way but to cool him off by ice water. His father picked up towels one by one from ice water, wrung them out and handed them to his mother. She changed the towels all the time. It was summer, but after several towels, her hands turned red because of the icy cold water. After the cooling work had continued for some five minutes, he would feel a little better. Therefore, they always had to keep ice on hand. His mother told me later, "We used 30 kilos of ice every day." The family members took turns day and night to cool him off. This continued for more than 50 days.
Gradually he started losing his eyesight; he had only dim vision. Cerebral hemorrhage had started in his eyes, we were told. Still he could hear very well. But he was getting thinner every day because he could not take in much nutrition and his body was functioning very poorly. After one month he looked totally different. His cheekbones became conspicuous and eyes in turn had sunken deep. And the eyes were staring nowhere.
He must have imagined his changed look; after one month in the hospital he said, "I do not want to see anybody." His arms and legs became so thin that their size was as large as a ring made by a thumb and a forefinger. When I met him the last time, I saw reddish brown spots covering the trunk of his body. They were signs of hypodermic bleeding. He passed away three days later.
Since then I worry about any disorder to my body because I am a survivor myself and have every possibility to be stricken by leukemia. I was horrified with the thought of dying from leukemia. Many people died of radiation disease after the atomic bombing. Mr. Yamashita died the same kind of death. However, his case was not recognized as being "due to the atomic bombing." Unlike the in utero cases, these "offspring of the victim-survivors" are not given the special certificate as are those who were exposed to the bombing. Even one Mr. Yamashita who suffered leukemia was not recognized as such e grounds that it is hard to determine whether his illness was "due to the atomic bombing."
The case of young Yamashita may, however, have much wider implications. Aside from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have piled up mountainous radioactive fall-out all over the world from the Pacific, the State of Nevada, the tundra of Siberia, the Deserts of Sahara and Gobi and now Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands. We may have had, and may have in the future, many more Yamashitas who die from leukemia due to "unknown cause."