Little Boy Blues

by Howard Altman

Saito Masakazu will never forget Aug. 6, 1945.

Just 21 at the time and a soldier in Japan’s doomed army, Masakazu was in his barracks when, at about 8:15 a.m., he instinctively looked skyward upon hearing the rumbling noise of B29 Superfortress bombers overhead.

"The enemy had been dropping leaflets, urging us to surrender," recalls the 80-year-old Masakazu, speaking through translator Hotaka Maki. "I was expecting to see more leaflets fall."

Not this time.

The only message the Enola Gay was carrying was in the form of a uranium bomb developed in the United States called "Little Boy."

Masakazu says he saw a parachute fall from the sky. Then, "a gushing sound."

"At first there was a bright light and then there was a physical impact," says Masakazu on the phone after attending an event honoring him and other bomb survivors -- hibakusha -- at a Washington, D.C., Buddhist center. "Everything was a sea of fire."

Masakazu has come to this country at his own expense, with a message to a president at war:

Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Every year, at about this time, the hibakusha come to our country to remind us of the consequences of nuclear war.

It is not an easy topic to discuss even if both parties speak the same language. Masakazu speaks no English and I speak no Japanese. That gap doesn't help. So he has prepared a statement, which I am offered before we even speak. It is a chilling recollection.

"Standing near a window, my head, face and the upper part of my back were burnt. The skin on both sides of my back peeled off and hung limply from my body. Shards of glass were embedded all over my body, a piece of wood was lodged in my neck and my left foot was split open and hemorrhaged a large amount [of] blood. The [two-story] barracks I was in collapsed, pinning me underneath and breaking five ribs on the right side of my body."

That was Masakazu's last memory of Aug. 6.

He was unconscious for three days, waking up in a pile of rotting corpses awaiting incineration because so many died -- at least 84,000 right away -- that Japanese rescue workers were overwhelmed. Burial was impossible.

"Because I was covered in blood and had lost consciousness," Masakazu recalls, "I was placed on a crematorium for dead bodies. On the verge of being cremated, I somehow uttered a few words and was saved from cremation."

The pain of that day is not just a memory

"I still have shards of glass embedded in my body and experience numbness all over," he writes. "Whenever there is a change in weather or air pressure, like a change from sun to rain or the vice-versa, I experience persistent nausea, headaches and discomfort."

They are dying, the hibakusha.

In addition to the death toll from the blast, hundreds of thousands later died from radiation sickness. Most of those who are left are old.

Masakazu, now president of the Iwate Prefectural Hibakusha Association, studies ancient history to relax.

Masakazu and his traveling hibakusha companions, a couple of whom came to our area to protest the U.S. war machine, say that they want the United States to unilaterally dismantle its nuke weapons stockpile -- a mission with as much chance of success as finding a time tunnel to go back and talk Truman out of his decision to go nuclear.

The unstable atomic genie is out of the bottle, never to go back again.

Masakazu and many others believe Japan would have surrendered without the bomb. The island nation was reeling from a strangling blockade and more Japanese -- about 100,000 -- perished in the low-level incendiary bombardment of Tokyo than in the initial burst of Little Boy. And, while it is legitimate to suggest that Japan was targeted out of racial hatred -- though even Masakazu says he doesn't fully buy that -- Truman's decision must be viewed in the context that, by even the most conservative estimates, some 50,000 U.S. soldiers would have died in an invasion of Japan. Too many more lives, from a president's point of view, to subdue an enemy that hit first.

It is a horrific algorithm. And one that, ironically, might have saved millions.

"I believe that nuclear war has been prevented because Hiroshima was so horrible," he says through the translator. "Until today, nuclear war has been prevented, partly because the hibakusha have been very active to speak and tell about the horrors of nuclear war from our experience. Not just me, but many hibakusha have devoted themselves to telling the horribleness of the nuclear war and to ask the world to take action."

There is, of course, no guarantee we will continue to luck out.

India has the bomb. Pakistan too. So do the Israelis.

Nobody knows how safe the old Soviet arsenal really is. And it is probably only a matter of time before al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and/or Hamas get a bomb.

And then there is our president, who has put the "tactical" nuke card on the table.

Heed well, all you nuke holders, the plight of the hibakusha.

It would be wonderful if nukes disappeared, but we know that won't happen.

May the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to haunt anyone with their fingers on the trigger.