Hiroshima survivor shares experience
By TIMOTHY ALEX AKIMOFF of the Missoulian
Watch a video of Shigeko Sasamori's remembrances of Hiroshima
Shigeko Sasamori tells a story about an airplane in the skies over Hiroshima.
It is Aug. 6, 1945, and the 13-year-old junior high school student watches as the plane floats above her city and something drops out.
“My classmate next to me, I told her to look up at this airplane, it looked so beautiful,” Sasamori said. “I pointed up to it and at the same time, very strong forces knocked me down, pressures knocked me down.”
Until that moment, Sasamori said the Hiroshima city skyline was beautiful.
Shigeko Sasamori survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 despite being severely burned. She is in Missoula this week to tell her experiences to those who may not understand the significance of the nuclear blast. Photo by TOM BAUER/Missoulian
“After that, I don't know how long I was unconscious,” she said. “Then when I was sitting up, everything pitch black. I didn't hear anything, I didn't see anything, I didn't feel anything.”
Now, some 63 years since mankind learned just how destructive an atomic bomb could be, she tells - again, and again, and again - the story of how she survived the bomb.
“I feel more important to talk about it because one of the reasons is that right now is the most important time,” said Sasamori, who is in Missoula this week with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Poster Exhibition at the Mansfield Library at the University of Montana. “People's life is very, very precious.”
Steven Leeper, chairman of the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Foundation, is traveling with Sasamori as a way of promoting education, especially to people who may not understand the significance of the atomic bomb.
Even though a gubernatorial debate was being held at the same time Monday night on campus, more than 300 people came to hear the two speak at the University of Montana.
“Part of the issue in terms of raising consciousness is to remind people of what kind of weapon we're talking about,” Leeper said. “Young people under 30 or 40 have very little awareness of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
A “rising tide of violence and stress in the world” indicates a trend toward violence and the possible use of nuclear weapons, he said. “We believe we are standing on that deciding moment, to get rid of nuclear weapons or let everybody have one. If we let everybody have one, it's a matter of time until they are used.”
To illustrate the point, Sasamori smiles despite heavy scars on her face caused by exposure to massive amounts of radiation.
Leeper hopes to paint a picture of the effects of nuclear weapons so gruesome the world will be appalled enough to ban them forever.
But it has been 63 years since the last awesome and horrible reminder of that kind of devastation. The generation that experienced it is dying, and new generations have no memories of the bomb, no way to relate to the horrors.
So Sasamori reminds them with her scarred fingers and her blunt and brutal depictions of survival, to say nothing of the hideousness of nuclear injuries.
“As soon as my parents found me, they took care of me,” Sasamori said. “I just didn't look like a face, my mother told me. (She) couldn't tell where is my mouth, where is the nose.”
Her father cut her burned hair off because he couldn't tell the front of her head from the back.
“I looked like a huge black ball,” Sasamori said.
There were no doctors, and nobody understood the kind of death - or injuries - that came after the bomb.
“Underneath my skin was yellow pus, infection,” Sasamori said. “But we happened to have cooking oil there.”
Her mother cut T-shirts into strips, soaked them in cooking oil and wiped away the pus from the burn infections.
“She wanted to save my mouth and nose,” Sasamori said.
In those moments of blackout and lucidness, she heard visitors ask about her.
“ ‘Is she alive?' they would ask,” Sasamori remembers. “I could hear them asking.”
Sasamori eventually made it to America, where she was treated by skilled doctors.
They saved her face, but the reminders of an atomic bomb would be forever on her lips.
Many survivors travel and speak about their experiences, but Sasamori is one of the few who was raised in the United States.
“There is something powerful in hearing her tell it in her own voice and being able to understand that,” said Elizabeth Baldwin, Leeper's wife.
Baldwin usually translates for Hiroshima survivors, but Sasamori is a gifted storyteller.
She relates her survival experience with as much impact as she can muster from the vivid memories that she keeps because she believes that this thing must never happen again.
“I have two grandchildren,” Sasamori said. “What kind of world waiting for them, what kind of future waiting for them? Please, people, help.”
