Hiroshima Chapter 5 Summary

The Aftermath

• An add-on to the original text, this chapter gives us the run down on what happened to the six main subjects in the forty years that followed.
• Mrs. Nakamura struggled with poverty and health problems for a long time, which kind of mutually reinforced each other (she was too poor to seek proper medical attention, and her health problems ended up jeopardizing her work).
• Eventually, though, things began to look up. First, she became eligible to move into some better housing. Then, she got a job with Suyama Chemical, whose owner was sympathetic to the plight of the "hibakusha" (which literally means "explosion-affected persons")—you know, rather than prejudiced against hiring them because of their health problems. She worked there for thirteen years.
• Also, as time went on, there was more agitating for better care/reparations for the victims of the bomb. Mrs. Nakamura, while not an agitator herself, benefited from the resulting increase in government programs/funding for the victims.
• Bottom line: Mrs. Nakamura was ultimately able to settle into a peaceful and enjoyable retirement.
• As for Dr. Sasaki, he finished up his doctoral dissertation on appendicial tuberculosis. As we know, he had gotten married, and we learn a bit more about how that match came about.
• In his surgery practice, a lot of his work consisted of removing the unique scars that hibakusha had suffered.
• Eventually, he quit the hospital and started a private clinic in Mukaihara. He eventually built a successful practice.
• In 1963, he visited the Red Cross Hospital in Yokohama to get up to speed on advances in anesthesia. The director general of the hospital, Dr. Tatsutaro Hattori, suggested that he get a physical so he could take advantage of the hospital's rad new equipment. He agreed, and a chest scan showed a shadow on his lung. Dr. Hattori recommended a biopsy, and when Dr. Sasaki woke up, his entire left lung had been removed.
• After some complications that followed, Dr. Sasaki thought he was dying. He survived, but the experience made him change his attitude toward patients, encouraging him to be kinder.
• His wife died of breast cancer in 1972, and at that point he became more work-obsessed. He built an even bigger clinic and then decided to branch out into running a retirement home, complete with hot springs.
• As for Father Kleinsorge: In 1948, he became priest of the church in Misasa. He still visited Miss Sasaki and other hibakusha regularly.
• His health was still pretty dicey, and he had to be hospitalized in Tokyo a couple of times more. However, he still worked tirelessly.
• He registered himself as a Japanese citizen and changed his name to Father Makoto Takakura.
• For a few months in 1956, he filled a temporary vacancy in the Noborimachi district. There, he found that Mr. Tanimoto had been giving Bible classes to a group of girls whose faces were disfigured by scars from the blast. They were called the Hiroshima Maidens.
• He began instructing the mother and two daughters of the Naganishi family.
• Then, he ended up having to go to the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital for an entire year.
• He eventually returned to Misasa, but it was hard for him to deal with the large congregation. He was ultimately "put out to pasture" in a small church in Mukaihara, where Dr. Sasaki had his clinic.
• In 1966, Father Takakura got a new cook: Satsue Yoshiki. She became his right-hand woman, serving as a kind of part daughter, part mother to him.
• His health problems continued, and eventually he ended up in hospitals again (and even Dr. Sasaki's rest home for a bit). He died in 1977.
• Toshiko Sasaki was on the mend in 1946, living with her younger siblings who hadn't been in Hiroshima the day of the bombing.
• Her fiancé bailed on her, ostensibly because he/his family was worried about the injuries she sustained in the blast (which left her with one leg that was significantly shorter than the other).
• On the bright side, she was still getting along well with Father Kleinsorge.
• Eventually, she ended up putting her younger siblings in an orphanage and later worked there.
• Later, she got orthopedic surgery that made her more or less able to walk normally again.
• When her brother had an accident, she went and studied accounting, thinking she was going to have to change jobs to support him. However, he recovered and went to study music.
• Then, Father Takakura advised Miss Sasaki to enter a convent, so she took vows and became Dominique Sasaki. As a nun, highlights of her life included becoming director of a home for the elderly called the Garden of St. Joseph for twenty years.
• She also traveled extensively in Europe.
• She spent two years as Mother Superior at the Misasa convent where she had trained.
• Then, she served as superintendent of the women's dormitory at the music school her brother had attended.
• Dr. Fujii, for his part, remained a party animal. He maintained his practice in the Kaitaichi clinic, and in the evenings he had "members of the occupying forces" over for whiskey. Father Kleinsorge apparently would come by from time to time to help teach him German. Because of his interest in learning Esperanto, the authorities thought he might be a communist (because naturally).
• In 1948, he built a new clinic on the site of the old one in Hiroshima.
• Primarily, it seems, Dr. Fujii tried to enjoy himself. A lot. He danced, played golf, went to watch a lot of baseball, and so on.
• In 1956, he went to the U.S. to help chaperone the "Hiroshima Maidens" who were there for plastic surgery. In the evenings, he ostensibly went out and partied pretty hard, according to this account.
• Later in life, Hersey suggests, things got a little less festive for Dr. Fujii. He argued with his wife about building a new American-style house, but ultimately he got his way.
• On New Year's Day, he didn't come down to breakfast when expected, and his family found him unconscious with a gas heater blaring next to him. He was still alive, however, and appeared to be on the mend initially.
• However, a few weeks later, he lost consciousness and then spent the next eleven years as "a vegetable."
• He died in 1973. His wife was against having an autopsy, but his son, Shigeyuki, wanted one. Through some trickery, he feigned having his father's body sent for cremation but instead had it actually delivered to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. The autopsy revealed that Dr. Fujii's brain had atrophied, his large intestine was enlarged, and he had a large tumor on his liver.
• His family fought over his property after his death.
• Finally, there was Mr. Tanimoto. He was interested in rebuilding his church, but sufficient materials and money were hard to come by. In 1948, an old classmate from Emory, Marvin Green, arranged an invitation for him to come visit the U.S. to raise money for his efforts. He went all around the country speaking and raising cash.
• Along the way, he met Pearl Buck, who put him in touch with Norman Cousins, the editor of The Saturday Review of Literature.
• Mr. Tanimoto sent him a memorandum he had drafted, which The Saturday Review of Literature subsequently published.
• The memorandum suggested that the people of Hiroshima (apparently Mr. Tanimoto had taken it upon himself to speak for the whole city) hoped their experience would help the push for world peace and proposed that a World Peace Center be established.
• After an extended speaking tour in the States, Mr. Tanimoto returned to Hiroshima, where he tried to get support for his peace center idea from Hiroshima's mayor and the Prefectural Governor. However, they refused. There were severe restrictions in place regarding agitating for information on the consequences of the bomb drop, so the authorities were worried a peace center would get them in trouble.
• However, Mr. Tanimoto got a bunch of prominent citizens together and set it up anyway. After Cousins had set up the Hiroshima Peace Center in NYC, Mr. Tanimoto and his allies set up the center in Hiroshima.
• In 1950, Cousins invited Mr. Tanimoto to come back to the States for more speaking engagements. As part of this tour, Mr. Tanimoto had lunch with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and gave the opening prayer for the Senate's afternoon session.
• When he returned to Japan from this trip, Mr. Tanimoto decided to help out some of the many former schoolgirls who, because they had been sent out to tear down houses to create fire lanes on the day of the bombing, had been especially vulnerable as a group during the blast and suffered severe burns as a result.
• He set up a Bible study for these girls, which he called the Society of Keloid Girls, and tried to set them up with various other forms of assistance and aid.
• In 1955, Cousins supposedly set Mr. Tanimoto up with an interview in the States to help support his fund-raising efforts. However, it turned out that he had scheduled to appear on "This Is Your Life."
• The Tanimotos stayed in the U.S. through December of that year, including the ten-year anniversary of the bomb dropping.
• Things were a little rough with him when he returned to Hiroshima. He became disenchanted with Cousins's management of the funds he had helped raise, and he ended up on the outside of peace movements in Japan proper, since he'd been out of the country so much.
• In 1959, a baby was left at Mr. Tanimoto's church, and he and his wife decided to take the child in.
• We then get some more details about what happened with Koko, Mr. Tanimoto's daughter (who was alive during the bombing), and the various anti-nuclear organizations that started to crop up at that time.