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NAGASAKI - All that was recognizable on the blackened body was a gold
tooth.
Sakue Shimohira believes it was her mother.
Finding that corpse near the ashes of what was her home was the ultimate
tragedy she endured that summer day.
Shimohira's life was forever changed a half-century ago when an atomic bomb
exploded over Nagasaki.
The morning started as many others, with an air raid siren.
"Usually, we stayed in a hole under the house when the alarm sounded.
But that time my mother felt something different."
Shimohira, then 10, her younger sister and 1-year-old nephew were sent to
a shelter cave in the woods three-quarters of a mile away.
Her mother and older sister -as tradition dictated - stayed behind to protect
their thatch-roofed home from the fires that inevitably followed an air
raid.
Moments later, as the three children played hide-and-seek in that forest
burrow, a U.S. B-29 dropped its bomb over the northern part of the city.
Her mother and sister were among the 73,884 killed.
Hours later, with the city ablaze, Shimohira carried her nephew papoose-style,
held the quivering hand of her little sister and walked over scorched earth
to return to the rubble of her home.
She remembers vivid details.
"The morning before the bomb dropped, I was hungry. We were always
hungry. Mother was going to fix lunch when the siren sounded.
"It wasn't to be much because we had no rice. ... We were going to
put a dry biscuit in water and let it swell and then drink it to get full.
But there wasn't time.
"The siren began and mother said, 'Quick, go!' "
The children put on their air raid masks and headed toward the shelter.
"Inside, we were playing and there was a sudden, brilliant flash of
light. Everything went dark and I fell down."
Later, someone shook her to see if she lived.
"I opened my eyes and could not believe the sights. There were people
with gruesome wounds filing into the shelter one after another. They were
horribly burned, covered with glass splinters like pin cushions and so disfigured
it was hard to tell men from women."
Shimohira and her sister began to scream for help. Hours went by and no
one came for them. "The stench became so strong I could hardly breathe."
Still, she would not leave the shelter.
"I took the advice of my elder brother, who the day before had told
us of a new bomb that fell on Hiroshima, and warned us we must stay inside
if a bomb dropped on Nagasaki because it, too, might contain poison."
Two days later, she recognized the voice of her uncle at the entrance of
the shelter.
"I began to cry and call out his name at the top of my voice."
As he led the trio of children from the damp cavern, the entrance was blocked
by bodies and dozens of groaning injured people who had not been able to
get inside.
"Be careful not to step on the dead," warned her uncle. Because
he was nursing his wounds, it was Shimohira's task to carry her squalling
nephew across the barren, burned fields.
"I was so little and I was so scared.
"There were people with hair, flesh and eyeballs hanging down, buildings
were on fire and all houses were gone."
Her 7-year-old sister lurched alongside, bare feet burning on the fiery
ground.
"I saw a plane overhead and I hid us under dead bodies."
As they continued their journey home, Shimohira tried to take shoes from
several bodies to cover her sister's feet.
"But the shoes were burned to the body and I couldn't get them off.
Finally, I found one shoe -it was too big, but little sister wore it."
They arrived in the Komaba district of Nagasaki, where her neighborhood
was in a sea of flames.
A seared body lay in the rubble of Shimohira's home, its hands covering
its eyes.
"We took the hands down, and found it was my elder sister, whose face,
strangely enough, had remained unmarred." She was the mother of the
boy Shimohira carried on her back.
Nearby was another charred body.
"That body had a gold tooth. My mother had a gold tooth, and I believe
that was my dear mother."
Two days later, Shimohira helped relatives collect broken pieces of wood
that had escaped the fires.
"We built a funeral pyre for my mother and sister and gathered around
them for a last tearful farewell.
"That same kind of primitive cremation was carried out throughout the
devastated area."
Four days later, a brother - then a student at the Nagasaki Medical College
- began to bleed from the gums and died.
Then Shimohira's gums began to bleed and her hair fell out. "We had
no money for a doctor, so like my brother before me, I thought I would die."
For months, Shimohira, her sister and nephew were cared for by relatives
in separate locations in the countryside. Seven months after the bombing,
an uncle returned with the children to Nagasaki and built a small lean-to
near the center of the still-wasteland - almost directly on the site of
her former home.
"There, we spent the rest of our childhood, many times staving off
hunger by going to the forest to gather pigwood and other wild vegetables."
Slowly, some semblance of normalcy returned, but not for long.
Shimohira's younger sister - whose feet remained scarred - underwent an
appendectomy at the age of 18.
But because radiation exposure had lowered her white blood cell count, the
scar would not heal.
"The odor was a great vexation for someone in the prime of young womanhood."
It was too much. Her sister threw herself in front of a train to commit
suicide.
Today, the tiny, soft-spoken Shirohima, 60, is grandmother to eight, one
of Nagasaki's leading peace advocates and an outspoken critic of Japan's
military leaders of 1945.
"If the Japanese government had surrendered after Hiroshima, there
would have been no Nagasaki. There would have been more of my mother than
a gold tooth."