Shizuko Abe was 18 years old when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. She had just married a soldier who had gone off to fight in the Pacific War.
Abe-san is a famous Hibakusha, who had previously announced her retirement from speaking. The second nuclear arms race has made her speak again. The World Friendship Center organized a public talk with her, and the room filled with students, activists, and Japanese press. Even through old age, you can still see the burns on her face, and where the terrible “keloid scars” were removed.
What I remember from her talk is that after the bomb her face swelled shut. Someone gave her a stick to hold onto and walked her out of the collapsed building she was in.
Like many Hibakusha, she feels guilt for the people she couldn’t help, even with her advanced burns. As she was walked to a place to find her father, people under the rubble pleaded for help before the fires consumed them. More people pleaded for water, “Mizu”.
Somehow, Abe-san was reunited with her father. Her father couldn’t believe the person he was looking at was his daughter. One side of her body was completely burned and swollen. Atomic fire melted the skin off her arm so that it was hanging by her fingernails. He asked her several times if she was in fact his daughter before taking her home.
Incredibly, Abe-san’s husband returned from the Pacific front after the bombing of Hiroshima. Abe-san’s parents advised him to divorce her. His parents begged him to divorce her. He refused, stating that the thought of his wife kept him alive in the war. He said that if the war had disfigured him, there would be no question of divorce for his wife. Since the war came to Hiroshima, he felt that there should be no question of divorce for him as a husband.
Life was incredibly difficult for Shizuko Abe. While her marriage kept her alive, she faced Hibakusha discrimination and was mistreated by her husband’s family. They constantly told him to divorce her and belittled her. She needed dozens of skin grafts and surgeries to remove the painful keloids, clumps of scar tissue left from the atomic burns. She never regained normal function in her arm.
A child in the front row asked a question at the end of the presentation. The child turned out to be her grandkid. The question was related to how she endured such pain, and Abe-san teared up with the response, saying “it was all worth it, because I got to meet you”.
I had the opportunity to meet her after the talk and give her a small gift, a jar of jam from Burnt Ridge Farms in Washington State. I thanked her for sharing her story and told her what I do for a living. She told me of the hospitality she received while visiting the US on a peace mission and how important that was to her, as someone who had lived with so much pain and discrimination. She then rolled up her sleeve and insisted I touch her arm. Her fingers were pulled tout by their skin, immobile. Skin grew over the nearly exposed bone of her arm, and the evidence of many surgeries marked her. “This is what atomic bombs do to people”, she said. The look she had, the way she said it, and the story of pain written on her body are all things I’ll never forget.