Nagasaki survivor: ‘The risk of nuclear weapons being used is increasing in Ukraine and the Middle East’

Masako Wada is 81 years old. She was born in 1943. She was a one-year-and-ten-month-old baby at the time of the bombing of Nagasaki at 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945. She humorously describes herself as “the youngest member of the youth department” of Nihon Hidankyo, the institution awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize in October “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” according to the Nobel Committee. Founded in 1956, Nihon Hidankyo is the only national Japanese organization of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. Like Wada, all its members are victims of the most destructive weapon ever used by humans. They pursue the abolition of nuclear arms through words, by recounting their experiences. Wada has taken over as the older survivors have died. She has a lively look and makes herself understood through an interpreter. “The danger of atomic weapons being used is increasing,” she warns in an interview at the end of October in the organization’s small office in Tokyo, two narrow floors filled with boxes, books, and pamphlets. She remembers nothing of the bombing of Nagasaki. She often tells the story of her mother. She unfolds a map of the city to accompany her narration:

Question: Where were they?

Answer. My family lived 2.9 kilometers from the epicenter. My mother was preparing lunch. I was playing outside the house. She called me because it was very hot outside; I went inside, and after some time, there was a loud bang, an explosion. She didn’t know what had happened. When she came to, she found that everything, the glass doors, the wooden doors, the paper sliding doors, and the walls of the house had been blown into the air. The fragments had turned into a pile about 30 centimeters in size. She went outside. She saw orange dust; the green mountains had turned brown from the heat of the explosion. The fire spread immediately, and many people who survived direct death came to our area around the mountain. My mother saw rows of people coming down. They were naked or they were wearing tattered clothes. She couldn’t tell if they were men or women; their hair was spiky, curly, and looked like horns. She described the rows of people as if they were brownish, grayish ants.

Q. How did you react?

A. My mother, who was 24, carried me on her back as she helped tend to the people who came in. In those days, people saved up pieces of old cloth to use as bandages after sterilizing them. With these makeshift gauze pads, and water from the well in our backyard, she helped clean and dress the wounds. Our neighbor’s house had been demolished some time before — it was official policy, to prevent the spread of fire — and the plot was empty. The bodies were brought there with the help of a large wooden cart, which was normally used to collect garbage. People would pick up the corpses scattered on the street to put them on the cart. Hands and legs stuck out of the piles like dolls. Every day, more and more bodies came to be cremated. Seeing so many corpses, little by little, my mother lost her sense of humanity, her sense of sadness or pity for these people. They all became numb. I just thought, ‘Well, we have so many bodies today;’ and the next day, ‘There are fewer today than yesterday.’ She always said that humans were not born to be treated like garbage like that.

Q. How were the next few days?

A. When the war was over, she was asked to help at a first aid station set up in a nearby school. In the auditorium there were lots of people lying on the floor, burned or wounded, moaning and crying. She was supposed to follow the doctors with the bottles of antiseptic liquid, but when she saw so many wounded she couldn’t bear it; she asked for the liquids to be taken away so she wouldn’t drop them, and she fainted. These were very precious products. Many hospitals had been destroyed. Doctors died, there were no medicines or nurses. So she was asked to work. When she came to, she was given another task. Because of the heat and the rotting flesh, there were flies everywhere, laying eggs on the bodies of the living, hatching in the flesh, the larvae moving around. She had to brush them off and sweep them off the floor. The larvae are usually very small. But she said they were the size of a thumb. They were so fat because they had a lot of food. She had never seen such huge larvae in her life.

Wada pauses to show a photo of a cylindrical device. When they dropped the bomb, she says, they also dropped three radiosondes like this one to measure the pressure of the explosion and other parameters. “These devices collected data on objects on the ground,” she says. “But they never collected data on how people lived and died under the mushroom cloud and how they ended the precious things of life. These machines could never sense or collect that information to send to the U.S. military.”

Q. What is your first memory associated with the bomb?

A. The people in the neighborhood were all hibakusha who experienced the bombing. Whenever they got together, they would naturally talk about those days. Many had injuries, scars, and keloids on their bodies. It was a daily occurrence for me to listen to them and watch them.

Q. What does the Nobel Peace Prize mean to you and the organization?

A. According to Alfred Nobel's will, the Nobel Peace Prize should be awarded to persons or organizations that meet three conditions: promoting friendship between nations, contributing to the reduction or end of war or the reduction of weapons, and working for the promotion of peace and disarmament through conferences. This is exactly what we have been doing. Awarding Nihon Hidankyo the Nobel Peace Prize has been very timely, because the danger of nuclear weapons being used is increasing.

Q. Why do you think this danger is growing?

A. Russia and Israel have nuclear weapons, and the risk of their use is increasing in Ukraine and the Middle East. We have a president [Putin] who keeps threatening to use them. The nuclear taboo, or the sense that nuclear weapons should never be used, is diminishing because of the worsening crises. People don’t know what could happen if a nuclear weapon is used. They don’t know what happened when it was used. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has been in effect for over 50 years, but the promises of that treaty have never really been fulfilled. The countries that officially have nuclear weapons, the P-5 [the five permanent members of the UN Security Council], are not sincere in implementing their promises.

Q. What has this organization meant to people like you?

A. When I was young, I was not very aware of their activities. It was only after returning to Japan after living in the United States from 1977 to 1982 that I wanted to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It had been 40 years. Still, there were many hibakusha with very clear memories who worked to spread their testimonies. I helped them publish newspapers and pamphlets that compiled their stories. I learned about their experiences. I also interviewed my mother and wrote down what she experienced. I tried to put it into a book, but my mother said that [its impact] was insufficient. I thought that perhaps other veteran hibakusha would feel the same way. But after so many years, many have died. The average age of survivors is 86. So little by little, I feel that I have to tell it.

Q. Do you think people are forgetting what happened?

A. Yes. But thanks to the Nobel Committee’s announcement, Nihon Hidankyo is now better known in the world. And perhaps that will resonate in people’s minds. Perhaps they will remember that there are people collecting signatures in many places and relate their actions to the abolition of nuclear weapons. Perhaps they will find out what these people have been doing and relate our activities to their own lives, and how it affects their lives — that is our hope. The Committee evaluated our work, the exchange of testimonies and experiences, as something unique. It is true: we call for peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons, not through weapons, but through dialogue and our words.

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