Part 3 Rescue and Medical Relief
Section 1 Emergency Measures
Chapter 5：Atomic Bomb Orphans
There are few official records regarding the children orphaned by the atomic bombing. Even the reports issued by Nagasaki Prefecture up to September 1 state simply that: “War orphans were initially cared for by Nagasaki City but later accepted by appropriate community service organizations, except those adopted by relatives.” Around 30 atomic bomb orphans were accepted by Nagasaki City community service organizations.
Matsuzaki Kiyoji, chief of the Nagasaki City Welfare Section at the time, describes the circumstances as follows:
Several citizens have brought atomic bomb orphans to the Welfare Section since the day of the atomic bombing. Since the orphans could not be left at City Hall in the confusion after the bombing, we decided to accommodate them for the time being at Togiya Elementary School. The number of the orphans, all of whom were infants, increased to 30 in several days. An office worker in her 40s named Hashimoto was taking care of these infants by herself, like a nursery school teacher, but it was no easy matter. Accordingly, I asked Sasaki Sukenobu, who had experience in orphanage management and was working at City Hall, to take in the orphans as a temporary measure.
Sasaki received the assistance of local authorities in procuring space in a small branch school in Taira-chō near Shimabara (part of present-day Unzen City) for the accommodation of the orphans. Commodities were all supplied by Nagasaki City.
However, six months to one year later, Amamoto Rokukanmaru of Dōza-machi opened an orphanage in Funadomari, Antoku, Shimabara. I remember that the atomic bomb orphans were transferred there later.
The first atomic bomb orphan I had contact with was a baby boy I picked up on the road in Ōhato on the day of the atomic bombing. Ōhato was far from Urakami; I still have no idea why a baby was left in such a place. I had no choice but to take the baby to my home. Since I had just become the father of a baby girl, my wife breast-fed the two babies as if they were twins. We took care of the baby at home until a respected doctor adopted him as his son. The baby has grown into a fine young man at the time of this writing.
Ota Jizaemon, sub-section chief of the wartime orphans section at Taira Town Office, remembered the atomic bomb orphans accommodated in the small branch school in Taira-chō as follows:
Some four or five days after the atomic bombing, people caring for atomic bomb orphans inquired whether there might be some place to bring them. With the town mayor’s approval, it was decided that the orphans would be accepted by Taira-chō. Kanayama Branch School (Kanayamamyo Aza Yamaguchi in Taira-chō), the proposed site for the accommodation of these orphans, was an abandoned school located in a remote area. We went there from the town, cleared cobwebs from the classroom and night-duty room and wiped the tatami mats. With regard to bedding for the orphans, we called on volunteers in the town to provide comforters and blankets. We also asked them to provide firewood and charcoal for cooking.
On the day the orphans were scheduled to come, members of a women’s association, wearing aprons, waited with me at the school to receive them. However, their arrival (scheduled for noon) was delayed, and it was not until two hours later that a truck arrived in a cloud of dust. Looking into the bed of the truck, I saw babies of six to 12-months of age, lying motionless and covered with dust. Three women accompanied them, 28 babies in all.
Members of the women’s association received the babies one by one from the truck and laid them in a row on blankets spread out on the mats in the classroom. These babies did not even smell of milk or soiled diapers. Although rice water and sugar water were given to them with feeding bottles, they soon stopped sucking. They might have lost the strength to suck. However, most of them were feeding eagerly within a few days.
Among the 28 children was a girl who was older than the others and seemed to understand what people were saying. We kept asking her what her name was. She finally said something that sounded like ‘Koh-maa-ko.’ After that, people from the women’s association, when caring for her, called her ‘Komako-chan.’ From the second day, she gradually stopped responding, and her face and belly began to swell. A doctor came to look at her, but she took her last breath in the evening of the third day after the atomic bombing.
I used some boxes from a somen noodle factory in the town to fashion a casket by pasting paper on them. That night, we held a simple funeral for the little girl at the women’s association office near the school. The girl was the only child who died in the Kanayama Branch School.
The period of accommodation in the branch school was 10 to 15 days. In addition to the women’s association in the town, members of women’s associations from Yamaguchi Village suspended their farm work to provide assistance at the school. It was also during this period that Fr. Zenon Żebrowski, a member of the Knights of the Immaculata Catholic monastic order with headquarters in Nagasaki (Hongōchi-machi), brought five or six loaves of bread, soaked pieces in sugar water and fed them to each orphan. Even now I remember that scene vividly.
In response to rumors that a school in Taira-chō had accommodated orphans, many people visited the school to look for their missing children. These visitors looked into the face of each baby in search of their children. Tragically, there were no parent-child reunions.
The above is an account of the temporary facility established in Taira-chō for the accommodation of atomic bomb orphans. There are several other records describing the plight of children separated from their parents in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing. The following are one or two examples.
Fukuda Tsurumatsu (previously mentioned) is one of the people who have memories of atomic bomb orphans.
On the day of the atomic bombing, the foremost priority of the prefectural police was to rescue the injured. Mr. Fukuda, along with assistant police inspector Yamasaki Kōtarō and a few members of the economic security section, drove a truck through the neighborhood of Ibinokuchi, when darkness was descending on the area, and picked up injured people who had escaped the flames and smoke:
A baby crawled out from between assistant police inspector Yamasaki’s feet. He picked the baby up but was at a loss as to how to handle it. We rescued around 20 injured people and brought them by truck to the auditorium at Irabayashi Elementary School, which was serving as a temporary emergency relief center. Mr. Yamasaki was still holding the baby.
At the relief center, two or three military doctors were busy treating patients. Mr. Yamasaki went directly to the military doctors and asked them to look after the baby but was turned down because the doctors were treating patients in order one at a time. I do not know what happened to that baby and the other atomic bomb orphans, but even now I often remember them and wonder
what became of them.
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The rescue unit dispatched to Nagasaki by the Kurume Military Hospital will be touched upon later, but it deserves mention here that a nurse from the unit brought an atomic bomb orphan from Nagasaki Medical College Hospital to Kurume Military Hospital and cared for the orphan in the nurses’ dormitory for a time. The orphan, a five or six-year old boy, was sweet and was loved by everyone in the dormitory. Subsequently, the nurse’s childless brother adopted him.
It is well know that the Knights of the Immaculata Catholic monastic order provided relief for atomic bomb orphans after the war. Dr. Nagai Takashi mentions the fact as follows in his book Kono ko wo nokoshite (Leaving these Children Behind):
This monastery started to take care of children early on, without any preparations, budget, or facilities. The monastery could of course not have made any preparations to accept orphans, because the buildings had been requisitioned by the military near the end of the war and the monks placed under house arrest at Mt. Aso. The buildings were returned after the war and the monks came back from confinement, but they had a hard time. During that troubled period, a mountain priest brought two orphans to the monastery. They were the children of a fish dealer and had survived the atomic bombing in an air-raid shelter in the wasteland. The next children were brought by a police officer. The entire monastery erupted with joy, as if welcoming honored guests. Citizens and police generally knew the monastery, it being a body of apostles of love. Learning that there were many children in such a predicament, the monks began going out in search of war orphans. As soon as they found an orphan, they took the orphan back to their monastery.
The monastery, which made it a principle to preach the virtues of poverty, could not afford extra rooms or food and had no extra budget. However, the monks took in the orphans without second thoughts. They gave up their rooms and moved to other places, such as the corner of a barn. Bread left from fasting was used as food for the orphans. It was as if the accounts had been entrusted to the
Virgin Mary.
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The Knights of the Immaculata initially accommodated two atomic bomb orphans, but the number increased to 100.
As the number of accommodated orphans grew, there was no longer sufficient space for them in the monastery facilities in Hongōchi. In such a situation, since the premises of the Catholic convent Maria-en in Minamiyamate was opened for orphans, female infants were accommodated there. Approximately 70 boys were accommodated in the former Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard Factory Workers’ Dormitory (mobilized students’ dormitory) in the neighborhood of Kogakura Dam, Nagasaki (Kamigō).
Unfortunately, the accommodation facility at Kogakura burned to the ground in January 1949, tragically killing seven of the 152 orphans living there. After that, babies and infants were left to the Les Soeurs de l'Enfant Jesus, a French Catholic order operating the above-mentioned convent in Minamiyamate (Naminohira-machi) and Urakami Orphanage in Motohara-machi 2-chōme (present-day Tsuji-machi). Called the Kōbeya or “children’s room,” the Urakami Orphanage had a long history under the management of the Holy Cross Society but had collapsed and burned in the atomic bombing.
The grim circumstances faced by the atomic bomb orphans inspired a new sense of mission among the surviving members. The orphans were initially accommodated in newly constructed barracks. In 1947, a two-story orphanage was erected with government support and provided accommodations for 30 children. Most of the children were atomic bomb orphans, ranging in age from newborns to children of elementary school age.
Assistance to orphans had relied to a large extent from prewar times on religious groups and other benefactors, and in the turbulent period after the end of the war, the city came to depend even more on the goodwill and services provided by these people and organizations.
Some of the children accommodated in these benevolent facilities ran away, a situation that reflected postwar Japanese society as a whole.
The exact number of children orphaned by the atomic bomb remains unknown, but it has been estimated to reach into the thousands. The orphans accommodated in the facilities mentioned above are undoubtedly just a fraction of the total number.
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Keiko (Warning Drum) Vol.49, No.3, p.46
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49
Nagai Takashi, Kono ko wo nokoshite (Leaving these Children Behind) (Chūō Shuppansha, 1976), pp.55-6
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