THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALFRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2020 N ANakamura — did not hesitate. “I feel an-
gry,” she said.
Many survivors of the atomic attacks
were reluctant to share their accounts,
much less say anything that could be
construed as criticism of the United
States, which occupied Japan after the
war.
But Ms. Thurlow described how she had
jumped over dead bodies to cross the city
on that horrific day. “It was hell on earth,”
she told the reporters.
Since then, Ms. Thurlow, now 88, has
insistently told her story in unflinching
detail to thousands of people at protests,
conferences, schools and even on cruise
ships. Three years ago, she delivered an
acceptance lecture in Oslo when the Inter-
national Campaign to Abolish Nuclear
Weapons, or ICAN, won the Nobel Peace
Prize.
Speaking on a video call from her home
in Toronto last month, Ms. Thurlow said:
“I am one of those who can tell a firsthand
story of human suffering that the bomb
caused. To me that was a very important
moral imperative.”
She shares memories not only to bear
witness to what it is like to survive a nu-
clear bomb, but also to put political pres-
sure on governments to get rid of atomic
weaponry for good.
Before this year’s anniversary of the
dropping of the two bombs, Ms. Thurlow
wrote to 197 heads of state asking them to
ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons, which was formally
adopted at the United Nations three years
ago. The world’s nine nuclear-armed coun-
tries have refused to sign the treaty on the
grounds the weapons are necessary for
deterrence.
During a two-hour interview, Ms. Thur-
low said she was particularly disappointed
that Japan and her adopted country, Cana-
da, also had not signed the treaty, al-
though neither possesses nuclear weap-
ons.
“Japan is overly subservient to U.S.
policy, which just breaks our heart,” she
said. “We survivors have been abandoned
by our own country.”
In return for her criticism, Prime Min-
ister Shinzo Abe has given her the cold
shoulder, rebuffing requests to meet her
when she has traveled to Japan. Even
after the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Abe did
not acknowledge her.
There are fewer than 137,000 survivors
— known in Japanese as hibakusha — of
the atomic bombings still alive in Japan.
An additional 2,887 survivors, like Ms.
Thurlow, live outside the country.
In more than four decades as an anti-
nuclear activist in Canada, the home coun-
try of her late husband, James Thurlow, a
teacher she met in Japan in the 1950s, Ms.
Thurlow has offered an emotional counter-
point to otherwise dry policy negotiations
over the weapons.
“It is so easy for nuclear weapons to
become an abstract theory,” said Beatrice
Fihn, the executive director of ICAN. “But
even though I have heard Setsuko speak
so many times, always some part of her
story just hits me hard.”
On that summer morning 75 years ago,
when Ms. Thurlow slowly regained con-
sciousness after the blast, she started to
hear the whispers of some of her class-
mates. “Mother, help me,” they moaned.
Then, a stronger voice and someone
shaking her shoulder: “Don’t give up,” she
heard, and a soldier urged her to crawl
toward sunlight, where he freed her. She
was less than two miles from ground zero.
She walked into a hellscape, where a
procession of people trudged on the roads,
body parts missing, some carrying their
own eyeballs. “They didn’t look like hu-
man beings,” she said.
Ms. Thurlow’s favorite sister and 4-
year-old nephew died in the bombing, and
she saw their bodies tossed into a pit and
cremated en masse. Her father, who was
fishing in Hiroshima Bay that morning,
survived. So did her mother, rescued from
the family’s collapsed house.
Just two months after the bombing, Ms.
Thurlow returned to her Christian girls
school. She also met Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a
Methodist pastor profiled by the journalist
John Hersey in “Hiroshima,” his book
about the bombing and its aftermath.
After the bombing, Ms. Thurlow said,
she questioned the God worshiped by so
many Americans. But at the school and
with Mr. Tanimoto, she was surrounded by
Christian adults who supported her emo-
tionally. “Because of them, I was able to
deal with that crisis and came out of that
trauma,” she said. Three years after the
blast, she converted.
On a volunteer expedition to build a
community center for coal miners in Hok-
kaido, Japan’s northernmost island, she
met her future husband. Having learnedEnglish in school, she decided she wanted
to study social work in the United States,
and earned a scholarship to what is now
known as the University of Lynchburg in
Virginia.
After she arrived and told reporters of
her anger about the American hydrogen
bomb tests, she received unsigned hate
mail, some of it demanding she go back to
Japan.
“How am I going to live in this new
land?” she wondered. “I can’t put a zipper
over my mouth.”
When she appeared at a Lions Club
meeting later that autumn to speak, the
headline in the local newspaper read: “Jap
Girl in Plea Against A-Bomb’s Use,” ac-
cording to archival research by Charlotte
Jacobs, a Stanford medical professor who
is writing a biography of Ms. Thurlow.
She also experienced other forms of
racism after coming to the United States.
When Mr. Thurlow, who had remained
in Japan teaching, arrived a year later,
interracial marriages were prohibited in
Virginia. So the couple married in Wash-
ington and moved to Toronto, where they
raised two sons.
For the 30th anniversary of the bomb-
ings, Ms. Thurlow staged a photo exhibi-
tion at the University of Toronto and
worked with Toronto’s Roman Catholic
archdiocese and the mayor’s office to
develop a memorial peace garden in co-
operation with the City of Hiroshima.
Such opportunities might not have been
open to her had she remained in Japan,particularly in a culture where women
were not expected to lead civic move-
ments.
In Canada, “she got confident and was
very connected at very high levels to
political people,” said Akira Kawasaki,
who serves on the executive committee of
Peace Boat, a Japanese nonprofit group
that operates socially conscious cruises
that have hosted Ms. Thurlow as a
speaker.
Ms. Thurlow is not afraid to confront
political leaders. At a 2014 conference in
Vienna, Toshio Sano, then Japan’s disar-
mament ambassador, said experts were
being “pessimistic” when they testified
that relief organizations would be unable
to provide meaningful aid after a nuclear
bombing.
Ms. Thurlow sharply challenged him —
in front of Japanese news cameras.
“What exactly do you mean?” she
asked, noting that nuclear weapons were
now so powerful that few would survive a
bombing and benefit from aid.
And in a letter to Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau, she asked that Canada apologize
for its role in contributing uranium to the
Manhattan Project, which developed the
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Naga-
saki.
Having witnessed nuclear horrors in her
childhood, Ms. Thurlow embraces pleas-
ures where she finds them. As recently as
February, she was still traveling interna-
tionally. At a stop in Madrid with Kathleen
Sullivan, a co-founder of Hibakusha
Stories, a nonprofit group that brings
survivors to speak in New York schools,
Ms. Thurlow suggested they try bocadillo
de calamares — a fried calamari sandwich
— in the Plaza Mayor.
Ms. Thurlow knows how to “grab the
opportunity right in the moment and do
what other people are doing around you
because it looks like fun,” Ms. Sullivan
said. That’s “why we work for the contin-
uation of life on earth.”
Some critics say hibakusha like Ms.
Thurlow can succeed in their disarma-
ment message only if they talk about the
atrocities committed by Japan during the
war as well. “Somehow you have to uni-
versalize your message,” said Yuki Tana-
ka, a retired research professor at the
Hiroshima Peace Institute, “not just talk
about your own sadness and pain.”
Ms. Thurlow said the power of a true,
human story could inspire commitment to
a cause. She puts faith in the young stu-
dents and activists she has met.
“I enjoy talking to young people,” she
said. “They really listen to me like dried
sponges getting water.”Misery, Up Close
Survivors of atomic bombings often used
the term pika-don. It translates as “flash-
bang” or “flash-boom” and describes how
nuclear weapons produce blinding light be-
fore an explosion.
Even though many Americans associ-
ated the bombings with the multistory
mushroom clouds they produced, Japanese
survivors found that their term “captured
the dazzling sight and thundering sound of
the misery they experienced up close,” the
University of Texas historian Michael B.
Stoff wrote in an essay for the new book.
When the two bombs were detonated,
thermal heat from the explosions seared
human skin and vaporized some people in-
stantly. “The closer to ground zero and the
more exposed you were, the more horribly
you were likely to die, but the less likely you
were to be aware of it,” Professor Stoff
wrote.
Those who survived woke up in a moon-
scape.
In Hiroshima, an estimated 140,000 of the
city’s 350,000 people were killed, and the
vast majority of structures were either
damaged or destroyed. Japanese Navy sub-
marines were left abandoned in a nearby
bay.
Feelings of powerlessness, desperation
and defeat “all came together,” Shigeo
Hayashi, who traveled there on assignment
for a military propaganda magazine, re-
called in a 1991 interview for the Japan Pho-
tographers Association’s newsletter. “I
pressed the shutter button almost uncon-
sciously to capture the scene in front of me.”
In Nagasaki, Mr. Matsumoto saw bon-
fires and assumed they were for cooking.
Later, he realized that people were cremat-
ing their relatives because the bodies had
putrefied.
Photographers who covered the bomb-
ings might have sensed that the assignment
was dangerous, but at the time, even medi-
cal experts did not fully understand the
health risks of exposure to nuclear radia-
tion.
Decades later, Mr. Matsumoto met with
Soviet photographers who had covered the
1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. They
asked what type of protective gear he had
worn in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said he
replied, according to the 1991 newsletter. He
and his colleagues had “absolutely no idea”
about the health risks, he added, so they
wore ordinary clothing.
Makiko Inoue and Hisako Ueno contribut-
ed research.‘Hell on Earth,’
Then Decades
Of Working
For Peace
From Page ABRETT GUNDLOCK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESNTB SCANPIX/REUTERSSetsuko Thurlow,
above near her home
in Toronto, and at left
with fellow antinuclear
protesters in the 1970s.
“I am one of those who
can tell a firsthand
story of human suffer-
ing,” she recently said.VIA SETSUKO THURLOWMs. Thurlow with Berit Reiss-Andersen, left, head of the Nobel Committee, and Beatrice Fihn, head of the
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in 2017 when she shared in the Nobel Peace Prize.HIROMICHI MATSUDA, COURTESY NAGASAKI ATOMIC BOMB
MUSEUM‘I am going to die here.’
SETSUKO THURLOW, of her thoughts
when Hiroshima was bombed.