The ‘sorrow of survival’

Students at East Side Community HS in Manhattan sign on for nuclear disarmament after teacher Debbie Brindis (third from right) hosted a school visit from Hiroshima survivors (next to Brindis from left) Michiko Tsukamoto and Kunihiko Bonkohara.

Brindis (far right) sits in on an interview between Bonkohara and school newspaper reporter Melvin Cheng (left). With them is volunteer translator Jennifer Ijichi.

Hibakusha.

It’s a Chinese word adopted by the Japanese that means a person affected by a bomb, expressing not the luck of escape but the great sorrow of survival.

No word better describes the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 at the end of World War II, explained retired UFT member Robert Croonquist.

Croonquist, founder of the group Hibakusha Stories, brought two Hiroshima attack survivors to visit students at East Side Community HS in downtown Manhattan.

The vivid memories of visiting survivors Kunihiko Bonkohara and Michiko Tsukamoto — who were 5 and 10 years old, respectively, when their lives changed forever — was tough stuff for kids to hear.

But learning specialist Debbie Brindis felt that the kids in history teacher Kerisa Jones’s four 10th-grade classes and English teacher Natalie Elivert’s 11th-grade class “were ready to hear it, and should hear it,” she said.

They had just studied a unit on World War II and the atomic bomb.

Chapter Leader Kate Philpott commended Brindis for the project.

“We’re primary-source oriented at the school, and to have the survivors speak — there’s just no substitute for that experience,” Philpott said.

Soon the time came for students to gather and listen to the survivors, speaking through their translators. There was not a sound in the room.

Images were graphic, of dazed, traumatized men, women and children wandering around with scorched hair, their burnt skin hanging off them, their fingers fused together, insane with thirst.

Bonkohara said his father knew not to give anyone water and beseeched them not to drink any because, since the core of their bodies was so hot, the shock of water to the system would instantly kill them. Indeed, Bonkohara said, the largest piles of bodies were by the edge of the reservoir.

When the bright flashes, sounds of explosion and huge black cloud came, Bonkohara was home along with his father. His father pushed him under a desk and covered him with his own body to protect him but was blown away by the blast, pierced with shards of glass and splinters of wood.

“My father survived, though, and decided not to let me see this scenery of hell any longer and took me to a rural area,” he said.

Most of Bonkohara’s family lived, but both parents died of cancer when he was 20.

He moved to Brazil and started life anew, cutting and burning trees for cotton fields and eventually becoming an engineer.

Although troubled with lung disease since 4th grade, he carries on as a peace activist, traveling the world to speak out against nuclear weapons.

Both he and Tsukamoto were in New York City for a week in May during the United Nations’ 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review. Along with fellow hibakusha, they collectively visited 25 public schools.

Bonkohara (above) and Tsukamoto (left with translator Mariko Komatsu) tell their stories of survival.

Tsukamoto, the daughter of junior high school teachers, told her story in a separate session, a tale as profound as her colleague’s.

“When my mother was wandering ragged and bleeding, in the depths of despair and depression, one gentleman gave her 10 yen and a fan. She felt as though she had met a Buddha in hell,” Tsukamoto said.

At last her mother found her father’s body. His body was treated well, which gave them some consolation. It was lying in a coffin next to the mayor’s in City Hall, “because his armband had identified him as a teacher.”

After listening to the stories, asking questions and grasping that the nuclear capacity of 1945 is a small fraction of today’s, students signed on for world peace, literally, writing their names on large colorful petitions.

“History is never just about facts in a book; every military decision is about people, children, families. It was a beautiful moment when kids realized that,” Brindis said.

Interested in the webcast on Hiroshima survivors in city schools? Go to japansociety.org.