A COMPARISON OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI (2024)

HIROSHIMA, situated facing the Inland Sea on the southern coast of the Japanese island of Honshu, was at the time of the atomic bombing a city of approximately 350,000 inhabitants (including military personnel). Nagasaki, located on the western side of the Japanese island of Kyushu, was at that time a city of approximately 250,000 persons. In addition to the obvious differences in size and location, there are a number of other respects, pertinent to this study, in which the two cities are not comparable.

3.1The peopling of Japan; possible differences between the inhabitants of Honshu and Kyushu.—The origin of the present-day inhabitants of Japan, like the origins of so many of the peoples of the earth, is a tantalizing riddle. Most standard reference works on the subject recognize the possibility of three distinct prehistoric streams of immigration into the Japanese islands, one entering Kyushu from the south by way of Formosa and the Ryukyu Islands, and ultimately derived from southern China,¹ a second entering northern Kyushu and southern Honshu from Korea, and ultimately derived from Manchuria, and a third stream, represented by the contemporary Ainu and having affinities with the present-day inhabitants of Siberia, northern Russia, Finland, and northern Sweden, entering from the north (Munro, 1908; Brinkley, 1915; Murdoch, 1926; Sansom, 1943; Beardsley, 1955). But while Japanese mythology, the earliest written records, and the archeological findings all supply reasonably good evidence for such waves of immigration towards the end of the Stone Age, it is not at all clear whether these immigrants found Japan already inhabited and, if so, the provenance of these very earliest inhabitants (cf. Kiyono, 1949). Almost equally uncertain is the relative timing of these waves of immigration, and the proportions in which these waves, together with the possible even earlier inhabitants, blended to form the modern Japanese type. Suffice it for our purposes to recognize the possibility that some thousands of years ago there existed significant anthropological differences between the inhabitants of the vicinity of Nagasaki in southern Japan and of Hiroshima in central Japan, and the further possibility that today, despite the many historical developments which would tend to obliterate such differences, some vestige still remains.

3.2Non-Japanese elements in the two cities. —The present-day inhabitants of Nagasaki may differ genetically from those of Hiroshima for reasons other than just outlined. Historically, Nagasaki is pre-eminent among all Japanese cities as a point of contact with Western culture. The problem to which we must now address ourselves briefly is the question of the extent to which these contacts have been accompanied by intermarriages and arrangements of convenience which have left a lasting imprint on the biotype of the inhabitants of this area.

3.2.1Early Nagasaki contacts with the West.—From our standpoint, the history of these contacts is best divided into three periods. The first of these begins in 1542 or 1543, when three Portuguese traders who had taken passage in a Chinese junk for Liampo were driven north by a typhoon and landed on a small island off the coast of southern Japan. Within a few years they were followed by Portuguese trading ships, which also brought Jesuit priests from the missions at Macao and Goa. The next 100 years were characterized by a considerable Japanese trade with the West, much of it funneling through Nagasaki. This trade was at first dominated by the Portuguese, but later shared in by Spanish, Dutch, and English ships. Concurrently, Portuguese Jesuit and Spanish Franciscan missionaries were busy. The activities of these missionaries, at first readily tolerated, at length reached the point where, both in terms of numbers of converts and political overtones, they were felt by the Tokugawa shogunate to pose a threat to the stability of Japan. In 1612, an earlier ban against Christianity was for the first time rigorously enforced. The Christian converts who refused to renounce their faith—and there were many—were vigorously persecuted. At the same time, the entrance of foreigners into Japan, as well as their movement about the country, was increasingly restricted. In 1636, Japanese ships and Japanese individuals were forbidden to go abroad. By 1639, all foreigners are reported to have been expelled from Japan, and the country had embarked on an era of self-imposed seclusion.

3.2.2The Dutch on Deshima.—This severance of ties with the West was not quite complete. From 1640 until 1853, when Commodore Perry was successful in the first steps at re-establishing intercourse with the West, the Dutch, presumably because of the non-political and non-religious nature of their prior activities, were permitted to maintain a small trading station on Deshima in Nagasaki. This span of 213 years is the second of the three periods we must recognize. During this period, Chinese were also permitted to trade at Nagasaki and in much greater numbers than the mere handful of Dutch. Thus, Kaempfer (1728) describes a Chinese section of Nagasaki with upwards of 1,000 inhabitants, and further estimates, on the basis of the number of junks coming to Nagasaki and their size, that in the years 1683 and 1684 (which may or may not be representative of previous years) there were “for each year not less than 20,000 Chinese visitors.” A year later trade with China was, at least officially, much more restricted, to 70 junks per annum with crews of not more than 30. Throughout the next century and a half the Dutch continued as in the past to send on the average one or two ships a year to Nagasaki, while Chinese activities were still further restricted, only a dozen junks a year being permitted to visit the port by 1820 (Murdoch, 1926).

3.2.3From the reopening of Japan to World War II.—The third period may be dated from 1853 to the outbreak of World War II. Perry in his negotiations of 1853 and 1854 for port facilities declined the Japanese offers of Nagasaki, apparently feeling that its past would be more hindrance than help in establishing his new era, but under an agreement negotiated in 1857 by Harris, the first American Consul-General to Japan, Nagasaki became one of three treaty ports into which American ships could enter freely. However, the Dutch, from their beachhead at Deshima, had already profited from Perry's visit. In 1853, immediately following Perry's visit, the Japanese entered into negotiations with the Dutch for the purchase of men-of-war. In 1855, the Dutch presented the Japanese with the Soembing, the first unit of Western construction to be acquired by the Japanese Navy. In that same year, the Japanese established a navigation school and ship-building yard in Nagasaki, instruction being furnished by 22 Dutchmen. In 1857 another Dutchman, Dr. Pompe van Meerdervoort, assumed charge of a newly established school of medicine.

During the first decade following Perry's visit, while Japanese relations with foreigners were most unsettled, the number of Europeans in Nagasaki remained quite small, but beginning with the mid-1860's, and particularly after the initiation of the pro-foreign Meiji era in 1868, there arose a sizeable “foreign colony” in Nagasaki, largely concentrated on land on the eastern side of the harbor specifically set aside for this purpose. We have found it difficult to locate any exact data concerning the “foreign colony” between the reopening of Japan and 1897, with the exception of some statistics for 1864–1870, 1882, and 1889. Concerning the situation after 1897 there appears to be considerable information, but unfortunately sometimes conflicting in nature. This conflict is not so great as to invalidate an approximate evaluation of certain matters pertinent to this study.

Table 3.1 summarizes the earliest complete data on this period which we have been able to locate, made available through the courtesy of the Nagasaki Prefectural Library. Between 1864 and 1870 there were on the average 150–200 Occidentals in the city, as well as a rapidly increasing number of Chinese, the number of the latter growing from 141 in 1864 to 366 in 1870. The biological significance of this number of persons can only be evaluated in terms of the city's total population, which in 1870 was given as 29,127 (Nagasaki since the Restoration, 1925). Occidentals thus accounted for approximately 0.6 per cent of the population at this time.

Data concerning only two years during the interval 1871–1896 have come to our attention. In 1882, when the population of Nagasaki was 39,963, the total foreign population had risen to 829. Of these, six hundred and some were Chinese and the rest Occidentals, including approximately 100 English, 30 French, 30 Americans, and some Russians, Austrians, Dutch, and Danes (Nagasaki since the Restoration, 1925). By 1889, when the city population was 54,502, there were 354 Occidentals and 701 Chinese in residence (Nagasaki since the Restoration, 1925).

Beginning with 1897, more complete data became available. Table 3.2 summarizes city and prefectural census reports from 1897 to 1923.² The data are drawn from different sources, the city data from a book issued by the municipal government in 1925 (Nagasaki since the Restoration), the prefectural data from the Japanese Empire Statistical Annual (Nihon Teikoku Tōkei Nenkan). It is apparent that most of the foreigners residing in Nagasaki prefecture were concentrated in the city proper, making it possible in an approximate treatment such as this to substitute prefecture for city figures where the latter are lacking. That one or the other or both sets of data are not completely accurate is suggested by the fact that for several of the years, city figures exceed those for the prefecture, a manifest impossibility unless “residence” is defined differently in the two sets of data, a point not entirely clear. City figures are not available after 1923, but those for the prefecture indicate a slow, continual increase in the number of Occidentals residing in the city, as illustrated by the figures for 1930 given in Table 3.3. Throughout the first 40 years of this century, something like 0.2 per cent of the population of the city was Occidental, and an additional 0.7 per cent, Chinese.

The ethnic breakdown of the figures for two representative years, 1910 and 1930, is indicated in Table 3.3. These simple totals fail to provide a true insight into the “dynamics” of the situation. In Table 3.4 figures based on the 1920 census report are given concerning the age composition and the marital status of four of the principal ethnic groups, as well as for the total foreign population. Attention is directed towards the high proportion of unmarried males in the 20–39 age interval. Furthermore, in evaluating the significance of the number of married women, it should be borne in mind that in cases-of mixed marriages, the wife and children assumed the citizenship of the husband (Izumi, 1921; Sasano, 1921).

3.3The biological influence of “foreigners” on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.—It is a manifest absurdity to attempt to quantitate in any way the extent to which foreign contacts during these three periods left a biological imprint on the face of Nagasaki. However, one is perhaps permitted certain impressions. It seems unlikely for at least two reasons that the foreigners who visited Japan during the first of the three periods defined above contributed in any significant way to the genetic constitution of the present-day inhabitants of this area. For one thing, the systematic suppression of Christianity, thought to involve the death of at least 20,000 Japanese converts, and perhaps 100,000 or even more (Kaempfer, 1728; Murdoch, 1926; Sansom, 1943), may have decimated the very group in which the offspring of Caucasian-Japanese unions were most apt to be found.³ For another thing, the Japanese, during the period ending in 1639 when they were ridding themselves of foreign influences, were systematic in their uprooting of all traces of the intruders, to the extent that, among other actions, it is recorded that they exiled to Macao in 1636 some 287 women and children known to be related to the Portuguese by marriage or birth (Kaempfer, 1728; Woolley, 1881).

It is characteristic of the thoroughness of the Japanese in ridding themselves of foreign influences that during the second of the three periods we have defined, the Dutch were forced to live on a small, artificial island in the Nagasaki harbor, termed Deshima, measuring some 600×240 feet. The number of Dutch in residence was severely limited, usually to about 10 to 20, and the movements of these carefully restricted (cf. Kaempfer, 1728). But the Japanese are above all else realists. Alone among the Japanese people, prostitutes were permitted to visit Deshima, and periodically such of the Dutch as desired—their numbers perhaps swelled by the arrival of a ship—were permitted to visit Maruyama, then (and still) the brothel district of Nagasaki. These activities, like everything else the Dutch did, were carefully noted. Thus it is a matter of record that in one year (the 7th year of Kyōho, 1722) there were 270 Dutch visits to Maruyama—during that same year there were 20,738 Chinese visits (Boxer, 1950). In view of the practice of abortion and infanticide during the Tokugawa Era and the official attitude toward foreigners, it would be strange if any considerable number of children from such relationships readied maturity. The few of whom there is any record are cited in reference works primarily as “curiosities” (e.g., Thunberg, 1795, 1796).

It is more difficult to evaluate the extent to which racial admixture occurred during the period ushered in by Commodore Perry's visit. The fraction of one per cent of the Nagasaki population which has been Occidental has been a very mixed group—diplomats, missionaries, teachers, and commercial persons—many of whom, of course, did not intermarry or otherwise contribute to the Nagasaki gene pool. However, in addition to these permanent residents, there were relatively many transient sea-men. The Russian fleet was stationed in Nagasaki during the winter months prior to the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. The intellectual climate of Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterized by the enthusiastic acceptance in some quarters of many aspects of Western civilization—there was apparently no particular opprobrium attached to mixed marriages or even temporary arrangements of convenience, as witnessed by the well-known story of Madame Butterfly, the locale for which was Nagasaki. One can state with considerable assurance that limited opportunities for racial admixture existed in Nagasaki between 1870 and 1940⁴ —the data do not permit one to go much further.

These are the bare historical facts. To what extent the present-day inhabitants of Nagasaki differ from those of Hiroshima because of racial admixture can only be a matter for conjecture. On the face of the evidence, it seems very unlikely that at most more than a few per cent of the corporate genetic constitution of present-day Nagasaki is non-Japanese in origin. This conclusion is borne out by the fact that the published A-B-O blood group frequencies of persons living in Nagasaki do not differ strikingly from those of their neighbors, although one wonders about the selection for typing studies of “pure” Japanese (summary in Boyd, 1939). It is unfortunate that studies on the Rh gene frequencies are not available inasmuch as these, because of the difference between Caucasian and Oriental populations (summary in Mourant, 1954), would be expected to be especially revealing.

That there has been some admixture can scarcely be challenged. One who visits the three cemeteries where foreigners were customarily buried is impressed by the frequency with which there appear on the tombstones of the past three-quarters of a century Japanese female given names in combination with non-Japanese surnames. Unfortunately, the local church records, which might have been of real value in this connection, fared less well than the tombstones in the atomic holocaust. One of these cemeteries is the large and picturesque, semi-official “Foreign National” cemetery, conveniently subdivided into Russian, Dutch, English, etc., sections. There is a marked preponderance of males buried here. It would be passing strange if, during the 70 years preceding World War II, these men, even more than the casual sailors from so many ports, failed to leave a genetic heritage paralleling their socio-economic stamp.

Finally, some of the authors have the distinct impression of encountering from time to time in Nagasaki, individuals who, because of hair or eye color or facial conformation, strongly suggested Caucasian ancestry. Such persons are a very small minority but, in view of the general dominance in mixed Japanese-Caucasian marriages of the straight, black hair, the dark eyes, and the facial appearance of the Japanese, cannot be easily disregarded.

In striking contrast to Nagasaki, the Hiroshima area, although it has supplied relatively many emigrants to Hawaii and the U.S.A., has itself been characterized by very limited contacts with the West, even down to the time of World War II. It would seem that the possibility of a Caucasian element in this population may safely be ignored.

In addition to the possible role of historical (and pre-historical) factors in creating biological differences between the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, certain obvious present-day differences should be mentioned. We are indebted to Mr. Fu, Chinese Consul in Nagasaki in 1952, for the information that in February of that year there were 600 Chinese citizens in the city. These were not all “pure” Chinese; on the other hand, there were known to be many persons in Nagasaki whose ancestry was in part Chinese who no longer claimed Chinese citizenship. In Hiroshima there was no significant number of Chinese, but, by contrast, a relatively large “Korean colony,” numbering, according to data supplied by the Hiroshima Municipal Government, some 5,000 persons in January of 1952. There is reason to suspect that because of illegal entry, the number was actually somewhat larger. There were relatively few Koreans in Nagasaki.

3.4The different impacts of the atomic bombs on the two cities.—There are important differences between Hiroshima and Nagasaki in respect to their experience with the atomic bombs.

3.4.1Types of bombs.—Different kinds of bombs were used on the two cities, that dropped over Hiroshima being a uranium-235 bomb, whereas the one used against Nagasaki was composed of plutonium-239. As will be brought out in the next chapter, the radiation spectrum of these two bombs differed.

3.4.2Effects of the bombs on the two cities.—The over-all effects of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been adequately described elsewhere (British Mission, 1946; United States Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946; Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, 1950; Oughterson et al., 1951). Suffice it to say here that both the mortality and the morbidity from the bombs differed markedly in the two cities. Because of the deterioration in Japanese vital statistics during the war and the destruction of records in consequence of the bombings, exact casualty figures will never be available. However, it is usually stated that in Hiroshima approximately 60,000 inhabitants were killed immediately or died within a few weeks of the effects of the explosion, and an additional 70,000 sustained overt injury. This figure may be a very conservative estimate of the total casualties for two reasons. As the headquarters of the Second Grand Army, the chief concentration of military power in Central Japan, Hiroshima was a major “staging area” for the South Pacific theater of war. The elaborate facilities of the Second Army were almost completely destroyed. Because of war-time secrecy plus the deliberate destruction of surviving military records, the military casualties will never be known, but they number well into the thousands. In addition, on the day of the bombing there were a number of work parties from neighboring towns in the area. The total number of persons killed may exceed 100,000. With respect to Nagasaki, it is usually stated that there were approximately 33,000 civilian deaths, and 25,000 surviving injured. Nagasaki contained no military installations of any significance, so that the problem of accounting for military personnel does not exist for this city. Since many more records survived here than in Hiroshima, it is felt that the figures for Nagasaki are reasonably accurate.

The plutonium-type bomb detonated over Nagasaki actually had a greater explosive power than that used on Hiroshima. The reason for the greater number of casualties in the latter city is to be sought in large part in differences in the physical features of the two cities. Hiroshima is built on the triangular delta of the river Ota (Fig. 3.1). Only one small “mountain” (Hijiyama, height 69 meters) breaks the flatness of the terrain occupied by the great majority of the city. As indicated in Fig. 3.1, the bomb was detonated not far from the “center” of this delta. The topography of Nagasaki is very different (Fig. 3.2). The city lies at the head of a long, narrow bay, running up from which there is a “mountain,” with a valley on either side. The city extends along both sides of the bay and up into the two valleys, thus roughly resembling in its outlines the letter “X.” As indicated on the map, the bomb was detonated over one of the valleys, in which there was a heavy concentration of war industry (and, incidentally, the largest Christian colony and church in Japan, and the Nagasaki Medical School and its hospital). The serious effects of the bomb were largely confined to this one valley.

The official statistics concerning the effects of the bombs are paralleled by the experience of the ABCC in the two cities. For instance, in consequence of a Radiation Census carried out in 1949, together with certain later supplementary data, it can be estimated that in 1949 there were some 31,000 inhabitants of Hiroshima who had been within 2,000 meters of the hypocenter at the time of the explosion, whereas the corresponding figure for Nagasaki was 9,850. It can be further estimated that approximately 6,000 persons then resident in Hiroshima, and 2,000 in Nagasaki, had shown such symptoms of relatively heavy irradiation as epilation, purpura, and/or oropharyngeal lesions following the bombings (ABCC Semi-Annual Report, January-June, 1954). As can be seen from Table 2.1, among the parents of children falling within the scope of the Genetics Program, there were roughly twice as many relatively heavily irradiated in Hiroshima as in Nagasaki.

3.5The development of the ABCC program in the two cities.—Despite the number of persons on the ABCC roster (p. 2), there was, considering the magnitude of the total problem to be attacked, a chronic shortage of trained personnel, this imposed in part by budgetary considerations and in part by recruitment difficulties. The original plan had been that the ABCC would develop programs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which would be quite comparable in size. From the first, however, the concentration of personnel and facilities in Hiroshima far outstripped that in Nagasaki. The reasons were chiefly two: (1) Given the personnel shortages alluded to above, and the greater number of relatively heavily irradiated survivors in Hiroshima, it was obviously more economical of available personnel to concentrate them in Hiroshima. (2) For a number of reasons which need not be entered into here, logistical problems, including the matter of housing, were less serious in Hiroshima. To those of your authors who found themselves curiously stirred by the colorful and dramatic history of Nagasaki—a history whose shadows confronted one at many turns—it has always seemed regrettable that practical considerations dictated putting so much more effort into Hiroshima.

Because of the clear need from the outset for all the “genetic” data which could be collected from both cities, the Genetics Program came closer to an equality of effort in the two cities than did any other facet of the ABCC's activities. Every possible attempt was made to ensure the comparability of the genetics programs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two chief factors in this effort were the formulation of a rather rigid set of procedures to be adhered to in the two cities, and frequent exchanges of personnel. It is felt that in the main, this effort was successful. On the other hand, as will become evident in Chapter V, some of the reported differences in pregnancy termination between the two cities may not actually reflect true biological differences.