Hawai'i A-bomb survivors prep for checkups

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

Esther Fujioka remembers the B-29 that flew overhead without warning.

Izumi Hirano of Salt Lake remembers the fire and shattered glass that hit his face and head. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

She remembers lying in a field, trying to cover her eyes, ears and nose. She remembers the gigantic mushroom cloud in the sky. She remembers thinking the world was coming to an end.

Nearly 56 years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the images flicker back for Fujioka as the Kailua woman thinks about beginning her fast tonight in preparation for tomorrow's doctors' exams.

She and about 90 other bombing survivors now living in Hawai'i are subjects of humanitarian gesture from a Japanese medical team that has been coming to Hawai'i every other year since 1977, offering free comprehensive medical testing.

The doctors who will examine her are familiar with illnesses that may be related to radiation exposure.

Fujioka is healthy, but the fasting and testing have become a biennial ritual.

"I feel that I might be contributing to their research," she said.

The testing is available for any local survivors of the the1945 U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, which killed about 140,000 people, and a second atomic bombing three days later on Nagasaki, which killed another 70,000 people just days before Japan surrendered in its war with the United States and its Allies.

While the bombing survivors' moment in history has ended, medical research continues. The medical team includes five doctors, a Hiroshima government representative and an interviewer from the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.

The team continues to look for more survivors, including offspring of women who were pregnant during the bombing exposure. The program assures confidentiality and includes an interview about survivors' location during the bombing so that the team can estimate the amount of radiation exposure.

Survivors' stories are those such as Izumi Hirano's.

He was born in Hilo but moved at age 4 with his family to Japan. In 1945, he was a 16-year-old school boy in Hiroshima, a little more than a mile from ground zero. He remembers the fire and the shattered glass that hit his face and head.

All these years later, he tries to forget.

He returned to Hawai'i in 1949. He's 72 now, lives in Salt Lake and has two children and three grandchildren.

Sometimes schools invite him to come and speak about his experience. He likes to talk about peace rather than war.

Hirano, president of the Hawai'i Chapter of the American Society of Hiroshima-Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors, also encourages survivors to participate in the medical testing. He welcomed the doctors to Honolulu yesterday.

Mito Jaworowski will be at the local program at Kuakini Medical Center for her checkup.

Jaworowski, now 78 and living in Kapahulu, said she still feels lucky when she thinks back on her life in Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

She had a headache that morning and was waiting for a street car to take her to her office job. She waited 40 minutes, and the street car never came, so she went home and escaped a bomb that killed many of her friends and co-workers.

Jaworowski went on to marry an American. She moved to Hawai'i in 1975 and keeps busy serving food one day a week at Odoriko Restaurant in Waikiki and working four times a week at Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center.

Fujioka, the former American school girl in Japan, has started to write her autobiography as a legacy to her children.

Now 73, Fujioka struggles with words to explain her history as an American woman who lived with her Japanese grandparents in a Hiroshima suburb and did wartime work for the Japanese.

She wonders whether her children will understand how she came to marry an American soldier who fought in Europe. They were simply caught up in the circumstances of war, she said.

In many respects, circumstances also made Fujioka a survivor. Her experiences made her strong enough to get through the loss of a son born prematurely, the death of her husband, the drowning of another son and the loss of a daughter to cancer.

"I had to go through so many hardships throughout my life," she said. "But I can endure because of what I went through."

Her school friends from Hiroshima visited Hawai'i the other day. They apologized for ostracizing her when she was a young American in wartime Japan.

Fujioka said her autobiography will concentrate on the positives, reflecting the peaceful existence she lives because of the lessons of war. Witnessing horrors, she said, makes health and happiness easier to appreciate.

Staff writer Tanya Bricking can be reached at 525-8026 or at tbricking@honoluluadvertiser.com.