Denver man was Japanese soldier struggling in ruins

By Jolie Breeden, Rocky Mountain News
August 6, 2005

Hibakusha.

It is a word not often heard in America, not nearly so often as the other words associated with Hiroshima.

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Atomic bomb. Nuclear fission. Radiation sickness. Utter devastation.

Hibakusha, translated literally from the Japanese, means bomb-affected people - survivors of the world's first nuclear holocaust.

Michio Taniwaki was one of them.

Taniwaki, 79, now lives in a small brick house in Denver, but 60 years ago, Hiroshima was his home.

Born in Hayward, Calif., in 1926, Taniwaki moved to the town of Susaki, Japan, when he was 6 years old.

Although the family enjoyed their American life, Taniwaki's father, the eldest son of a Susaki farmer, was called home to work the family plot when his father died.

It was there, among the rice paddies and tangerine trees, that Taniwaki grew up.

But by Aug. 6, 1945, Taniwaki was an unwilling soldier in the Japanese army, training in Hiroshima.

He'd been drafted seven months earlier; his American citizenship meant nothing to the Japanese government.

"I had to act like the Japanese and obey the Japanese," Taniwaki said. "I knew there was no way I could escape."

So Taniwaki left his family farm and traveled the 80 miles to Hiroshima. There, he trained as a soldier in a city that was becoming increasingly militarized.

At the time, everyone did some sort of work for the war effort, from training to resist enemy forces to destroying buildings to create a firebreak in case of bombing.

But Hiroshima wasn't bombed.

From his barracks near Hiroshima's main city park, Taniwaki could see the B-29 bombers as they ravaged the nearby city of Kure.

"We thought we are lucky we are not bombed yet," he said.

As it turned out, the reprieve in Hiroshima was not luck at all, but design.

The United States had declared a moratorium on incendiary bombs in areas that were potential targets for the A-bomb. They hoped to limit the damage to those cities to better study the effects of the new weapon. Taniwaki never accepted the good fortune as permanent, though.

"Air-raid alarms were going on pretty regularly," he said. "We knew bombs would be going off over our heads soon. It was only a matter of time."

He just didn't know what kind.

About 5:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, Taniwaki and 20 other soldiers were ordered to enlarge an air-raid shelter that was dug into a hill about 50 feet above the barracks. It would be their salvation.

The men worked without a break, digging the tunnel-like shelter with picks and shovels. Every so often, one of them would wheel a cart filled with the dirt they scraped from the cavern walls to the shelter's entrance. They worked that way for more than two hours.

"Then it happened," Taniwaki said.

At 8:15 a.m., one of the men had pushed the dirt-filled cart to the entrance. He saw a flash and was thrown backward into the retreat. Then he heard an explosion.

Deep in the shelter, Taniwaki heard it, too.

"It didn't sound that loud," he said.

Taniwaki and the other men calmly made their way out of the enclosure, which was about a mile and half from where the bomb detonated.

The sight that met them was astounding.

"We could see the entire barracks sitting in the rubble," said Taniwaki. "Some were still standing, leaning to the east. Probably a mile or more that we could see was flattened. Within a limited view, everything was gone."

Taniwaki knew immediately that Hiroshima had fallen victim to an extraordinary weapon.

"We could see that this was not something usual," he said. "We assumed that it was a new type of bomb. I thought 'Hiroshima is finished.' "

The men made their way down the hill in a silence that would last for several days.

"We didn't talk much," Taniwaki remembered. "Awestruck, I think is the word."

Taniwaki, as one of the few uninjured soldiers, was soon sent to help out in a hospital that had been set up at the Niho elementary school on the city's eastern edge.

There he watched a steady stream of walking wounded pour into the makeshift medical center that lacked bandages, doctors and oil for burns.

"So many of them died," Taniwaki said, shaking his head. "We carried them out and brought in a new patient."

Although he didn't sleep for the three days he was there, Taniwaki could do little for the badly burned victims, many of whom were women and children.

"Skin was falling off and there was nothing we could do," he said. "At first we tried not to look at them. But of course you can't avoid looking at them. Seeing them. Helping them."

As bad as the hospital duties were, Taniwaki's next assignment was worse. He collected the corpses from around the city, transporting them to temporary crematoriums.

"Nobody liked that job. If you tried to pick up the corpse, the skin peeled off and stuck to your hand," he said. Then he fell silent.

Taniwaki was later sent west through the broken city to stand guard against looters. At the bridge over Kyobashi River, "You could see from one end of the city to the other," he said. "There were no houses standing."

Throughout the ordeal, Taniwaki and others in Hiroshima remained in the dark about the specifics of their nightmare.

"Since before the war, we didn't have newspaper or radio," Taniwaki said. "Information trickled down to us. Atomic bomb. Radiation. These were words we heard much later."

At noon on Aug. 15, though, Taniwaki got all the information he needed when a scratchy radio transmission from Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender.

"A lot of people thought 'No, this couldn't be true,' " he said. "A lot of people thought, even in August, that Japan was going to get the final victory."

Taniwaki was never one of them.

"I was 100 percent sure Japan was going to lose the war," he said.

Taniwaki eventually returned to his family, who was safe in Susaki. In 1953, he moved to California and then to Denver in 1960. He's led a quiet life since then, working in an appliance service center.

For the most part, Hiroshima is behind him, although, some years ago, he happened to meet George Caron, the tailgunner on the plane that dropped the bomb.

"While you were looking down from the top of the mushroom cloud, I was looking up from the bottom," Taniwaki told him.

He said he didn't expect any remorse from the gunner, and he didn't get any.

"He wasn't a bit apologetic," Taniwaki said.

Still, Taniwaki, doesn't waste time placing blame for bombing. For him, it's just a condition of war. Perhaps that's why he believes the same thing could happen again.

"If there's another war like World War II, I have no doubt that so many countries that possess nuclear weapons will use them," he said. "I think that's human nature."

In Hiroshima, a moment of silence and offerings

• Tens of thousands of people gathered in Hiroshima today to mark the 60th anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack with a moment of silence and offerings of flowers and water.

• More than 55,000 people joined in the austere ceremony in Peace Memorial Park, a sprawling, tree-covered expanse that for one day each year becomes the spiritual epicenter of the global anti-nuclear movement.

• A moment of silence was observed at 8:15 a.m., the instant of the blast.

breedenj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2933