Irene Sampson came to the United States as a refugee from Latvia during World War II. As a young mother, she moved with her husband and their toddler to Japan in August 1965, 20 years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her husband, a medical student at UCLA, had begun working at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, “which was basically doing a study on the after-effects on people,” Irene remembers. The family lived there for three years. On the 60th anniversary of the bombing, the Berwick resident describes what daily life was like in Japan. Interview by Karen Marzloff

The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was still quite sensitive to the whole American-Japanese relations. They did not want to have the American presence be too disruptive. So my husband wasn’t supposed to have a uniform. So there he was doing his service (during the Vietnam War), and we were living in just a regular house in Japan, with a maid and everything. All of us who were part of ABCC were scattered through the community wherever they could rent houses for us. Some of us were fairly close to each other, others were on the other side of town.

My first impression of Japan, I was almost disappointed because it seemed so ordinary. I was leading my life. It’s only as you live that you feel what a remarkable, different culture it is. Coming back to the United States afterward, the biggest in-my-face impact was the change in pace. Japan was a much more relaxed way of living. 

Hiroshima was very modern in the sense that there was nothing old. But there was very, very strong industry. It was a very striving, prosperous city. There was shipping. And Mazda, of course. There was a whole section that was very industrialized and modern and booming. We lived in an ordinary neighborhood. Hiroshima is on the water, and they soak their wood in the ocean to make it last longer, to preserve it maybe, and then they build with it, so there’s always that sea-type smell to the whole atmosphere. Our shopping was daily in the local markets. Once a week we’d go Saturdays to the base. We didn’t have a car, but we could requisition one of the drivers who during the week would drive the patients back and forth to the ABCC buildings for their treatment. It was nice, it was going to local markets to pick up whatever vegetables one wanted. Some of the vendors would be pushing their pushcarts, like with fish, and whatever was the catch of the day, the fish lady would be pushing her cart and you’d go up and look at it and decide what you wanted for dinner. The food was sort of an acquired taste. I didn’t take immediately to it. But now that I have, I still crave it sometimes.

I learned enough Japanese to get around. It’s a hard language to learn. It’s also very hard to learn Japanese because everyone wants to practice their English. The house we lived the longest in Hiroshima was maybe half a mile up the hill from a Jesuit high school for Japanese boys, and so just about every afternoon after school somebody would stop by because they wanted to practice their English or they wanted to speak or get to be friends or something. Misao Fukuda was a more frequent visitor than others. Some were shyer, he was a little bit more aggressive. They would ask questions about us. They were curious. Then Fukuda told about his father, who had been in the bomb, the whole thing, how he survived the bomb. Somebody in our maid’s family was involved, too. She was in her 40s or something like that, single, not married. That was the plight of a lot of women. In any country after war, the men have been killed off and there’s nobody to marry.

Things were rebuilt, people were leading their lives and everything, but the people who were survivors of the atomic bomb did not have anything. They were almost like outcasts. In fact there was a whole area where the more.… It was not visible, let’s put it this way. The world goes on. It’s sort of like veterans here are not visible, you know. If you come back maimed or with one arm or whatever, you don’t see those people that much. The same thing. There was this sort of sad outcast place where these people lived, and they didn’t really live the best of lives.

I don’t think anything was deliberate, except in the sense that these people were not as desirable as marriage partners because of fear of what the genetic effects would be. They really got left behind. I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly how they felt. They’re too polite. They’re almost embarrassed to tell you something that will be painful for you to hear. They’ll start giggling about something or laughing about something that’s really not a laughing matter, but that’s just a cultural kind of thing, that “I’m not going to impose my story on you.” Many survivors were very eager to tell their story, so if one wanted to sit and listen, which at that time, it was a “heard one, heard all” kind of thing, I think one could have been a great historian there, gathering stories. But there was that business of almost making light of it because they didn’t want to burden you with it.

Rebuilding is sort of a strange concept in Japan in some ways. They have shrines that go back a thousand years, right? But it’s not a thousand-year-old shrine. When they say this is a thousand-year shrine, it means that that shrine looks exactly as it was made a thousand years ago. But it might have been rebuilt five years ago. Same way, same methods and all that. But it’s not like there’s this piece of wood that’s a thousand years old. The structure, the way that it looks is a thousand years old, but it’s made of totally new wood because they just built it last year or something. So everything was destroyed, everything was rebuilt. It was already quite a few years. It doesn’t take long.