The entry leaves the Fukuryu Maru No. 5 at the quay in Yaizu at six in the morning of 14 March 1954. This piece follows her from the day she left, through what the Japanese government established about where she was on 1 March, to the arguments in Tokyo and Washington about what had happened to her crew, and to the death of Aikichi Kuboyama in September.
The voyage
She was a wooden long-line tuna boat of 99.9 tons, registered at Yaizu in Shizuoka prefecture, owned by Kakuichi Nishikawa and skippered by Hisakichi Tsutsui, with twenty-three men aboard. The Japanese government’s aide-memoire, handed to the American ambassador, John Allison, by the vice-minister of foreign affairs, Okumura, on 27 March 1954, reconstructed her movements from the statements of the skipper, the fishing master and the crew, from the log and the fishing records, and from the Central Meteorological Observatory’s account of the weather. It is the primary record of the voyage and the Defense Nuclear Agency reproduced it in full in its 1982 history of the Castle series. All its times are Japan Standard Time.
She left Yaizu at 11:30 on the morning of 22 January and headed south-east. On or about 27 January, at about 27 degrees north and 148 degrees east, she turned east. She began fishing on 3 February at 26 degrees north, 171 degrees east, and fished several times until 12 February. Then, in order to fish near the Marshall Islands, she changed course and, fishing on the way, reached on 23 February a position near 11 degrees 11 minutes north, 173 degrees 33 minutes east. From there she worked west. The task force’s 2013 reviewers noted that these were known to be poor waters, that the Japanese tuna fleet took no more than one per cent of its catch from the whole Marshalls area, and that by Ralph Lapp’s account the weight of tuna she caught was less than the weight of bait she used; by the same account she had left the rest of the Japanese fleet near Midway on 12 February at the urging of the radio operator and over the objections of the fishing master. That detail, when it reached Washington, became the basis of Lewis Strauss’s private suggestion to the President’s press secretary that the boat was “probably a ‘Red spy ship.’”
On 1 March, at about 1:15 in the morning by the ship’s clock, she arrived at 12 degrees 3 and a half minutes north, 166 degrees 56 and a half minutes east, and began setting her lines along a track running west. She finished at 3:42 at 11 degrees 52 and a half minutes north, 166 degrees 35 minutes east, ran ten minutes to the north-east, about a mile and a quarter, and drifted with her engine stopped. At about 4:12, after she had drifted about twenty minutes, “a streak of light which seemed to have resulted from an atomic bomb explosion was seen”, from a position the account puts at approximately 11 degrees 53 and a quarter minutes north, 166 degrees 35 and a quarter minutes east. The detonation at Bikini was at 6:45 local time, which is 3:45 by Japanese time; the ship’s clock was about twenty-seven minutes slow, or the time was remembered loosely.
“About 0412 hours on March 1, a reddish brilliant light was seen in the direction of west-southwest of the vessel. The color of this light gradually turned to white-yellow and again back to red and faded away.” No wind reached them, but after seven or eight minutes “two blasts were heard in succession”, and a mushroom-shaped cloud rose where the light had been and spread “covering the sky with dark clouds”. The crew began hauling in their lines at about 4:30, “progressing in the opposite direction toward the northeast”, by machine, with the engine going slow ahead and stopping and going again. “In the present instance all hands with the exception of a few engineers on watch were working on the upper deck and in the wheel house.”
About three hours after the flash, at an estimated 11 degrees 56 and three-quarter minutes north, 166 degrees 42 and a half minutes east, “ashes started to fall on the deck, which was turned white.” The hauling ended at about 10:30 near 12 degrees 3 minutes north, 166 degrees 53 minutes east, and the boat “headed for north in the direction where ashes were not falling and cruised with a speed of seven (7) nautical miles per hr trying to evacuate the area.” The crew then worked on the upper deck processing the catch. “The ashes kept falling until about noon”, when the vessel was at an estimated 12 degrees 14 minutes north, 166 degrees 53 minutes east. After 4:40 the next morning she turned north-west for Yaizu.
“In the following two or three days all the crew suffered from a slight headache and some of them felt nausea.” Seven or eight days after the ash, “the crew began to feel painful irritations, from what looked like burns on the neck, face, ears and places where they wore ‘hachimaki’ (a cotton towel wrapped around the head) which were exposed to the ashes.” The vessel had one licensed radio operator, second class, “who has a slight knowledge of English”; the set was in good order; the listening hours were unfixed. “There is no evidence that the Fukuryu Maru No. 5 received warnings, by radio message or any other means.” Nor had any other vessel. The crew heard no aircraft.
The task force’s reconstruction puts her about 85 miles east-north-east of the burst, about 25 miles outside the eastern boundary of the Danger Area; the Japanese embassy’s later note put her 19 miles outside at the flash and 26 at the ash. The patrol planes that searched for shipping before the shot had swept the north-west, where the forecast sent the fallout. The one that swept to the east on the morning of the shot became so contaminated at 9:49 that it turned back, and by one reading of its log it broke off its search about 65 nautical miles east of ground zero, just short of where the boat would have come into view. Nobody on the task force knew the boat existed until the story broke on 16 March.
The crew’s own words reached the West through Life magazine, whose Tokyo bureau chief, Dwight Martin, interviewed all twenty-three and whose account the Associated Press summarised on 25 March. Sanjiro Masuda: “Then we saw flashes of fire as bright as the sun itself rise to the sky.” “Someone yelled to the men below, ‘The sun is rising in a strange fashion. Hurry up and see it.’ Then I realized that what we were watching could not be the sun, for the light was coming from the west. It was at this moment that I first felt fear and first thought of pikadon (atomic bomb).” The glow faded “leaving a dull red like a piece of cooling iron”. The skipper, whom Life called Tadaichi Tsutsui: “Some ash fell in my eyes and began to burn. Then the ash got in my nostrils. I blew my nose and took off my straw hat and tried to brush the ash away and off myself.” Masuda: “I remember that shortly before I entered the engine room for my bath after the ashes fell, I felt much warmer than usual, almost as if I was glowing.” Kuboyama: “On the first night we were unable to eat our supper. We tried drinking some sake (rice wine) to improve our appetites, but our appetites would not improve and the sake did not make us drunk. We were very depressed. Some of the crew grumbled ‘pikadon’ but others said it couldn’t be.” Tadashi Yamamoto, three days out: “Our faces felt very hot and then when our faces began to turn this pencil-lead color, we knew something extraordinary had happened. If we realized how sick we were, I think we would have put in at Midway and asked the Americans there for help.” Masuda again: “We had washed the dust—the ash—from our bodies, but we forgot that we had been regularly handling our nets and ropes and that they had not been washed. The itch became almost unbearable, and we began breaking out with huge, irregular blisters. They were terribly painful.”
Yaizu and Tokyo
The boat came into Yaizu at six in the morning of 14 March. By the Commission’s own history, “the effects of radiation had become so prominent and irritating that several members of the crew reported to the local hospital”; two were sent to Tokyo University Hospital, and within days all twenty-three were in hospital. On 16 March the Associated Press reported from Tokyo that the crewmen “were burned and blistered by a two-hour shower of snow-white, radioactive ashes”, that Dr Masao Tsuzuki, the country’s authority on radiation injury since Hiroshima, had found one man “in serious condition from burns resembling ‘a very bad sunburn’”, and that Japan’s foreign minister had told the Diet the United States might be asked to pay. The Maritime Safety Board said it had received no warning of the date and would have warned the hundred Japanese boats near the test area if it had. The owner said the boat had been about eighty miles from the blast; the skipper “insisted he was outside the banned area as defined to him”. The next day the embassy offered a team from the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission at Hiroshima, and in Washington Sterling Cole of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy “said it was possible the fishermen were spying but said he has no official report”.
The fish mattered as much as the men. Tuna from the hold had gone to market before anyone tested it; “Health authorities with Geiger counters prowled Tokyo markets today. Most of the catch was recovered and buried, but a few hundred pounds are believed to have been eaten. The price of tuna tumbled 40 per cent.” Eight more boats came in slightly radioactive. The fishing industry called it “a near fatal blow”. Tokyo University’s physics department analysed the ash and found it was mostly calcium carbonate, pulverised coral; Dr Tsuzuki called the burns “X-ray dermatitis” and said they were unlike the burns of Hiroshima, which had been made by heat and direct radiation and not by anything that touched the skin. One nuclear specialist, Professor Mitsuo Takeya, said a regular atomic bomb could not have thrown debris eighty miles, and that the blast “may have been a ‘hydrogen caliber bomb.’” That inference, from the ash, was exactly what the Danger Area had been drawn to prevent.
The Americans’ medical mission went badly, for reasons both sides have described. John Morton of the Casualty Commission reached Tokyo on 18 March with three American and three Japanese doctors, examined the two men in the university hospital, went to Yaizu, boarded the boat, sampled the ash and the fish, and counted the twenty-one men there with Geiger counters; on 19 March he said the men “would recover completely in about one month” and called the newspaper reports exaggerated. Merril Eisenbud, the director of the Commission’s Health and Safety Laboratory, arrived on 21 March “and was greeted courteously but was not permitted to examine any of the fishermen”; after much persuasion he obtained urine samples from some. The Commission’s historians explain the breakdown: the Americans would say nothing about what the ash contained, because the ash could tell the Japanese, and anyone they told, that the bomb had burned lithium, and the Japanese physicians “simply could not accept the assurances of American experts that this information was unnecessary.” The Japanese, for their part, “did not wish once again to be ‘guinea pigs’ for American experiments.” The Shukan Asahi had already printed the guess that a lithium bomb had been tested.
The treatment the fishermen got is the part of the story the task force’s medical officers took hardest. By mid-April, by an American report, “every treatment imaginable had been used”, including repeated auto-transfusion, in which twenty to thirty millilitres of a patient’s blood were drawn from a vein and injected into a muscle, a procedure the task force’s surgeon, Clinton Maupin, had watched Japanese military doctors use on prisoners of war when he was one, and which he likened in effect to being hit in the arm with a baseball bat. Two-thirds of the crew contracted infectious hepatitis, by Lapp’s account, and American doctors suggested it had come in with the transfusions.
Washington
Strauss, who was in the Pacific for the second shot, sent the President’s press secretary a report saying the injuries to the Marshallese were exaggerated and the claims about the fishermen unverified. On 24 March the President passed that on and deferred the rest. On 31 March, at the White House, Strauss read his statement. “A Japanese fishing trawler, the Fortunate Dragon, appears to have been missed by the search but, based on a statement attributed to her skipper, to the effect that he saw the flash of the explosion and heard the concussion six minutes later, it must have been well within the danger area.” The fishermen’s situation “is less certain due to the fact that our people have not yet been permitted by the Japanese authorities to make a proper clinical examination. It is interesting to note, however, that the reports which have recently come through to us indicate that the blood count of these men is comparable to that of our weather station personnel. Skin lesions observed are thought to be due to the chemical activity of the converted material in the coral rather than to radioactivity, since these lesions are said to be already healing.” The only contaminated fish, he said, were those in the open hold of the trawler; the United States would reimburse the Japanese government for interim medical care and family relief, “including wages”. He added that in the waters round Bikini “almost all fish caught are normally poisonous” at certain seasons anyway. The embassy’s answer, handed over on 12 April, set the seven or eight minutes and the nineteen and twenty-six miles against him, and explained that the fuller examination the American doctors had offered had not been undertaken “because of the special psychological situation in which these simple fishermen find themselves”; they resented the kind of examination proposed.
The Operations Coordinating Board’s status report of 9 June gives the state of play three months on: “The United States has no authoritative information indicating that the 23 fishermen from the Fukuryu Maru either are getting better or getting worse. Our experts in Japan still have no access to the fishermen.” Ambassador Allison was planning to explain to Congress that a settlement “might go as high as 1 million dollars”; the Japanese had informally claimed about seven million, “but only about $800,000 of this is for direct damages”. A Japanese research ship, the Shunkotsu Maru, was sampling the sea round the Marshalls with no American scientists aboard, and the embassy noted reports in Japan that it had become dangerous to walk in the rain.
September
Aikichi Kuboyama, forty years old, the radioman, was the sickest of the twenty-three through the summer. He nearly died in early September. By the Casualty Commission’s count he had by then received no fewer than seventy-three transfusions of blood and plasma. He died in a Tokyo hospital on the evening of 23 September 1954, and was believed, the Associated Press wrote, to be “the world’s first death resulting from a hydrogen bomb explosion.” “Less than an hour after Mr. Kuboyama’s death United States Ambassador John M. Allison issued a statement expressing ‘extreme sorrow and regret at this most unhappy event.’” The next day Japan “plunged into almost hysterical mourning”; an editor said only the death of an emperor could have commanded similar attention. The Japanese autopsy fixed radiation sickness as the fundamental cause; an American Army doctor who watched it “could not disagree” with the preliminary findings but wanted to await the pathology; the Casualty Commission’s physicians thought the death likely attributable to “serious overtreatment”, and the Commission’s director of biology and medicine recorded it as complications of infective septicaemia. Allison sent the widow, Suzu Kuboyama, a cheque for one million yen, about 2,700 dollars, with a letter: “While no sum of money can compensate for your loss it is the desire of the Government of the United States that something be done to make life easier for you and your children in the future.” The United States had by then offered Japan one million dollars for everything; Japan was asking five to seven. On 4 January 1955 the United States offered and Japan accepted two million dollars as payment in full for all damage from the tests, the Associated Press reported, to be distributed by Japan “in such equitable manner as it may determine”. Foreign Minister Shigemitsu replied that “the sum tendered is acceptable to the government of Japan.”
The Japanese had their own name for the fallout by then, shi no hai, the ashes of death, and in November 1954 the Commission sent six scientists to a conference in Tokyo, arriving “less than two months after Kuboyama’s death” with, their historians say, “considerable apprehension”, and came home with more data on fallout, American and Russian, than they had brought. The boat herself survived. The entry gives the sequence; this piece has tried to give the voyage.