Today, Tokiko Stuckey will say a prayer. She prays most every Sunday, but this time it’s her annual petition for world peace - a sacred plea that no one will have to go through what she did 44 years ago on Aug. 6.
It was a hot day in Hiroshima in 1945, and 11-year-old Tokiko Hujita was on an errand for her uncle when “Little Boy,” an American atomic bomb with the explosive power 13,000 tons of TNT, exploded about 1,000 meters away. Tokiko says she didn’t hear anything but noticed a brilliantly colored sky.
“I looked up and thought, `What a beautiful sky.’ I had never seen anything like it before,” she recalls, saying it looked like the bluish-green water in a lighted swimming pool at night.
Seconds after the flash, Tokiko was pulling herself out of a nearby shallow wading pond, where the explosion and good fortune had tossed her. She says doctors have told her the water had saved her from burning.
Soaked and bleeding from deep cuts to her leg and breast, Tokiko sat in the pond and stared in disbelief at the chaotic scene of destruction and burned, screaming people around her.
“Everybody was screaming . . . I saw an arm sticking out of a pile of rocks, but I was so young I couldn’t help.”
She said she didn’t take any time to think about what had happened or how. She wanted to find her family. It took five hours for the frightened young girl to make her way home through an unrecognizable wasteland of rubble.
“I was surrounded by fires and buildings fallen down. There was nowhere to go.”
Eventually she came upon a familiar canal and knew she was close to home. But to cross the water, she had to wade through dead bodies.
Tokiko found her uncle and 11 cousins - with whom she had lived since her parents died several years before - alive and safe in a cramped underground shelter near what had once been their home. They bandaged her wounds with sheets. That afternoon a black, sticky rain fell.
During the next months of rebuilding her home and city, Tokiko would brush her long black hair only to have it fall out in clumps.
Knowing firsthand the horrors of nuclear warfare, it’s ironic that Tokiko now lives about 150 miles from where the U.S. government detonates nuclear weapons underground in Nevada.
But, Tokiko has experienced other paradoxes. After her parents died, she moved in with her uncle and his family in Osaka. Constant air raids prompted the family to later move to Hiroshima where they believed it was safe.
Marriage to a U.S. Army man brought Tokiko to the United States almost 30 years ago, and eventually to Cedar City. Now divorced, she lives with one of her four children in a trailer home. Her income is a welfare grant, and she spends her days at Southern Utah State College’s aging program, where directors and group members know her as Koko.
She said it makes her somewhat uncomfortable knowing that nuclear testing is so close by, but it’s not enough of a concern to make her move.
Tokiko sympathizes with southern Utah families who believe fallout from testing has caused loved ones to suffer cancer-related illness and death. She has undergone six operations to remove tumors in her back and stomach. At 55, she complains of stomach pains and occasional earaches she believes are side effects of the atomic blast.
As one of several hundred “habakusha,” or survivors of the the atomic bomb, Tokiko is flown by the Committee of Atomic Bomb Survivors in the USA to Japan every two years for a checkup at a clinic in Hiroshima.
According to a newspaper clipping she kept about a visit to the clinic four years ago, doctors are skeptical about Tokiko’s claim of being 1,000 meters from ground zero - where the bomb hit - because to their knowledge no one within that range survived.
But Tokiko doesn’t doubt her memory. She believes a Buddhist statue in her uncle’s home, blessed by her young father who possessed healing powers, saved her and her cousins.
And Tokiko hopes her prayer today, and every Aug. 6, will save others from the horror of nuclear war.