The Sunday Profile : Ever Vigilant : Aug. 6, 1945. A single atomic bomb scorched the earth of Hiroshima. People burned to ash. Now, 50 years later, we still struggle with its impact. Five who were affected share their perspectives on the specter of nuclear war.

In Hiroshima, a 16th-Century castle town, a place born of tiny fishing villages, the Americans came, 50 years ago next Sunday.

Around the world, observers will remember, via church services and newspaper stories, Aug. 6, 1945--perhaps the last major commemoration for aging atomic bomb survivors.

On that clear Monday, at 8:15 a.m., just after an all-clear air-raid siren had sounded, a single plane dropped a single atomic bomb: “Little Boy.” A huge fireball exploded, 10 times brighter than the sun.

Hiroshima was leveled. Near ground zero, victims burned to ash. Others collapsed from a lethal dose of radiation.

The toll: 114,000 dead--one-third of the city’s population--and 78,000 injured. In Los Angeles the next day, The Times’ banner headline read: “Atomic Bomb Hits Japan. Man’s Most Destructive Force. . . .”

On Aug. 9, U.S. forces dropped a second atomic bomb, this one on Nagasaki, killing or injuring 75,000 people. Five days later, Japan surrendered, ending World War II.

History’s take on the A-bomb is still uncertain.

Last December, the U.S. Postal Service canceled plans for an A-bomb commemorative stamp after the Japanese government protested.

A month later, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum scaled back a proposed exhibit centering on the Enola Gay--the B-29 that transported the Hiroshima bomb--after U.S. veterans groups complained that it dwelt on damage and death.

Veterans and historians who launched the protest said President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs saved hundreds of thousands of lives--American and Japanese--by making an invasion of Japan unnecessary and by bringing a quick end to a bloody war. For some, the A-bomb’s legacy is not about politics or America versus Japan, but rather about a vigilance wrought by the awesome capacity of people to harm one another.

Here are the stories of five Southern Californians who share a perspective on the specter of nuclear war:

‘They Can Offer Their Stories and Their Wisdom’

Emma was a skinny Japanese girl with stick-straight hair and a blond Shirley Temple doll--not to play with but to look at, in all her American perfection.

Her play doll was fashioned of old socks. It was wartime, with no room for luxuries. But on Aug. 6, 1945, she was a happy, outgoing 12-year-old in the rural outskirts of Hiroshima.

That day, the A-bomb exploded in a noiseless flash of white light. At school, Emma ducked under her desk, unharmed. But her world changed. The wounded swarmed the countryside, looking for help, begging for water.

She avoided the eyes of the injured. Why them? And why not her?

Now, Emma Shimoyama is a Culver City homemaker, the guilt behind her. And one of her sons is a doctor who volunteers to treat atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha, the very same people she had once tried to avoid.

“It’s nice to know that he’s very interested in his culture,” she says shyly. “I am very proud and happy.”

In February, 1992, Dr. Jeffrey K. Shimoyama was one of two Americans selected for a five-week international research project to study hibakusha in Hiroshima. For his work on another project, Shimoyama examines a 67-year-old patient one recent morning at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Los Angeles, as part of a joint effort by Japanese and American physicians to treat and monitor hibakusha.

Jeffrey Shimoyama, 36, chats in polite Japanese as he hooks his patient up to an EKG machine. How far away were you from the bomb’s hypocenter? The white-haired man knows exactly: 2.774 kilometers. Less than two miles.

Later, the doctor says: “It’s a two-way street. We, as physicians, can offer medical care and a listening ear, but on the other hand, they can offer their stories and their wisdom.”

He has heard his mother tell her story without bitterness. Shikata ga nai --it can’t be helped.

Her father was uninjured. But her 95-year-old mother, who still lives in Hiroshima, has suffered internal problems since the bombing. And years later, glass shards surfaced in a sister’s skin, mocking reminders of shattered windows in the family’s home.

Jeffrey Shimoyama and his mother are close. They talk and laugh easily together in English, throwing in a little Japanese. She teases him about his “funny Japanese”; he teases her about childhood dinners of “Banquet [frozen] chicken over gohan [steamed rice].”

He speaks with passion about the A-bomb’s toll, sometimes pounding his fist on the dining room table of his West Los Angeles home. She looks down when asked about that day, her hands twisting in her lap.

“If people could see the [Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park], I guess there won’t be war like this,” she says after a long pause, her voice barely audible, “because, that way, people could see it and actually feel the damage.”

Three years after the war’s end, Emma Shimoyama moved to Los Angeles to live with family friends. She and her husband, an accountant, raised four children, all of whom are in medicine or dentistry.

Jeffrey Shimoyama, who is single, is the second oldest son. He says his mother rarely talked about the bombing when he grew up. He didn’t think about it much.

But for nine years, he attended Japanese school on weekends, learning the language and the culture. He also studied karate and earned a black belt. His warm-up: 1,000 kicks, 1,000 punches.

Now, he is an internal medical specialist at UCLA Medical Center. He first thought seriously about treating hibakusha four years ago when he heard about the international medical program in Hiroshima.

The hibakusha are aging, says Jeffrey Shimoyama, and it’s important for the next generation to keep their spirit alive.

“We’ve become numb,” he says. “We’ve heard of violence inflicted on so many people on such a larger scale so often, it doesn’t really strike a bell in our hearts anymore.”

At a recent church lecture on the A-bomb’s toll, Jeffrey Shimoyama handed each person an origami crane--the same hand-crafted symbol of hope held by the bronze statue of a girl at Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima, her arms outstretched to the heavens.

‘It Leaves a Tremendous Feeling of the Injustice’

He was 28, a U.S. Army field surgeon at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Dr. James N. Yamazaki watched 18-year-olds die by the dozens in the snow and fog of Belgium’s Ardennes Forest, a week before Christmas, 1944.

The wounded cried for medics, but he could stop only for men who had a fighting chance. Few did. In his 106th Infantry Division, two-thirds of the 12,000 troops were killed or injured. It was his first job as a doctor. He thought he would never feel as helpless again.

He did. Five years later, as a pediatrician in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he saw what an atomic bomb could do to children and the unborn children of pregnant mothers. The horror dogged him. Even today, semi-retired at 79, he searches for answers.

“Every decision-maker, every citizen, needs to know the human cost of nuclear warfare,” says Yamazaki, a UCLA clinical professor of pediatrics. “I want no mistakes. I want no decisions that ignore the very particular vulnerability of children.”

He speaks softly, his words measured. Yamazaki is the type of gentle doctor who drew rabbits on patients’ prescriptions--the way his own family doctor did. He grew up in Los Angeles, the son of an Episcopal priest.

These days, he and his wife, Aki, have three grown children and six grandchildren. Framed on his living room wall in Van Nuys is a reminder of his roots: a Japanese silk brocade purse owned by his grandmother in the 1860s; on the gold clasp is an etching of a mother and child.

In 1949, Yamazaki was the only American doctor in Nagasaki as the physician-in-charge of the U.S. Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. (He also worked in Hiroshima and studied cases from the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific, where U.S. forces tested nuclear weapons after the war.)

At the time, he had no government reports on radiation, no medical journal articles on how to treat atomic bomb survivors. He had never heard the term nuclear fallout.

In Nagasaki, he examined Nishi, who was 21 when the bomb exploded. She was 20 weeks pregnant, a mile away from ground zero. She had terrible burns and infections; her baby died at 2 months.

He examined Fusa, who was six months pregnant and 1,600 yards from ground zero. She miscarried the next day.

He examined Toshio, whose mother was 1,200 yards from the hypocenter when she was pregnant with him. The 5-year-old boy was mentally retarded and could not speak.

And he did the first study on how a fetus is affected by nuclear radiation, examining 30 women who were within 2,200 yards of ground zero in Nagasaki--43% of the pregnancies ended in death through miscarriage or other means, and 17% of the babies were mentally retarded or had other abnormalities.

What he saw, Yamazaki says, “is so strong, it’s beyond words. . . . It leaves a tremendous feeling of the injustice life metes out to different people.”

He recalls his five decades of research in a new book, “Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician’s Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima and the Marshall Islands” (Duke University Press), written with Louis B. Fleming.

In 1989, Yamazaki returned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for follow-up research. He met a woman who was half a mile away from ground zero in Hiroshima and who was 20 years old and pregnant at the time. Her daughter is mentally retarded; she blames the bomb.

“Doctor,” she pleaded, “please tell this story.”

‘We All Know What My Country Did to Hiroshima’

She wasn’t sure if she believed in humanity.

So she started to walk.

At 51, Judy Teru Imai quit her teaching job, sold her furniture and packed a few valuables to put in storage. In February, 1990, she began a 9,000-mile global peace walk from the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica to Hiroshima, the city of her ancestors. On that sparkling first day, 125 people joined her. Imai, a third-generation Japanese American, was the only one to complete the route.

“I’m walking for peace,” she told people along the way. “My roots go back to Hiroshima, and we all know what my country did to Hiroshima.”

On Aug. 6, 1993, she entered the city bearing a bouquet of birds of paradise and roses. Before TV cameras, in a T-shirt and shorts, she bowed her head in silent prayer at the arched cenotaph, designed in the shape of an ancient Japanese clay burial house to protect the souls of A-bomb victims.

To get there, she endured exhaustion, blisters and cold feet. But later, at home, she realized that she had discovered who she was.

“I’m American, and I’m Japanese,” says Imai, at her five-acre Lake View Terrace ranch. “I never said that before. I was always Asian. Now, I look at myself and [say] no! There’s so much of me that’s American that I can feel blessed about.”

Before, she wasn’t sure.

In December, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, where her mother’s side of the family lived. (They escaped injury.) The next year, at age 3, she and her family were interned in a World War II relocation camp in the dusty Sierra foothills of Manzanar with thousands of other Japanese Americans. When she was 6, the Americans dropped the A-bomb.

“It just made no sense,” Imai says. “All my life I’ve looked out of a window of confusion about my identity.”

In her 20s, she ignored the confusion. She got married, raised a son and baked bread in a two-story Simi Valley home with a pool. But something was missing.

Ten years later, she was divorced and started to think about her place in the world. In 1987, she joined 200 Soviets and Americans on a peace walk from Leningrad to Moscow. Then she decided to quit her teaching job at a North Hollywood health trade school and organize the Hiroshima Peace Walk.

She never walked alone. Along the way, people dropped out, and others joined in. One 28-year-old man in Bombay said he would walk for a week but lasted more than two months. Locals gave food and lodging, or the walkers slept in pup tents.

Throughout the journey, Imai carried a small lantern lit from the “Flame of Peace” in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, meant to burn until the world is free of nuclear weapons.

Strangers saw the peace flame and welcomed them--in northern Japan, where a balding monk with a cane taught them to dance barefoot in a Buddhist temple; in a Polish village, where an old woman invited them into her bare home for tea and her last piece of bread; in Auschwitz, where a Holocaust survivor showed them the spot where, as a 12-year-old boy, he last saw his mother in the old Krakow ghetto.

“There’s a magic [in the world], but on another level, I think it’s nature. There’s a cycle of things,” she says, weeping as she describes the kindness of strangers, “a rhythm, an ebb and a flow. And once you get into it, our needs are always met . . . and we get to see sights so glorious that it makes you happy to be alive.”

Now, back home, she is taking care of her ailing 83-year-old father and living off savings. Imai, her father and her 31-year-old son live on a ranch started by her grandfather, who once raised chrysanthemums and sweet peas.

Here, in the shelter of lemon and plum trees, she ponders her next move.

“I used to ask myself this question: ‘Why am I here? Why do we exist?’ ” she says. “And I think I’m on the right track, thinking, knowing or sensing that we’re here to learn and grow . . . to take risks. That’s where change begins.”

‘We Have to . . . Find Meaning in Life’

Kayoko, 6, was hot and bored.

At the tiny train station a few blocks from home, the little girl ducked into the coolness of a big man’s shadow. Her mother had sent her to buy a ticket for a distant relative who had dropped by their Hiroshima house that morning, Aug. 6, 1945.

She heard the crowd murmur: “B-nijuku. “ A B-29. Kayoko glanced up and saw a silver speck in the clear sky. So what. She bent down to trace pictures in the dirt with her fingers just as the Enola Gay dropped its load.

Kayoko Kanomata is sure that the man’s shadow protected her, somehow deflecting the A-bomb’s deadly rays. Only her right arm--the one tracing pictures--was badly burned. And, in another twist of fate, the unexpected appearance of the relative had led her family to cancel plans to go downtown, where the bomb surely would have killed them.

Fate intervened, she says, for a reason.

“People have saved my life,” says Kanomata, who teaches at Belmont High School in Los Angeles. “This [relative], she died. Probably this man standing in front of me is dead or died. And I say, ‘What am I doing to give back what they have sacrificed?’

“We owe a lot to others for our own existence. This is one of the reasons I went into teaching. I felt that by teaching, I could maybe impact some of our students. . . . We have to go on and somehow try to find meaning in life when so many horrible things appear to happen randomly.”

That morning, the horror swept by her in waves. The injured looked like nothing she knew, bloated, deformed, charred black. Some hobbled nude, their clothes ripped off by the bomb’s force. But, from her child’s perspective, she knew only that her arm hurt where her skin had flapped open.

Finally, her mother came for her at Yokogawa station, dragging an injured leg, carrying her baby brother as fires raged throughout the city. A sticky black rain fell--radioactive soot. Kayoko saw badly burned people crumple, trying to make their way north toward the river in the Misasa area, where cool waters beckoned. But the river had turned into a graveyard, bobbing with corpses and dead carp.

She followed her mother to the shelter of a bamboo forest, where they tried to sleep. Throughout the night, people from the countryside searched for their relatives, their voices desperate.

These days, Kanomata’s right arm still bears a small white scar, her only physical reminder of the bombing. She doesn’t need reminders. She doesn’t like to talk about that day. Even her own doctor doesn’t know she is an A-bomb survivor.

Most of her colleagues don’t know. She teaches English as a second language to 10th- and 11th-graders. Some don’t speak English well and eat lunch alone; others are so homesick they want to run away to their native country. Sometimes, when she sees their spirits droop, she tells them about Hiroshima. She says: “Hey, I survived, and so can you.”

After 33 years in the classroom, Kanomata says her students “have given me so much to live for.” In class, she tricks them into speaking English with icebreaker games such as the one she announces in mock falsetto: “Getting to know you. . . .”

“I have passed on my baton to so many students,” she says, her voice filled with warmth and wonder. “I could die today and know there was a reason that I existed, that there was 50 years of meaningful living.

“I’ve tried, and I think, found peace with the fact that even among the most terrible of weapons, that total destruction did not take place. Hiroshima is again alive . . . and just like that, the people again have come alive.”

Kanomata’s father and brothers also survived the attack. Two years after the war, the family came to Los Angeles. Kanomata graduated from UCLA, got married and raised a son, who now attends UC Irvine.

She and her retired husband like to travel. On vacations in the Colorado mountains, she puts a Vivaldi concerto on her portable stereo and watches the golden aspen leaves twirl in the breeze.

On those days, she thinks: “I am so happy to be alive.”