Monday, September 14, 2026

Hiroshima Maidens

Hiroshima Maidens: The Story of Twenty-Five Remarkable Women and Their Heroic Journey to America

by Rodney Barker

ISBN: 0670806099
Viking Publishing, 1985
240 pp, Paperback

Among the historically significant but mostly forgotten aftermaths of World War II was the Hiroshima Maidens Project, a humanitarian effort that sent 25 young women who had suffered severe facial and body burns in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to America in the mid-1950s for reconstructive surgery, which was still relatively undeveloped in Japan.

The project - controversial at the time in both America and Japan — was organized by several people and organizations, most notably Japanese Methodist minister Koyoshi Tanimoto, American political journalist Norman Cousins and The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a U.S.-based Quaker organization founded in 1917 to promote peace, humanitarian relief, and social justice.

Author Rodney Barker spent five years researching this book (1979-84), going back and forth between America and Japan and interviewing all 25 Maidens, Cousins, doctors and nurses from Mt. Sinai Hospital where the operations were conducted, the Maidens' interpreters and host families and a host of other connected people. He also most likely interviewed the Rev. Tanimoto, although this has not been 100% confirmed. Barker focuses primarily on three of the maidens' stories.

Notably, Rodney Barker's family in Darien, Connecticut, hosted two of the Hiroshima Maidens during their time in America, and there is a photograph in the book of Barker at the age of nine with the two in his house; Suzue Oshima (mistakenly ID'd as Suzue Hiyama in the book) and Misako Kannabe. Barker's family were Quakers. His acquaintance with the Maidens in the early years surely helped him build the trust he needed to get candid interviews with the Maidens in later years.

Readers expecting to ease into the book are in for an unexpectedly powerful, out-of-the-blue punch in the solar plexus, even before the first chapter. The prelude section might make you hate the American media even more than most people do now. The callousness of some members of the media is inexhaustible.

After that, Barker, who cannot be blamed for what is described in the prelude, examines the Hiroshima bombing, life after the bomb, the international effort to help the 25 women selected, their approximately 18 months of medical treatment in America, aspects of the cultural exchange and the legacy of the mission. There is compassion, insight and plenty of actions and decisions to ponder of people who rallied for and against the humanitarian efforts.

As you would expect, some of the Maidens fared better than others, both in their reconstructive surgeries and in their ability to adapt to life afterward. There was hope. There was despair.

Refreshingly, since the book was written in 1985, there is none of the vitriolic hatred of America that is de rigueur in books written today about the war.

Review by Marshall Hughes, author of Rural Reflections: What 11 Years in Provincial Japan Taught Me.

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