<i> Hibakushas--</i> survivors of World War...

Senji Yamaguchi was digging an air-raid shelter one warm August morning when hell descended on Nagasaki.

A blinding light flashed across his eyes. Intense heat consumed his body. The right side of the 14-year-old boy’s chest and head melted away.

Across town, Sakue Shimohira waited nervously in an air-raid shelter, while boys from her neighborhood still played in the streets. The all-clear signal had sounded, so the shelter was only about one-third full when the bright light flashed.

A thunderous blast hurled the 10-year-old girl to the ground, knocking her unconscious. When she awoke, most of the boys lay dead or maimed. Her brother was vomiting a yellow substance. Her home had collapsed into a pile of rubble.

“Looking out of the shelter, I saw people walking this way and that, mostly indistinguishable whether they were male or female, with their eyeballs pushed out, their viscera hanging out, and their hair gone,” Shimohira recalled.

“Among them were a boy crying aloud, his body swollen with burns like a big pumpkin, and a mother, herself burned black, but still holding firm in her arms a charred baby and struggling to be alive.”

It was about 11 o’clock, Aug. 9, 1945. The United States had launched its second nuclear attack on Japan in three days. The end of World War II was less than a week away.

Last Saturday, weary from a whirlwind tour of the United States, Yamaguchi, now 55, and Shimohira, 51, took refuge in the South Bay, delighting in a taste of sushi at a restaurant in Hermosa Beach and enjoying intimate conversation in a beachfront home several blocks away.

The two Nagasaki victims are hibakushas-- a Japanese word used to describe survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were innocent children turned foreboding adults. They are anti-nuclear activists in the purest--and most horrific--sense.

About 120,000 people perished in the attacks on the two Japanese cities, with several hundred thousand others dying later from their injuries. About 350,000 survived.

Yamaguchi and Shimohira were joined in the South Bay last weekend by two other hibakushas-- Yasuko Ohta, 56, who also survived the Nagasaki blast, and Sumiko Umehara, 62, who had been in Hiroshima three days earlier when an atomic bomb was dropped on that seaport city.

The group held about 100 sessions across the United States during a two-week tour aimed at persuading President Reagan to accept a recent offer from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for a mutual moratorium on nuclear testing. A testing ban, they said, would be a crucial first step toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.

“There is no way but to learn from the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” the four survivors said in a written statement. “That is, there is no way out of this nightmare unless people all over the world realize through the testimonies of us victims that nuclear weapons cannot exist side by side with humanity, that they are by nature inhumane, and there is nothing of any value which can be defended by such inhumane weapons.”

The group failed in its immediate goal, with Reagan giving the go-ahead for two underground nuclear tests in Nevada while they were in the United States. Yamaguchi was in Las Vegas when the second underground test was conducted at the Nevada Test Site last week.

“It is very, very frustrating,” he said through an interpreter in Hermosa Beach. “I got angry very much. The United States has provoked the Soviet Union by having this series of tests.”

Still undeterred, the hibakushas, who had broken into three separate touring groups, continued their appeal for the abolition of nuclear weapons. They directed their message to the American people.

The four talked to high school students, farm activists, church groups, civic organizations and Japanese-Americans from North Carolina to Texas. They visited hibakushas who had married American sailors and moved their shattered lives to San Diego. They showed films and passed out pictures. Yamaguchi attended a Passover seder with Jews in Santa Monica.

“I feel it is my obligation to do this,” said Yamaguchi, who leads Nihon Hidankyo, a nationwide Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors that has affiliated groups in all 47 Japanese prefectures.

When Yamaguchi speaks, the corner of his reconstructed mouth twists down,

and the crumpled skin of his right cheek stretches awkwardly from his eye. He has skin cancer, leukemia and keloids. He is unable to father children.

Yamaguchi’s body is a reminder of that hellish August morning 41 years ago. Beneath his deformities, though, thrives a hopeful soul that eclipses the ugly ailments and serves as vibrant testimony to his faith in mankind and its future.

A Japanese television journalist who followed the determined Nagasaki survivor on his tour of the United States said Yamaguchi is admired in Japan as a courageous leader of that country’s anti-nuclear movement. The Japanese affectionately call him Senji-san, an informal salutation used among friends.

“He is making this trip at the risk of his life,” the journalist, Shinichi Murayama, wrote in a letter to organizers of the American tour in which he said Yamaguchi’s maladies are strained by traveling. “He confided to me that he had made his will in which he wrote (about) his life and his ardent hope for the abolition of nuclear weapons.”

Hundreds of thousands of Japanese survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic blasts, but many of them, including Yamaguchi, often wish they had not. Their lives have been replete with radiation-related diseases, recurring personal tragedies and the burden of being ostracized from their own society.

Yamaguchi said he has attempted several times to take his own life. When he was released from the hospital seven months after the Nagasaki bombing, he was feared by other children, who fled when they saw him, screaming, “Here comes the Red Demon!”

Only the prospect of sparing others the suffering he has endured has given Yamaguchi the will to carry on.

He speaks optimistically about his lifetime work to abolish nuclear weapons. While acknowledging that a proliferation of bigger, more destructive nuclear weapons continues, he derives comfort from the absence of nuclear war in the years since Nagasaki.

“This is great progress,” he said through the interpreter. “We must prevent nuclear war. This must not happen again. Nagasaki must be the last time.”

The four hibakushas were in the South Bay for just one night. Yamaguchi stayed in Hermosa Beach at the home of June Pulcini, a local representative of the Asia Resource Center, a nonprofit educational organization based in Washington. The three women stayed in Redondo Beach at the home of Cindy Biddlecomb, a member of a peace organization called Clergy and Laity Concerned.

The Asia Resource Center and Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese advocacy organization for hibakusha, co-sponsored the group’s American tour. The four travelers stayed with families throughout the tour. Clergy and Laity Concerned agreed to serve as host to the four visitors while they were in the South Bay.

The four hibakushas have little but nuclear disaster in common. Yamaguchi, who was on his fourth visit to the United States, has made the abolition of nuclear weapons a full-time mission for 35 years. Shimohira works as a typist in a printing company and sells life insurance in Nagasaki. Ohta manages a coffee shop in Tokyo. Umehara is a housewife and grandmother, having adopted a daughter after the war.

The three women, while not bearing the visible evidence of their suffering in the way Yamaguchi does, also have tragic tales to tell. They either have given birth to deformed children or have been unable to have children at all. They said it took them nearly 40 years before they were able to talk about their suffering with strangers or even think about sharing their grief with the world.

Ohta, a slender, bespectacled woman with deep brown hair and a quiet manner, has a 23-year-old daughter who was born blind and autistic. Ohta has two healthy sons, but she also suffered several miscarriages.

“We are here to let people know what will happen to them,” she said through the interpreter.

Umehara is a talkative, animated grandmother, who leans forward when she speaks and who looks directly into the eyes of her American hosts, even though neither understands what the other is saying. Umehara lost a baby boy and her husband during the war, and when she remarried, she was unable to have more children. She adopted a daughter.

“I lost my baby,” Umehara said through the translator, referring to her 3-year-old boy who was killed along with her aunt and grandfather when the bomb hit Hiroshima. Umehara said she survived the bombing because she was working as a maid about a mile and a half from ground zero when the bomb hit.

Shimohira, who was on her second tour of the United States, lost her mother, sister and brother in the Nagasaki bombing. Another sister committed suicide in 1955 after being unable to cope with her radiation sickness.

One of Shimohira’s two daughters was born with heart problems, the other with glandular deformities. One of her three grandchildren has a deformed heart.

In 1984, Shimohira toured West Germany to appeal for a ban of nuclear weapons in Europe. She has also traveled to South Korea to gather testimony from hibakushas living in Korea.

“We have been going through hell,” Shimohira said through the interpreter. “The war will not end until we have all died, and our children have died and their children have died.”

The four hibakushas were tired Saturday night as they assembled one last time in the Pulcinis’ living room in Hermosa Beach before flying back to Japan. Shimohira, who had traveled through North Carolina, Illinois and Wisconsin, rested her head on the back of the couch. Ohta and Umehara, who traveled together through Utah, Colorado and Texas, sat quietly, their hands folded on their laps.

Yamaguchi and the three women listened attentively, nonetheless, to questions posed to them through translator Hiroshi Ohta, who had been provided by the Asia Resource Center. They talked a bit about what they remembered from the days the bombs struck, but they were more interested in reflecting upon their experiences in the United States.

While discouraged that the underground nuclear testing went ahead during their visit, the hibakushas said they derived strength to continue from the students and community activists they encountered nationwide.

Generally, however, they were disappointed that American students did not know more about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some had heard of Hiroshima, but did not know that Nagasaki had also been bombed, they said incredulously.

“The students had been taught that they dropped the bombs to save lives,” Shimohira said. “But after hearing our stories, they were totally shocked.”

Shimohira reached into her purse and pulled out two pieces of notebook paper with names and addresses scribbled on them. Students from Oak Park, Ill., wanted to become pen pals with students in the two bombed cities. Shimohira had agreed to act as courier.

An eerie silence befell many high school classrooms as stunned students watched films and looked at pictures of the devastation from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Omehara said. Some students cried, and others were allowed to skip classes for the rest of the day, she said.

“I think we got our message across,” she said.

Ohta said students asked her about the American decision to bomb targets in Libya in an effort to strike at the heart of terrorist activities in that country. Does she support non-nuclear bombing?

“Superficially, Americans are kind, but I wonder if deep down they want war,” she said through the translator. “Why couldn’t the Americans talk to solve the problems?”

About 6:30 Saturday evening, as the hibakushas sat in a circle in the Pulcinis’ living room, the beach beneath the second-floor room began to clear of sunbathers and volleyball players. A few bicycles sped past on The Strand, and roller skaters and boys on skateboards passed on their way home.

As the sun dropped to the edge of the water--a huge, radiant orange ball gracefully slipping beneath the blue horizon--Yamaguchi, as if overwhelmed by his memories, stood up abruptly and walked out onto the balcony.

He rested his palms on the wooden railing, staring pensively at the sunset. He watched intently until the last sliver of orange had been consumed by blue.

When he returned to the living room, he sat quietly for a moment. Finally, he reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

“Any more questions?” he asked his interpreter.