Riots Bring Back Disturbing Echoes for Peace Activist

A few blocks north of Sunset Boulevard, on a street of modest cottages and graceful palms, lives a woman named Kaz Tanaka Suyeishi.

Born in Pasadena 65 years ago, Kaz Suyeishi moved to this home in 1964 with her husband, Mas, and their 5-year-old daughter, Chris. The neighborhood, in east Silver Lake, was so pleasant that Kaz wouldn’t bother locking the doors.

Times change. Mas died 2 1/2 years ago. Chris is now married and living in Gardena. Kaz is often alone now, in a neighborhood that no longer seems so safe. Her home has been burglarized four times in recent years. Once, the family car was stolen out of the driveway. Two years ago, a young man was shot and killed across the street. During the riots, a few stores were looted and burned on Sunset. Kaz was transfixed by the images on TV.

“I just pray and pray and pray and pray,” she recalls in heavily accented English. “To me that’s like during the war.”

Meaning World War II. Though American by birth, young Kaz Tanaka did not experience World War II as did her late husband and other Americans of Japanese ancestry--as wards of the relocation camps. Her parents, after a few years running a grocery in Pasadena, had returned home with their little daughter.

Home, for the Tanakas, was Hiroshima.

The B-29 bombers had flown over her city before, but they never attacked. On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, 18-year-old Kaz Tanaka was not worried when she heard the airplane’s distant roar. The family had just finished breakfast, and Kaz had gone outside to fetch water to do the dishes. It was about 8 a.m.

Today, a thousand nightmares later, Kaz recalls how she watched the airplane soar overhead, how she spotted a speck of white float like a snowflake toward Earth. She can only surmise that it was the parachute used to slow the descent of the atomic bomb.

First came a blinding flash of light, then, instantly, a cataclysmic force that knocked Kaz to the ground. She landed face first, snapping her front teeth. A wall from the house collapsed on top of her.

Dazed, she crawled from the rubble. Through the fog--the interior of a mushroom cloud--she saw her father stagger toward her. Minutes before, he had gone outside wearing only his shorts to water the vegetable garden. Now he was bleeding, his body a brownish color. When Kaz reached for her father’s hand, the skin seemed to melt at the touch.

“Then I started to hear baby cry. Some people in the area, saying, ‘Help me, help me.’ ”

Kaz’s mother emerged from the wreckage of their home, also injured, though not as badly as her husband. Later, Kaz’s 17-year-old brother, severely hurt, was transported home by a classmate. Their school was destroyed in the blast.

For months the family lived outdoors, time nursing the wounds. All around them were the dead and the dying.

Kaz became so weak she was unable to stand. “I was 18 years old, but I see so many people dying, dying, dying. I think next is me.”

She was, she knows now, “very lucky.” The wall that collapsed on Kaz had shielded her from the full force of the blast. The friend who carried her brother home, who himself had seemed remarkably unscathed, would die because of the radiation. But Kaz’s family would survive.

The Japanese would create a name for survivors of the atomic blasts that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki-- hibakusha. Cancer is common, sickness lingers. Kaz defied the odds.

But by 1949, Kaz Tanaka--a rare American hibakusha-- was well enough to fulfill a dream. She returned to U.S. soil, to Hawaii, to study fashion design.

One day in 1950, strolling along a Honolulu boulevard, “I saw a very distinguished American gentleman,” she recalls. “He stopped right in front of me and he pointed at me and he said: ‘You killed many soldiers at Pearl Harbor.’ ”

It is hard to say exactly when Kaz Tanaka Suyeishi started to see herself as a peace activist. Her English was weak in 1950; she remembers responding to the man with a few key words and pantomime:

“Me. American . . . Hiroshima. Bomb . . . hurt me. Hurt me. . . . Me American. You American. . . . You, me . . . brother, sister.”

For many years she has worked in the peace movement, speaking in schools and churches against nuclear weapons. This month, as part of events commemorating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, her schedule included remarks at the city of Santa Monica’s Peace Day celebration, as well as talks at a Buddhist temple and a Methodist church in Little Tokyo.

Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world does not seem that safe to Kaz Suyeishi. More and more nations have developed nuclear capability. And, closer to home, the sound and the fury of Los Angeles is not reassuring.

She thinks of a teen-age neighbor who “looks like a gang member.”

“But he’s such a nice boy,” she adds. “When I see him, I say hello. When he sees me, he says hello.

“That’s the peace message.”