Launch of Nuclear Age Is Re-Created in Exhibit

There was no shortage of inspiration Thursday when Susan Masuoka took an audience on the East Coast back in time to the dawn of the Nuclear Age.

There was no shortage of help, either.

Masuoka is a Los Angeles native who runs the main exhibit center at Tufts University near Boston. That’s where her latest exhibition Thursday night began taking an unusual look at the lingering effects of the atomic bomb.

It’s a daring subject: Controversy over this country’s use of nuclear weapons to end World War II caused the Smithsonian Institution to cancel a 1995 exhibition and prompted the resignation of the director of its Air and Space Museum.

Masuoka hopes to avoid a similar fate during the 2 1/2-month run of her exhibition, “Hiroshima/Nagasaki: The Fallout.”

Part of the reason is her background. The Los Angeles native is the daughter of Japanese Americans who overcame the stigma of being interned in American relocation camps more than half a century ago.

The other part is the unusual range of support for her exhibit that the 49-year-old Masuoka has received from friends in Los Angeles.

Her former pediatrician, a Van Nuys doctor who studied Hiroshima bomb victims in the late 1940s for the U.S. government, volunteered his expertise and will lead seminars on effects of radiation exposure later this month for exhibition audiences.

A former classmate of Masuoka from her days at University High School in Los Angeles, who went on to document American A-bomb test sites and weapons manufacturing facilities, has contributed a series of photographs for display.

A family friend from Monterey Park who as a child was sent to live in a Japanese American relocation camp has created 1,000 handmade origami crane figures that are hanging in the exhibit.

Others have loaned Masuoka personal letters, family photos and startling mementos from World War II and the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Masuoka’s research assistant is Trisha Nakano, a former Westlake Village resident and Agoura High School graduate who attended Tufts.

“We’re trying to give a historic context, not to paint one side or the other in black and white,” Masuoka said. “I think my background is an asset.”

Masuoka admits having her doubts at first, however.

The Smithsonian fiasco was still on everyone’s mind two years ago when Tufts sociology professor Paul Joseph returned from a speaking tour of Japan and suggested an exhibition at the Medford, Mass., campus.

The Washington museum was embroiled in a yearlong controversy over a proposed atomic bomb exhibit that critics charged would portray the United States as heartless aggressors at the close of the war against Japan. Veterans groups asserted that use of the two bombs--which claimed about 210,000 lives in Japan--prevented the need for an invasion and spared the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.

The protests led to the cancellation of the exhibition and, a short time later, the resignation of Air and Space Museum head Martin O. Harwit.

“We knew what we could be up against,” Masuoka said. “So we decided to show various sides of the issue. . . . We decided we wouldn’t draw a conclusion about the use of the bomb in 1945.”

But artifacts loaned to Masuoka are likely to speak volumes about the wartime era and the subsequent Nuclear Age.

A Diary and the ‘Fat Man’ Are On Display

Photos and documents, including a diary kept by a Japanese American woman interned in an American camp, are being shown. There is a replica of “Fat Man,” the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, loaned by the National Atomic Museum in New Mexico.

Stacks of Japanese coins fused together, pieces of melted roofing tiles and clothing burned by the Hiroshima detonation have been loaned by the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima and the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki.

Also on display is a mock-up of a basement bomb shelter similar to those constructed by nervous Americans during the uncertain days of the 1950s’ Cold War era.

Masuoka’s father, retired research scientist David Masuoka of West Los Angeles, contributed the U.S. government’s letter of apology for his internment. It is displayed next to a photo of Masuoka in uniform as a member of the U.S. occupying forces in Japan after the war.

Nearly 1,000 paper origami cranes folded by Bill Shishima of Monterey Park are among some 8,000 contributed to the Tufts exhibit by volunteers from the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. The figures have come to be known as a symbol of peace in Japan.

“Many people on the East Coast don’t know what went on” at America’s western relocation camps, said Shishima, a 67-year-old retired teacher. “It’s important that they do know, so something like that never happens again,”

Masuoka’s former University High classmate, documentary photographer Richard Misrach, has loaned photographs of U.S. atomic test sites for the exhibition. Photos by Misrach, of Berkeley, have been the subject of seven books, including “Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West.”

Dr. James N. Yamazaki, who was Susan Masuoka’s pediatrician when she was a child, will be a guest speaker at the exhibition Oct. 28 and 29.

A U.S. Army field surgeon who served in Europe’s Battle of the Bulge in World War II, Yamazaki was sent by the U.S. government after the war to study the children of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He has spent a half-century since tracking the effect of radiation on them and has written a book, “Children of the Bomb.”

Yamazaki, 82, said physicians in the Boston area have long been peace activists. On his visit, he said, he hopes to try to underscore how Hiroshima and Nagasaki are examples of “what nuclear war could bring” to today’s society.

Masuoka, who studied art history and design at UCLA, said the exhibition is geared to Tuft’s 8,000 students as well as youngsters living in the Boston area.

“Today’s students are too young to remember how dramatically our culture was influenced by the atomic bomb,” she said. “But it certainly was.”

Opening night visitor Nitin Puri, a 21-year-old Tufts senior from Detroit, agreed.

“It was numbing. It brings something that happened 50 years ago into today.”