Dr. Tomin Harada; Surgeon to Victims of Hiroshima

Dr. Tomin Harada, a Japanese surgeon who devoted his life to mending the disfiguring injuries suffered by victims of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima and to promoting world peace, died Friday. He was 87.

Harada died of acute pneumonia in a hospital in Hiroshima, his hometown.

When the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Harada was a military doctor stationed in Taiwan. After the war, he set up a private practice in Hiroshima, where more than 86,000 were killed and hundreds had been left mutilated and scarred.

The surgeon devoted nearly all of his professional attention to the hibakusha (victims of the bomb), who had strange, unidentifiable illnesses that Japanese doctors lumped into a single category of “atomic illness,” and horrible raised scars called keloids.

Harada was as deeply concerned about the psychic scars suffered by the bomb victims as he was with their physical wounds.

The hibakusha were rejected as marital partners because of their disfigurements and fears that any offspring would be born deformed. Many worried about developing cancer from the radiation exposure.

In an attempt to remove the keloid scars, Harada operated on dozens of the bomb survivors at the Atomic Bomb Hospital, which he headed for decades while also running his own private hospital.

Plastic surgery was not widely available in Japan, however. In 1955, Norman Cousins, then editor of Saturday Review, raised money to bring about 200 female survivors of the bomb, the “Hiroshima Maidens,” to the United States for plastic surgery. Harada led the group to New York’s Mt. Sinai Medical Center, where many of the operations were performed.

In 1957, Harada successfully pressed the Japanese government to enact a law to provide medical treatment to atomic bomb survivors.

He also worked to further world peace. In 1964 he embarked on a tour of Europe and the U.S. with activist Barbara Reynolds. His organization, the World Peace Study Mission, sent delegations of bomb victims to nuclear and potential nuclear nations, including France, Britain, China and the former Soviet Union. The victims described their experiences in the hope that future Hiroshimas could be averted.

In recent years Harada immersed himself in the cultivation of roses. He developed his own hybrid, which he called Hiroshima and sent to peace activists in the United States, China, Germany and other countries.

Harada often said the people of Hiroshima harbored no resentment toward the United States. Japanese authorities said the blast claimed as many as 140,000 lives: the 80,000 who died in the bombing and 60,000 others who died in later years of injuries or radiation-related illnesses, including cancer.

The suffering unleashed by the devastating explosion that ended World War II may have sealed Harada’s wife’s fate.

She was in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1961 and died the same year, shortly after the 16th anniversary of the bombing.

Harada could not say with certainty that her death was related to the nuclear attack that leveled Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

“As a doctor, I know I can’t blame this on the bomb. But as a human being,” he said in a 1985 interview, “I can’t help wondering.”

Harada later survived a severe case of cancer of the colon, which he said was unrelated to the bomb. He is survived by four children and 10 grandchildren.