James Yamazaki – An American hero
All James Yamazaki ever wanted, as a youth, was to be treated as an American, but few outsiders bothered to look beyond his Japanese heritage. Yet, this soft-spoken and gentle pediatrician overcame prejudice to become a world-renowned expert on the devastating effects of nuclear radiation and a tireless advocate for peace. His experiences and the contacts he made as a pediatric resident at Cincinnati Children’s were crucial in determining the course of his extraordinary career.
James Yamazaki was born in Los Angeles in 1916 and grew up there in a Japanese-American “ghetto.” His father was an Episcopalian priest; his church and community center welcomed immigrants and encouraged assimilation. His family spoke English, and he and his friends engaged in typical American pastimes. Yet prejudice was all around him. His non-Japanese American classmates never invited him to their social activities. “We had the feeling we weren’t welcome,” he said in an interview in 2011, “but on the other hand, we had no connection to Japan in terms of culture.”
Yamazaki attended UCLA from 1935-1939, but even a degree from a prestigious university couldn’t get him a job more challenging than picking and crating fruit. Discouraged, but not despairing, he got himself accepted to medical school at Marquette.
Called to serve
And then came Pearl Harbor. His idealist father saw this as another opportunity to prove their patriotism, encouraging his son to join the armed forces. Yamazaki enlisted but was granted a deferment to complete his medical school education. Meanwhile, his family and neighbors were interred in detention camps across the country.
Following graduation in 1944, he was deployed to Germany as a battalion surgeon. He was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and spent the remainder of the war in a German POW camp. “The most impressive part of my war experience is that I survived,” he acknowledged. But he was also forced to confront the reality of the vicious hatred between peoples and cultures that had culminated in war.
His homecoming was bittersweet. He was reunited with his wife, Aki, a fellow college student whom he had married rather precipitously – as was common during wartime – prior to being deployed overseas. But he never met the son that was born to them while he was away: the child had been born with lethal cardiac anomalies, likely the result of congenital rubella syndrome.
Later that summer, while he and Aki were enjoying an army-sponsored vacation in Asheville, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “We paid only passing attention,” he later admitted in his book, Children of the Atomic Bomb. “An ‘atomic bomb’ meant nothing to us.” He had no idea that, in just a few years, the survivors of these blasts would alter the direction of his life forever.
Yamazaki was able to secure an internship at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and then came to Cincinnati in 1947 for his pediatric residency. He identified Drs. Ashley Weech and Katie Dodd as two mentors who had a profound influence on his career. Dodd, he reported, demanded “absolutely full attention to each case” and this “became the standard for my care of every patient during my career as a pediatrician.” He and Aki named their first daughter after her.
Yamazaki also had the opportunity to do research with Josef Warkany, MD, now considered the father of teratology. Warkany was studying malformations in children born to mothers who had been inadvertently exposed to high doses of radiation. “My interest grew quickly,” he acknowledged, “for this was a new field of study, a virtually unexplored subject, and the death of my son had awakened a concern about the paucity of medical knowledge about malformations.”
Dealing with the fallout
In 1948, Weech attended a meeting of the National Research Council of the American Academy of Sciences. They were establishing a commission to study the effects of nuclear radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Weech recommended that Yamazaki become a member of this group, specifically to conduct research on the effects of radiation – immediate and long term – on children. After serious discussion with Aki, Yamazaki agreed, and he was appointed lead physician of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission.
In 1949, Yamazaki, along with his wife and new infant son, arrived in Japan for the first time. If he had assumed, as had some of those who selected him, that his Japanese ancestry would be an asset, he was disappointed. The British occupying Hiroshima at the time were even more prejudiced against Japanese than the Americans had been, and ironically, the Japanese bureaucrats saw him as 100 percent American!
But Yamazaki’s persistence and equanimity, along with his genuine concern for his patients and their families, won him support within the Japanese medical community. Within several months, he was transferred to Nagasaki and there began to conduct research and forge partnerships with physicians at Nagasaki’s University Medical School. He was both fascinated and heartbroken by the bomb survivors’ conditions. He and his collaborators were the first to study and report on the long-term effects of radiation. They discovered that the developing brain is the organ most sensitive to radiation and that gestational age was more of a determining factor in the type and severity of pathology than radiation dose. Infants exposed in utero were often born with microcephaly, mental retardation and seizures; young children exposed to radiation frequently developed leukemia and other cancers.
A haunting experience
In 1952, he and his family returned to Los Angeles. He opened a private pediatric practice and also worked with graduate education and the medical executive committee at UCLA. His experiences in Nagasaki continued to haunt him. He felt a responsibility to share his knowledge of the widespread and long-term effects of radiation, particularly with young people who had no memories of the atomic bomb and its aftermath. He participated in radiation exposure studies following the Marshall Islands test bomb in 1954. In 1957, he joined a newly formed AAP committee to study the effects of medical radiation on children. Along with Dr. Fred Silverman, he helped establish safe standards for pediatric radiation exposure (which finally eliminated those ubiquitous shoe-store fluoroscopy machines).Throughout his long life, he has remained an active contributor to conferences and symposia on nuclear issues sponsored by many groups, including the US Department of Public Health, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the United Nations. He has made many trips to Japan since his initial visit, as an advisor and humanitarian. In 1995, he published his memoir, Children of the Atomic Bomb, and shortly thereafter developed a website of the same name, which is still active, advocating for nuclear disarmament and world peace. He has been the recipient of many commendations for his life’s work, including the Socially Responsible Medicine Award from the LA Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility in 2008.
In an interview a few years ago, Yamazaki said “Anyone who truly understands the consequences of a nuclear bomb and has an ounce of humanity would never let it happen again.” According to his youngest daughter, Caroline, he is currently living at home with a caregiver in White Salmon, WA. His wife, Aki, passed away in 2014. He is now 101 years old.
“Value each individual as a person, as a physician, that is our main purpose,” he advocated. Yamazaki certainly has practiced what he preached.
-- M. Elaine Billmire, MD, May 2018
