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An Accepted Fact. Japanese plastic surgeons did their best: at Tokyo University Hospital, Shigeko had 20 operations, regained some movement in her neck and fingers. But the scar tissue kept coming back. Then U.S. Editor (The Saturday Review) Norman Cousins heard of the "Keloid Girls," began a campaign to get them another chance. The Hiroshima Peace Center Associates, a private philanthropic group, agreed to sponsor 25 of the most badly scarred Hiroshima Maidens on a trip to the U.S. for surgical treatment; the New York Quakers offered to find them homes. In charge (without fee) of the long, arduous program of surgery at Mt. Sinai are three of the nation's top plastic surgeons: Dr. Arthur Barsky, Dr. Bernard Simon and Dr. Sidney Kahn.
In the intervals between operations (three or four may be needed for each patient), the girls pass from one Quaker home to another for visits. They are in such demand that the families vie with each other for the chance to put them up. Said one host: "When the girls first moved in, we looked for signs of homesickness or some uneasiness in their attitude toward us. But they couldn't be more cheerful or more delightful as guests." The girls have picked up enough English to get by without an interpreter; they have adopted sleek Italian hairdos, colored ballerina slippers and other U.S. fashions. Above all, they no longer shrink from meeting people as they did at home.
To the attendant doctors, these signs of mental healing are as important as the surgical gains. Although facial deformities are being improved, and the use of frozen hands and limbs gradually restored, plastic surgery can never totally efface the marks of the terrible seconds under the bomb. Shigeko and the others quietly accept this fact. Said one of the girls to an interpreter shortly before she was wheeled into the operating room: "Tell Dr. Barsky not to be worried because he cannot give me a new face. I know that this is impossible, but it does not matter; something has already healed here inside."