japan

Thursday marks 70 years to the day since the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later it dropped a second on the city of Nagasaki. The devastation is widely believed to have brought an abrupt end to World War Two – with Japan’s surrender. But what about the appalling human cost of the bombing? Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from Hiroshima. The incident of atomic bombing horrified the world and the human for their lives. Even in the present the surviving family members eventually remembered the day when hundreds of thousands died. Injured people were asking for water. But we were told not to give water because they would die after the first sip, which was true. Survivors remembered how brutal and gruesome was the period when people were dying. While the disaster’s immediate aftermath was equally fraught, a general sentiment prevailed that the challenges unfolding were preferable to being at war, according to Mrs Nakabushi. The people suffered through sad and harsh experiences. Despite all the distress, they were sure it wasn’t just them that thought, ’It’s better than war.’  For Mrs Nakabushi, the bombing – and the loss of her mother – dictated the course of her life, as was the case for thousands of traumatised hibakusha. She sees herself as one of the lucky ones: after living in Hiroshima with her father and stepmother, she married her university academic husband and moved to Osaka at the age of 25, before having three children, now in their forties. For in addition to the injuries and stress, many survivors – and later, their children – were stigmatised and rejected by Japan’s deeply homogenous society as a result of their experiences. Women suffered rejection from marriage partners fearful that they would not produce healthy babies, while employers also discriminated against hibakusha, making it difficult for them to return to the workforce. The radiation exposure has clearly not disappeared – as alarmingly reflected in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima crisis, when local residents were reportedly shunned from clinics and refugee camps for fear of “contaminating” others.