Life After the Atomic Blast, as Told by Hiroshima’s Survivors

The cloud of mushrooms was visible from the hills of the neighboring province. Those who were out of the radius of the instant could not immediately show any external injury – but they usually get sick and die on the next day, weeks, months and years.

And when they tried to enter the injured, people outside the city came in contact with radiation.

Radiation also affected the children in the womb at that time. General radiation diseases are hair fall, bleeding gums, reduction of energy (“nothing will happen” in Japanese) and pain, as well as fatal high fever.

About 650,000 people The Japanese government was recognized as Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s nuclear bombing. Although mostly died now, Statistics The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare shows from March 7, 2021 that there is still an approximately 99,130 alive, with an average age of 86.

Emperor Hirito announced the surrender of Japan on a radio broadcast after the nuclear bombing and urged the Japanese people toTolerate unbearable,“The Allies used to use” the most cruel weapon “without direct identifying the atomic attack. Due to the bad about defeat, Japan’s empire in the war, as well as the reality of censorship and nuclear weapons, the idea that the dead and forgiveness of the nuclear weapons increased was dead and forgiven.

Influenced the generation

Yamanaka took about seven years to restore his strength to a relatively normal life, so he barely earned a bachelor’s degree from high school. Later, he has been diagnosed with various blood, heart, eyes and thyroid diseases as well as low immunity – the combination that may be associated with the contact of radiation.

His daughters also suffer. In 1977, when her older daughter was 19, she had three operations for her skin cancer. In 1978, when his second daughter was 14, he developed leukemia. In 1987, her third daughter suffered by one -sided Ophorectomy (a surgical procedure for ovarian removal).

I interviewed Yamanaka’s daughter, granddaughter and several other survivors repeatedly, starting with experience before the nuclear bomb, and continued today.

These interviews usually started in the official position of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I also interviewed the walk and went to special importance sites in their personal memory. I have shared car travel, coffee and meal with them and their helpers, because I wanted to see their lives in context as part of a community.

Their trauma and misery are dealt with socially. In comparatively a few survivors who tell their stories to the public, it is through the help of the sight of the sight Local networkThe I was told at first that I wouldn’t find the survivors who wanted to share their stories, gradually came forward with another snowball effect.

On August 27, we traveled to Yamanaka in the car and traveled to his eastern EBA, a break on the site where he started his journey after the river. There, Yamanaka started a conversation with the surviving person who was on his way to his bike. His name was Maruto-San. They attended the same temple based primary school.