Hiroshima, A City Of "Hibakusha"

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30819, 3 August 1965, Page 18

Hiroshima, A City Of "Hibakusha"

(A’.Z. Press Association —Copyright) NEW YORK, August 1. One hundred thousand people walk around Hiroshima today with special identity cards which tag them as living victims of the first A-bomb dropped in anger, the “New York Times” News Service reports.

They are called “hibakusha,” a Japanese word which means something between “survivor” a n d “sufferer.” I Their thoughts go back tc : the day twenty years ago i when the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima: August 6, 1945, was the date. After the first test blast in the darkness of the New Mexico desert less than a month before Hiroshima, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer said' “We knew the world would not be the same.” Dr. Oppenheimer, who later opposed production of the hydrogen bomb, headed the Los Alamos team—the greatest scientific team ever assembled—which designed, developed and fabricated the atomic bomb. Germany— not Japan—was the original target of the A-bomb. But Germany was reduced to ruins before she could produce a nuclear bomb Peace came to Europe. In the Pacific, however, Japan fought on. Almost 125,000 Japanese died, were wounded or burned in a single fire-bomb raid on Tokyo on March 10, 1945—until then the greatest

Iman-made holocaust in hisItory. On June I, 1945. an “interim committee” set vp by President Truman to advise him about the problems of nuclear weapons recommended that the bomb should be dropped on Japan, without prior warning, as soon as it was ready. And so the decision was made. President Truman had Ino qualms about it. Later he wrote that he “regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.” Twenty years after there remain the hibakusha, haunted ;by the spectre of genetic i effects. Hiroshima now is a bustling modern city of half a million. Each year two million visitors from Japan and overseas come to look. They stop at the museum, where bits of seared clothing and the pictures of men roasted and | children’s faces without skin I are preserved. “We are like prisoners, conIvicted and sentenced to death i but we do not know when. We think illness waits in us and it has been difficult to think lof the future and work for lit,” says an engineer who was I caught in the radiation blast. “Captives” I An American psychiatrist I has found that the great illness of the hibakusha is that I they are never free of the sense of being death's cap I tives. Eight hundred and eighty hibakusha were in their {mothers’ wombs on August 6, 11945.

I There are rich hibakush; and poor ones, but as a grout .they are economically lowei ■ than the rest of the city Financial and economic powei lin Hiroshima is held largely Iby newcomers. “Generally speaking, the (hibakusha are physically weal ,and cannot undertake tht (same labour as the new [people,” says the Mayor. I A Japanese physician says “the hibakusha live with the belief that they are weaker, unlucky and not able, and this in itself is a real handicap tc them in their lives.” Doom The survivors seem to be afflicted by something deeper than hypochondria, deeper than lethargy. It seems to be a sense of being a hostage, of having had doom ordained that day and waiting for it tc catch up. “They may be healthy, but they read press reports on cancer and the atomic bomb. They know there is no effective treatment,” said the Mayor. “Therefore, they undergo a great shock any time they get ill. They feel doomed. I do not know how long this mental suffering will continue.” All scientific studies so far have shown that there is no discernable genetic effect, except in the sex ratio, but the Japanese are not comforted. A shopkeeper, a survivor, sums it up: “How can I tell what will happen to my son’s son? Tell me, how can anybody tell?”