The Globalization of Hibakusha

Joseph Gerson

Joseph Gerson New England AFSC's Regional Program Coordinator is author of With Hiroshima Eyes and is involved in helping to launch the U.S. National Nuclear Weapons Abolition Campaign.

We know Hibakusha as the witness/survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. Yet, as the numbers and circumstances of Cold War era and Post-Cold War era nuclear weapons victims come to light, Japanese Hibakusha, doctors, peace museums and the peace movement have reached out to embrace the non-Japanese Hibakusha. For the last several years, Hibakusha from the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan, Russia, the United States and Tahiti have participated in the annual World Conference Against A & H Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sharing their agonies and joining in the call for No More Hiroshimas! No More Nagasakis! No more Hibakusha!

This year's conference opened with a report by Nori Tohei, a Hiroshima Hibakusha. Before turning to denounce the Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons "tests" and describing her organization's work nuclear weapons abolition, she grounded the Conference in the Hell she remembered:

"I had been on student mobilization working at a factory located about 4 kilometers to the east of here. At 8:15 am, I saw a strong flash and felt intense heat...the window panes in the factory blew up with a huge sound and women screamed in the workshop...People who were near the widows were bathed in blood. I thought that a bomb [had] directly hit the factory...

"To the west, a mushroom cloud was forming over the city of Hiroshima. It was snow-white and rising fast up in the air...While we were telling each other that something terrible had happened... and discussing what we should do, crowds of people fleeing the city came in our direction...We were speechless at the sight of this strange procession. People looked like they were wearing rags, but what we thought to be rags was actually their peeling skin. As they walked on with wobbly steps, blood dripped from their wounds, deep and wide open, as if somebody scraped out parts of their flesh...

"We...departed for the city to rescue survivors. Hiroshima had been turned into a hell. When I tried to help up a man lying on the ground, his burnt skin peeled and stuck to my hands. I found a man groaning under a fallen house, but I could not save him because of the approaching fire. Bodies burnt black, injured people lying dead on the ground like objects, in agony or already dead...I spent several days in that hell trying to rescue people. In mid-September, I suddenly developed acute A-bomb disease and began suffering from high fever, bleeding and loss of hair. The atomic bomb is a weapon of the devil. It does not allow people either to live or to die in dignity as humans. It is a weapon of absolute evil, designed only to annihilate. It must not coexist with humans."

Ties between the Japanese peace movement and Marshall Islanders are deep for historical reasons. Fifteen seconds before U.S. technicians detonated the world's first Hydrogen bomb, on March 1, 1954, they learned that the wind had changed direction and was blowing toward the inhabited island of Rongelap. Rather than delay the test, a warhead 750 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb was detonated. 239 Marshallese were exposed to deadly radiation, many of whom have since died.

One hundred miles away, the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Fifth Luck Dragon were confused when the sun seemed to rise in the west and the sea rumbled. They wondered if they had seen an atomic explosion. They too showered with fallout that fell like tropical snow. By the time the returned to port, they were suffering from radiation disease. This "third atomic bombing" of Japanese ignited the Japanese peace movement.

Nelson Anjain, long the mayor of the people of Rongelap has repeatedly described their suffering from the initial fall out, how despite U.S. promises of safety they were twice forced to evacuate Rongelap, and how they are confined to Mejatto, a small nearly barren island where food and medical care are scarce and dependence has subverted their traditional life.

Urkys Ilieva, who is active with "Women of the Orient" a Kazakhi environmental organization returned to Hiroshima this year. She was struggling against yet another cancer and saw Japanese doctors before and after the World Conference. Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 160 atmospheric and 350 underground nuclear weapons tests (one third of which released gaseous radiation into the air) in Kazakhstan. Evidence indicates that Kazakhis are also suffering from China's nuclear weapons tests at Lop Nor. Twice, during the conference Urkys stood before us with barely controlled passion, to show us photographs of deformed infants and other dying Kazakhi children while her compatriot Maidan Abishev described what the Kazakhi people are suffering:

"The extent of the nuclear massacre of the Kazakh people has not been determined by scientists and doctors due to the high cost involved in scientific, medical, genetic and demographic studies...people affected by the tests died from esophageal cancer, gastric cancer, intestinal cancer, lung cancer or leukemia. We still have a high mortality rate among children who live in the vicinity of the test site. We have a number of children with deformities...Estimates of the number of people considered to have been directly affected vary from 500,000 to 7 or 8 million.

An activist from the Hiroshima Municipal Workers' Union, quoted a woman he met in the Kazakh community Zharkent, near Lop Nor: "We used to grieve at the death of people each time. But so many people die nowadays that we no longer have deep sorrow for them."

U.S. Hibakusha are estimated to number a million or more people: Western down winders poisoned by fallout and venting from nuclear weapons tests, Native Americans exposed to radiation in the mining and milling of uranium, "atomic vets" many of whom were used as guinea pigs in nuclear experimentation, and workers in warhead assembly plants like Pantex in Texas.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, Claudia Peterson of Saint George Utah told her story of being socialized to fear the Russians, of her husband who was 13 years old when his father died of lung cancer because no one had warned miners about the radon gas in the mines, of her father and her daughter dying from cancers caused by fallout, of her sister suffering from cancer, of how her story "is but one of many that can be told by other families in [her] community," and that "We will never stop working to prevent a repeat of the mistakes and suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Dorothy Purley, a Navajo from New Mexico was accompanied in Hiroshima by her daughter Carletta Garcia. Dorothy, who has struggled with cancer, read her speech haltingly. She described how the government and the mining companies "never told the Laguna people what the uranium would be used for. They never informed my people that mining uranium ore would be dangerous." She explained that a uranium mine was opened 1,000 yards from her village and that "Everyday, the people of Laguna still endure the harmful effects of the open pit mine." Dorothy has been exposed to radiation since her birth in 1939, and when she needed money to support her daughter, she worked as a truck driver delivering uranium ore to the milling site.

Dorothy's closing words which vision, wisdom and courage, moved me deeply: "I would like to encourage all of you survivors and your loved ones to stand strong and tall. Help us to teach the rest of the world that no good can come from such mass destruction and that there are never really any winners but only victims of war. Let us leave the earth in peace and bounty. And when we pass on to the Great Spirit we will meet him with straight eyes."

Two months later, via Email from Tokyo came news: Carletta returned to the U.S. to learn that she is suffering from melanoma.

There are so many other tragic stories of women and men, boys and girls, civilians and soldiers, Central and East Asians, North Americans and Pacific Islanders, soon to be joined by those of Indian, Pakistani and Iraqi Hibakusha. Several years ago, under pine trees in Maine, a leading Japanese Hibakusha asked if people will remember the Hibakusha after they have died.

Some who listen and remember are answering with organizing and action. In early November more than 100 nations at the U.N. voted for the resolution for nuclear weapons abolition introduced by the New Agenda Coalition of the Swedish, South African, Slovenian, New Zealand, Brazilian, Mexican, Egyptian and Irish governments. Activists in dozens of northern New England communities are working to put the abolition on their town meeting warrants this March, and later this winter representatives of organizations across the U.S. will gather to launch the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Abolition Campaign.

For more information about Joseph Gerson's progam, see the Peace and Demilitarization page.