JAPAN: For Atom Bomb Survivors, the Past Never Fades Away

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Aug 9 1997 (IPS) - The approach of Aug 6th is always hard for 63- year-old Reiko Yamada, an atomic bomb survivor who is now active in a battle to gain better support for victims of the world’s first atomic blast 52 years ago.

Yamada recalls all too clearly that midsummer day in 1945, when American warplanes dropped an atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

A second atom bomb was dropped by the U.S. on the southwestern city of Nagasaki three days later, forcing Japan, to surrender to the allied forces and bringing the PacifcWar to an end.

More than 140,000 people were killed instantly after the nuclear blasts and many more died in the months and years after. Victims continue to each year from cancer and radiation-linked illnesses.

“I was in my school courtyard in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. I saw the B-29 plane and fell to the ground as the explosion rocked the earth,” recalls the softspoken woman, whose gentle smile belies the pain and hardship that marks the life of ageing survivors in Japan today.

In the next two decades, Yamada lost a father and two sisters to cancer, since they had been closer to the epicenter and thus experienced high doses of deadly radiation.

Today, Yamada is part of a group called Japan Confederation of A and H Bomb Sufferers, made up of survivors like her truggling for a fairer deal in life.

There are tens of thousands of radiation victims who are officially recognised by the Japanese government, but there remains a vast number of those still lobbying the government to give them the status they have been denied for so long.

“Our battle is bitter because progress is so slow,” she says. “But still we have learned to appreciate the inches (of progress) we have made.”

Yamada’s group makes frequent visits to the offices of influential members of the Diet, appealing for better medical treatment and counseling for the vast majority of survivors who are now in their seventies and suffer from various illnesses.

They are also asking for an end to the labyrinth of bureaucratic red tape that continues to deny a large number of people official recognition as radiation victims, and the benefits that status entitles them to.

For example, hundreds of old people still waiting for the government to give them identification cards that entitle them to free medical services and a monthly allowance of around 350 U.S. dollars, Yamada explained.

Their long wait is made worse by requirements of official papers that prove to the authorities where the survivor had been when the bomb was dropped more than 50 years ago.

“These demands amount to a process of mental torture,” says Yamada. “How on earth can these people expect to produce these papers when the bomb burnt houses, trees, everything and threw the whole city into total chaos?”

During the past few years, this criticism of the government’s approach has been echoed by survivors living overseas. Many of these are Japanese, Korean and Chinese survivors who left Hroshima and Nagasaki for the United States, South and North Korea and South America after the disaster.

There are an estimated 2,300 atom bomb survivors in South Korea, 1,000 in the U.S. and 190 in South Korea says Kanji Kuramoto, the 71-year-old president of the Committee of A-Bomb Survivors in the U.S. Likewise, there are undocumented survivors in China and North Korea.

Apart from agitating for better medical and economic support, survivors like Yamada are part of a movement lobbying for a world without nuclear arms.

This sentiment remains firmly entrenched in pacifist Japan, where the atomic bomb anniversary is observed with dedications to peace and calls for the eradication of all nuclear weapons.

This year survivors received an important boost from the mayor of Hiroshima, Takashi Hiraoka, who will strongly condemn the U.S. as the city on Wedneday marks the 52nd anniversary of the nuclear bombing in a poignant ceremony where the still-growing list of victims will be read out.

Hiraoka is expected to single out the U.S. as an obstinate opponent of peace. “On the one hand, the U.S. promises to reduce its stockpiles of nuclear weapons and on the other hand it obstinately maintains its nuclear testing program,” a draft of Hiraoka’s speech says.

He then goes a step further by calling on Japan to rid itself of the protection it enjoys under U.S. security umbrella. “Hiroshima specifically calls upon the government of Japan to devise security arrangements that do not rely upon a nuclear umbrella,” reads a copy of his speech.

Observers say the mayor’s speech reflects growing calls in Japan for a more independent foreign policy that would bestow on the country a status that respects both its economic might and hefty financial contributions overseas.

Tokyo often points out that it is the second highest contributor to the United Nations, using this argument to support its demand for a permanent seat in the Security Council.

Its experience as a target of nuclear attack leads Japan to pronounce itself on issues touching on nuclear arms and testing.

Foreign Minister Yukihiko Ikeda has just returned from visits to India and Pakistan during which he stressed the need these countries to join the U.N. Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

In a symposium in Hiroshima last week, Japanese experts on international relations called on the government to play a leading role in persuading North Korea to renounce the development and use of nuclear weapons.

The foreign ministry announced plans to send an official this month to work with Pyongyang on the nuclear issue, the first time such a step has been taken on a long-term basis.

“Japan should take the central role in promoting democracy in Asia,” said Kuniko Inoguchi, an analyst at Sophia University.

Yamada says Japan can take on a more prominent role not only by taking by shunning nuclear weapons itself, but by cleaning up its own wartime record. First, she says Japan should lay out a policy that frankly acknowledges and then compensates Asian victims of Japanese colonisation more than 50 years ago.

Imperial Japan colonised Korea, China and many South-east Asian countries in its bid to pursue an ‘Asia for the Asians’ decades ago. At the time, Japanese troops built a network of brothels where Asian ‘comfort women’ were forced into providing sexual services for its soldiers.

Despite repeated apologies for this, the Japanese government has ruled out direct compensation and instead put up a private fund to compensate thousands of individual victims.

Analysts say it is issues like this, relating to Japan’s own wartime past, that remain a thorn in its development as a nation indeed committed to peace.