The Hibakusha, Survivors Of Atomic Attack In Japan

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The Hibakusha, survivors of atomic attack in Japan

Introduction

Among the drama, grief and sadness, these survivors to the attack in Hiroshima Nagasaki, have taken their lives since that horrendous day. It would have been better for us to have died, these people pray among sobs, while remembering the pain, horror, loss, tragedy and fear that have passed since that day. They are living testimony of chaos, disaster and tragedy that caused the bombs.

There are still no definitive figures that tell the death left by the two explosions of August 6 and 9, 1945. The most optimistic calculations offer the sum of 110 thousand deaths and that at the end of that year would have died more than 210 thousand people: women, pregnant, elders, children and babies.

Developing

Hibakusha means: person affected by the atomic bomb in Japanese. The psychologist Yuka Kamite, a professor at the University of Hiroshima explains that they are social narrators, but are not able to tell their own version/history of their children or grandchildren.

Today about 140 thousand hibakushas are estimated in the world between 70 and 85 years old. They not only suffered the bomb those horrendous days, but the traumas, scars and rejections have persecuted them all their lives.

Burns and radiation exposure brought sequels: hair loss, bleeding and diarrhea, some developed different types of cancer and leukemia.

They have fear. Yasuaki Yamashita, survivor of Nagasaki says I still feel fear that I can express the consequences of radioactivity and die at any time, she was 6 years old on the day of the attack. Today lives in Mexico and is 81 years old.

She speaks for all when she says that fear, stress, confusion, uncertainty and anxiety are permanently constant and the fear of inheriting the effects of radiation to her offspring does not let them live.

Hibiki Yamaguchi, a researcher at the center for the abolition of nuclear weapons at the University of Nagasaki, says that physical and psychological wounds marked them forever and irreversibly struggled mental and emotional health.

The professor at the Peace Center of the University of Hiroshima, Luli Van der Does, reports in her studies of Hibakusha cases that many cannot eat fish because they still retain the memory of the smell of burned bodies, also many do not eat cucumberWell, missing the medicines after the pump fall, it was the only thing they could use to cure the wounds some others cannot cross or see rivers, nor bridges, nor old buildings because they remind them of the floating bodies that they saw or the horrendous scenes of bodies trapped trappedAmong the rubble.

Fear affected their emotional health and their reality, apart from mercy to a society that made all the most difficult time their recovery and struggle to lead a life, no longer normal, but bearable.

They were discriminated. Physical wounds identified the Hibakusha. People repelled them as ‘insects’, because they believed that they could have contagious diseases or mortal infections: ‘you have to separate them, you don’t have to marry them, you don’t have to talk to them,’ they were the words they said about them.

His keloid scars – which skin bulges in a wound – were their ‘worst problem’ did not allow them to keep their work, their studies and less a stable relationship.

Yasuaki Yamashita remembers with pain: ‘I left the high school and got a job, but the effects of radiation came: it evacuated blood, lost blood, vomited blood, and I had to leave it, so it was two years;People told me that he was a lazy one because he didn’t want to work, but they didn’t know what he had, and he couldn’t talk about it.

Setsuko Thurlow comments that the marriage was very important for the Japanese women of that time. She survived Hiroshima, received the Nobel Peace Prize granted by the International Campaign to abolish nuclear weapons (ICAN).

Keiko Ogura tells: ‘I was 8 years old at that time, I was in the elementary school, but we knew we shouldn’t say that we had been in the city that day that day. If we said something related to radiation, we could not get married, ”he adds that they had a certificate of survivors for what they were attended at the hospital sponsored by the government, but my family told us‘ do not show that that.

She felt the rejection of the youthful age between 18 and 20 years old when ‘the young men from outside the city asked me Keiko, where were you at the time of the bomb? For my part there is no problem, but my parents are concerned ’. Van der Does, points out that in marriage age the couples came to hire detectives to investigate whether the couple came from Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Another type of discrimination is Yoshiro Yamawaki, a survivor of Nagasaki: ‘The bomb killed my father, my mother had seven children and could not take care of them. Therefore, I had to dedicate myself to work, without being able to go to college, I think that was a form of discrimination ’. She was eight years old in the explosion.

Professor Van der Does also explains that the other problem was among them, because ‘they had to compete to achieve a type of help’. They knew each other, they knew what the other thought and therefore they were the ones who did more harm between them than the other people.

They felt guilt. Many Hibakushas remember the voices of help they ignored, the last glassy eyes that looked at them and the cries and regrets of children, young and old who could not help. This feeling of guilt brings them constant and even greater suffering than what they feel or have made them suffer.

Keiko Ogura asks daily between pain and crying: why couldn’t I fulfill the duty to help my children until the last moment?. Remember: we all had a feeling of guilt because we saw family and friends die. After the explosion we saw people under the collapsed buildings asking for help, but we couldn’t help them, they were trapped. Mothers tried to get them out, but it was very difficult.

He points out that the fire spread quickly and had to run away from the place: ‘Two very injured people approached me and only said‘ water, water ’. I gave them drink and then died in front of me. At that time I did not understand, she was just an 8 -year -old girl, but I began to blame myself because I felt she had killed them. I felt that if I hadn’t given them water, they wouldn’t be dead. I felt like that for more than 10 years ’.

conclusion

The psychologist Kamite points out that the motivation of the Hibakusha for telling her stories rounds between anger, social motivation and a healthy response to trauma. The main factor to cope with this was to build a sense of community, says Van der Does, ‘becoming leaders in the struggle for nuclear disarmament, going from being victims to precursors of a new world’.

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