Above the thick clouds as they approach Nagasaki airport, it is impossible not to imagine seventy-seven years ago, on August 9, 1945, the two American pilots at the controls of their Boeing B-29 Superfortress sailing by sight, looking for their target. The mission is about to be abandoned. The clouds completely block the horizon. When, suddenly, a few clouds part, offering their gaze a clear vision of the city of Nagasaki.
Three days after the atomic bomb « Little boy » dropped on the city of Hiroshima (1), on August 6, 1945, the pilots dropped the second, « Fat Man », on Nagasaki (2), much further south, on the island of Kyushu. “It was a deafening explosion at 500 meters altitude a little north of the city, a blinding light and a deluge of fire which razed three quarters of the city in a few hours”, says today Masao Tomonaga, 79 years old. “I was only two years old that day but my mother never stopped telling me what she had witnessed”continues this fierce anti-nuclear activist, president of the Association of hibakusha of Nagasaki Prefecture.
Sword of Damocles
« Hibakusha ». This word resonates in the minds of all Japanese people. It means “irradiated” and applies to the hundreds of thousands of Japanese affected in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the devastating health effects of the two bombs. “If there were more than 200,000 deaths in the two cities in a few months after the explosions, we were hundreds of thousands to have been indirectly affected by the effects of the irradiations, continues the one who became a doctor at the Institute of Bomb Diseases at the University of Nagasaki. I continued my research there for half a century and I was able to see that many cancers and leukemias appeared later in the victims of the bombs. »
Beyond the guilt of having “survived”, the hibakusha have spent their whole life “with a sword of Damocles above their heads, described by Masao Tomonaga, in constant anguish of being affected by cancer, leukemia or cardiovascular disease”. He himself had prostate cancer four years ago… “The chemo saved me, of course, but the hibakusha face a new and far more dangerous threat. We fear that the memory of these two dramas will be erased, that oblivion will cover them. » In fact, the hibakusha (a hundred thousand survivors today) are getting old. “We only have about ten years left in front of us, because many of us are dying and no one will take up the torch. »
The memory is fading
Educate, educate, educate. Masao only has this slogan in his mouth. The young Japanese generation no longer studies history. Several polls carried out in recent years reveal that only 30% of Japanese know the dates of August 6 and 9, 1945. The memory of the war is eroding. Moreover, if we still talk about the two atomic bombs of which Japan was the victim, no one recounts with transparency the origins of the war and the Japanese responsibility in this murderous conflict.
It is striking to see that, in the Museum of the bomb in Nagasaki, as in that of Hiroshima, one speaks of the destruction and the Japanese deaths but nothing, nowhere, explains the real origins of the war and the horrors committed by the Japanese armies in China or South Korea. Japan would therefore have been only a victim without bearing the slightest responsibility in the military conflict. “I do not avoid the subject with young people who know nothing, Assure Masao, but it is still extremely sensitive in Japan. Many people know who is responsible, but it remains totally taboo. »