Hiroshima Hibakusha: Survivors of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb
Hiroshima Hibakusha – survivors of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb – are dwindling in number. They are the last remaining keepers of the record of what happened in Hiroshima that fatal day, August 6th, 1945, when the first nuclear weapon was unleashed upon a civilian population.
That day was a pivotal point in human history. We came face to face that day with our own power to annihilate the human race.
On that day, what the bomb instilled into the human psyche was a deep and all-pervading sense of powerlessness.
One of the survivors of the Hiroshima bomb described it thus:
“The powerlessness of not being able to help or participate because we didn’t know what dropped. Even those people who didn’t have any burns and injuries started to suffer and drop dead because, you know, the radiation, how forceful it was there.
“It goes into the marrow of your bones and penetrates your brains and then changes your fetus, and malformed children are born. We had no idea how to help ourselves or help anybody. So that kind of death is annihilation and death without dignity. Complete powerlessness. Not even a person being there, torturing you. It’s invisible. Done to people, DNA, plants.”
It is important to listen to what these people – these hibakusha, or survivors – have to say. It is something that has to be kept alive in peoples’ minds and memories. In their suffering, in the transformation of their lives wrought by a nuclear nightmare, and in their heroism – heroism at struggling to stay alive even one more day to speak to people and to spread their stories – is found the fundamental force of life that can defeat the bomb.
This is the story of one survivor, Mr. Akihiro Takahashi.
The story of the bombing of Hiroshima can be found on one of Jim Hilgendorf’s websites – “America’s Dialogue”. At the bottom of that page are links to the two parts of the video he made after visiting Hiroshima, talking to survivors, and then interviewing others in the U.S. who talk about the many issues surrounding nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and the waste of militarism.
“The New Superpower” is a book that Jim wrote after his experience with that film.