That was before this year’s accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan confronted them once again with their old nightmare of thousands of civilians exposed to radiation. Aghast at the catastrophic failure of nuclear technology, the dwindling numbers of atomic bomb survivors, most now in their late 70s or older, have stepped forward for the first time to oppose nuclear power.
Now, as both Hiroshima and Nagasaki observe the 66th anniversary of the twin US atomic attacks at the end of World War II, the survivors are hoping to use their unique moral standing as the only victims of nuclear bombings to wean both Japan and the world from what they see as mankind’s tragedy-prone efforts to tap the atom. “Is it Japan’s fate to repeatedly serve as a warning to the world about the dangers of radiation?” said Hirose, 81, who was a junior high school student when a US bomb obliterated much of Nagasaki. “I wish we had found the courage to speak out earlier against nuclear power sooner.”
No simple matter
But speaking out, even here, was no simple matter. It would have required them to challenge Japan’s postwar establishment, a difficult position in a consensus-driven nation that had put itself on a forced march out of devastation and toward economic development. One of the reasons resource-poor Japan went to war in 1941 was to secure new sources of energy, in that case oil, after a US embargo.
Even now, the pressure to adhere to what was the nation’s shared vision for energy security is strong. As Hiroshima observed the anniversary of the bombing that killed at least 70,000 people there, the city’s mayor stopped short of calling for an end to nuclear power, remarking instead that opinions were divided. “Some seek to abandon nuclear power altogether with the belief that ..mankind cannot coexist with nuclear energy, while others demand stricter regulation of nuclear power and more renewable energy,” said the mayor, Kazumi Matsui.
Last month, the Hidankyo, the group representing the some 10,000 still-living survivors of the bombings, appealed for the first time for Japan to eliminate civilian nuclear power. In its action plan for next year, the group called for halting construction of new nuclear plants and also for the gradual phasing out of Japan’s 54 current reactors as energy alternatives are found.
Though the group has been a vocal advocate of abolishing nuclear weapons since its founding in 1956, it has until now been mute on the issue of nuclear power, which Japan continued to pursue even after the accidents at Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania led many Western nations to shelve nuclear expansion plans.
“The bureaucracy, industry and the media were able to shut our eyes to the danger of nuclear power,” said Hirotami Yamada, secretary general of Hidankyo’s Nagasaki chapter.
“We let them fool us, even in this country that was the victim of the atomic bomb.” Hirose, who lost his aunt in the Nagasaki attack, played a leading role in the group’s shift on nuclear power after Fukushima.
His younger brother died 20 years after the bombing, in his 30s, while suffering from a half-dozen types of cancer.
Those still alive, he said, “are living testimony to the horrors of radiation.” Yamada said many atomic bomb survivors, like other Japanese, accepted nuclear power because they had bought the argument put forward by the government, industry and the news media that Japan’s nuclear reactors were among the best in the world, and absolutely safe.
This “safety myth,” as many here now call it, held sway even after the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, which Japan dismissed as caused by poor technology or incompetent plant workers.
Some atomic bombing survivors ruefully admit that it took a disaster the size of Fukushima to free them from that myth.
“They convinced us that nuclear power was different from nuclear bombs,” said Yamada, 80, who was in junior high school when Nagasaki was bombed. “Fukushima showed us that they are not so different.”