Latest news with #Nagasaki
Japan Times
16 hours ago
- Politics
- Japan Times
U.S. public opinion divided over atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
U.S. citizens are divided over the August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II, an opinion poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in the United States shows. Respondents who said the bombings were "justified" accounted for 35%, while 31% said they were "not justified." Those who were "not sure" made up 33%. The survey, released Monday, was conducted on more than 5,000 U.S. adults between June 2 and 8, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings on the city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and the city of Nagasaki three days later. The share of respondents who answered that the attacks were justified fell sharply from 56% in the previous survey, in 2015, and that of those who said they were not justified also dropped, from 34%. The decreases in both answers were apparently due to the "not sure" option not being available in the 2015 survey. By gender, 51% of the male respondents thought the bombings were justified while the proportion stood at only 20% for female respondents. Older respondents tended to defend the use of the atomic bombs, with the proportion of those age 65 or over who are supportive of the bombings coming to 48%. By contrast, only 27% of those under 30 gave that answer. Meanwhile, 69% of all respondents think that the development of nuclear weapons has made the world "less safe," far exceeding the 10% who answered the opposite. A large majority, at 83%, of all respondents said they "know a lot' or 'a little" about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Japan Times
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
Almost 80 years on, 'Hiroshima Panels' pass on memories of atomic bombing
"The Hiroshima Panels," which depict the hell victims experienced in the aftermath of the U.S. atomic bombing of the city, continue to draw viewers ahead of next month's 80th anniversary of the bombing. "These are paintings that allow everybody living on Earth in this nuclear age to imagine (the bombing) as a future that could happen to them," said Yukinori Okamura, 51, curator at the gallery that exhibits the work. "I want visitors to feel memories of history that speak to us on a life-size scale." The work, consisting of 15 folding panels, was painted by the late artist couple Iri and Toshi Maruki. Fourteen of the panels are exhibited at the Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels in Higashimatsuyama, Saitama Prefecture, with the remaining one at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, the other city that the United States dropped an atomic bomb on in August 1945. The couple engaged in relief activities in Hiroshima soon after the atomic bombing and continued to paint pictures of the devastation for over 30 years based on their experiences and stories from witnesses. The panels depict not only Japanese atomic bomb victims, but also U.S. prisoners of war and Koreans who met the same fate, as well as the Fukuryu Maru No. 5 fishing vessel exposed to radioactive fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test in 1954. In early July this year, Okamura was seen talking to visitors to the gallery about the first panel, titled "Ghosts." Soon after the bombing, details of the damage from the blast were largely unknown outside the affected areas due to restrictions on news reporting. "The Marukis were worried that the damage would be forgotten, so they began to think about painting the atomic bombing to convey it to people," Okamura said. The work shows victims dragging their burned skin as they walked, with their kimonos burned away due to the heat and blast. Also depicted are piles of bodies of victims who ended up collapsing. Each panel is accompanied by an explanatory note by the couple. Visitors studied the paintings and read the explanations in turn. "I can't find any words quickly," said a 30-year-old woman visiting the gallery for the first time. "I want to recall the impressions of the paintings many times after I go home." "I think it's significant that this place continues to exist, allowing us to appreciate the Hiroshima Panels in person," said the woman, who is from Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. Okamura, who has faced the work for more than 20 years as gallery curator, said, "The story of the Hiroshima Panels continues even after the artists are gone. "Living in an age of wars and disasters, we must continue to reinterpret the meanings of the paintings," he said. The gallery will be closed from Sept. 29 for work to improve temperature and humidity controls in the exhibition rooms and enhance earthquake resistance. It will reopen around May 2027 to mark the 60th anniversary of its founding. The gallery has collected some ¥350 million in donations since 2017 but will seek an additional ¥100 million to ¥200 million for the upcoming work.
Japan Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Japan Times
Hibakusha's stories will change the world, Nobel committee chair says
Norwegian Nobel Committee chair Jorgen Frydnes has emphasized that the testimonies of hibakusha, or people who survived the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will bring changes to the world. "Their story is also a story of memory becoming a force for change," he told a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on Monday. He, therefore, highlighted the historic importance of activities of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, also known as Nihon Hidankyo, which won last year's Nobel Peace Prize. Frydnes visited the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki last week, ahead of the 80th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of the cities on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, in the closing days of World War II. Noting that he was the first member of the committee to visit the country of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Frydnes said, "We walked through places that changed the course of human history." He stressed the importance of maintaining nuclear taboo, saying that the atomic bombings created "an international norm that ... any use of nuclear weapons is not only dangerous, but deeply and morally unacceptable." While Nihon Hidankyo has been working for the abolition of nuclear weapons, Japan is protected under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. On this, Frydnes said, "I don't think fear (of nuclear weapons) is the solutions to our problems," adding, "The hibakusha clearly shows that it is possible, even though in a situation of pain, sorrow, (and) grief, to choose peace, and that's the message we want the world to listen to."
Telegraph
2 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
The doctor who survived Nagasaki – and the horrors he saw
On August 9 1945, Takashi Nagai, a doctor, inspected the air-raid equipment at Nagasaki Medical College. The buckets were full of water; the hoses were uncoiled; students scurried around with first-aid kits. If American planes bombed the site and its hospital, Nagai thought, it would be well prepared. Yet, he later recalled, as he passed a cluster of blood-red oleanders, a shiver of fear ran through him. Later that morning, the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Factories and homes were flattened, mighty pine trees were uprooted. Mount Inasa was stripped of every blade of its glittering, emerald grass. Nagai's neighbourhood of Urakami was obliterated. The scorched bodies of the dead lay as far as the eye could see. The doctor was buried alive, his face in a pool of shattered glass – though he eventually forced his way out. The bomb killed an estimated 75,000 people. Tens of thousands perished instantly, others died from festering wounds or radiation sickness weeks or months afterwards. Nagai's two small children, who had been sent to the countryside, survived, but his wife Midori was reduced to 'a bucketful of soft ashes' and a clod of melted rosary beads. Four years later, Nagai published a haunting eyewitness account of the bombing and its aftermath, The Bells of Nagasaki. It's being republished this week, in English translation, by Vintage Classics. Eighty years after the atrocity, as the clouds of conflict gather once again, his book is a crushing reminder of the obscenity of nuclear war. In the wake of the bomb, Nagai recounts, the survivors looked upon a desert of naked corpses. A professor cradled the charred bodies of his dying students. Their flesh was peeling off 'like the skin of a peach'; blood flowed from their ears and noses. One student, who was 'swollen like a pumpkin', took his last breath: 'There's no hope for me. Thanks for everything.' All the while, distant cries of agony echoed in the wind. A child's voice screamed, 'I'm burning! Throw water on me!… Mummy! Mummy!' Then, silence. One nurse could only compare Nagasaki to hell. Nagai, and a small group of surviving doctors, nurses and medical students, tried to treat the mass of wounded with only the most basic medical equipment. Nagai worked with one hand pressed against his own lacerated forehead to stop blood spurting out of a severed artery. His patients' injuries were graver still. Two plump nurses, nicknamed Little Barrel and Little Bean, felt 'ecstatic joy' as they crawled through burning rooms to rescue survivors. As flames enveloped the hospital, the medics made for safety up the hill with the wounded on their backs. Using the blood dripping from his chin as paint, Nagai 'traced a huge circular sun' on a white sheet to create a Japanese flag; with this held high, they abandoned their college. Later, Nagai's lionhearted troupe – stumbling, limping, deathly pale, in bloodstained skirts and ragged trousers – would trudge from village to village to heal the sick and chronicle their torments for the future benefit of science. For a while, they had no word from the outside world. But when American planes scattered leaflets announcing the atomic bomb's devastation 'to the People of Japan', the political situation became dreadfully clear. The message: surrender, or we will 'use this bomb… to bring this war to a swift, irresistible conclusion'. The weapon made a mockery of Japan's war effort. 'The bamboo spear against the atomic bomb! What a tragic comedy this was!' Nagai despaired. 'This was no longer a war. Would we Japanese… be annihilated without a word of protest?' On August 14, Japan surrendered. 'We all held hands and wept,' he recalled. 'The sun set and the moon rose; but we could not stop weeping.' For what had their friends and family died for? Despite his anguish, Nagai couldn't help but admire this 'victory of science'. In one rather unnerving scene, the wretched medics gather in a dugout for a reverent discussion about nuclear physics. 'We can't deny that it is a tremendous scientific achievement, this atom bomb,' one said, as they talked shop in an atomic hellscape. Later in the book, Nagai tells his children that the atomic age could still be glorious, if nuclear energy were to replace coal, oil and electricity, and its military uses were curtailed. 'If we use its power well, it will bring a tremendous leap forward in human civilisation. If we use it badly, we will destroy the earth.' The month after Japan's surrender, Nagai 'collapsed into bed like a stone falling into the valley'. He lapsed into a coma. By some miracle, he awoke, but he knew his destiny: at the time of the bombing, he had already been dying of leukemia, caused by exposure to X-rays during a mass screening programme for tuberculosis. The second torrent of radiation quickened his decline. Soon, he knew, his children would be orphans. He described his five-year-old daughter playing alone with her toys: the head of a doll, some bottles, a mirror frame. She had no option. 'All her friends are dead,' Nagai wrote. She chattered with ghosts. Soon after, Nagai moved to a tiny hut near the centre of the explosion. From his sickbed, his spleen swelling up, he wrote a series of bestselling books. The Bells of Nagasaki was completed in 1946 and published three years later. In 1949, Nagai was Japan's most-read author, and by then he was a celebrity of sorts. He was also a devout Catholic: Eva Perón sent him a statue of the Virgin, Pope Pius XII a rosary. Hirohito, the emperor of defeated Japan, paid him a visit. By this point, however, Nagai was a divisive figure. Three months after the bombing, he had given a speech in the red ruins of the once-majestic Urakami Cathedral, in which he cast the event not as a monstrous war crime, but as a grace from God, for which the city should give thanks. To his mind, Urakami, home to the largest Christian community in Japan, had been chosen as 'a victim, a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War'. It was due to the sacrifice of 8,000 pure Catholics that God had finally brought the war to an end. In that address, which is reprinted in The Bells of Nagasaki, Nagai drew on a long local history of martyrdom. Christian missionaries had travelled to Japan in the 16th century, on Dutch and Portuguese ships; and their word quickly spread. In 1597, 26 Catholics had been crucified in Urakami as the shogunate suppressed Christianity; for centuries after, persecuted 'Hidden Christians' had been forced to worship in secret. Now, Nagai painted the city's Christians as martyrs once more: 'How noble, how splendid was that holocaust of August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling the darkness of war and bringing the light of peace!' In sanctifying the atomic bomb, Nagai appalled many of his countrymen. The Americans had justified their mass slaughter of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by arguing that the bombs put an end to the war, and thus prevented further bloodshed; Nagai's talk of a heavenly inferno seemed to strengthen their defence. As the veteran journalist Richard Lloyd Parry puts it, in his introduction to the new edition of The Bells of Nagasaki: 'Without setting out to do so, Nagai provided the Americans with the home-grown expression of ideas they needed to shore up their moral authority.' Perhaps this is why Nagai's book slipped past the occupying US censors. Nonetheless, in Nagasaki, Nagai was celebrated as a quasi-saint. In a wasteland yearning for meaning, he offered a comforting alternative to a tale of pointless and excruciating suffering. And he did so in a way, Parry tells me, that suggested 'that rather than being the concluding acts of a 15-year war of colonisation into which Japan had enthusiastically marched, the atomic bombings were almost like a natural disaster, literally an act of God, over which the Japanese had no control and for which they bore no responsibility'. In the book, Nagai presents his speech to an old friend who'd lost his cherished wife and five children; the friend is greatly consoled. The book also contains a poignant sketch by Nagai of his wife ascending to Heaven on the tip of a mushroom cloud: a reminder that this grieving widower was seeking solace himself. Yet many on the Left, Parry tells me, regarded Nagai as 'at best a naïve enabler of the Americans and conservative Japanese, at worst a reactionary collaborator, whose writing 'anaesthetised' its readers and prevented them from identifying those responsible for the war'. While Hiroshima became the cradle of a furious peace movement, which was determined to abolish nuclear weapons, Nagasaki withdrew in stoic sorrow. Few could read The Bells of Nagasaki today and not tremble at the thought of another nuclear conflict. At one point, Nagai is visited by two former students, returning from the war with bitter hearts. 'We must get our revenge,' they say. 'Even if it takes ten years, we'll win this war.' But Nagai tells them: 'If you had seen the hell that opened up on earth before our eyes, you would never, never entertain the crazy thought of another war. If there is another war, atomic bombs will explode everywhere, and innumerable ordinary people will be annihilated in the flash of a split second.' On May 1 1951, Nagai died, aged 43. Around 20,000 mourners attended his funeral, swarming the entrance to Urakami Cathedral. Today, as belligerent nations pack their armouries with nuclear warheads, his book offers an urgent warning. 'Men and women of the world, never again plan war!' he implores us from the grave. 'Grant that Urakami may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world.'
NHK
2 days ago
- Politics
- NHK
Nobel Committee Chair calls on young people to carry on legacy of peace
The chair of the committee which awarded last year's Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo has called on the young generations to pass down the experiences of atomic-bomb survivors. Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H- Bomb Sufferers Organizations, represents the survivors of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are known as hibakusha. Norway's Joergen Frydnes attended an event on nuclear disarmament at Tokyo's Sophia University on Sunday. He appeared at a news conference with Nihon Hidankyo co-chair Tanaka Terumi. Frydnes said his trip marked the first time ever for the Nobel Committee to travel to the home country of a Peace Prize laureate. He said, "This is a unique opportunity to us, and it's a unique time because we are here to listen and to learn, and we believe the world should listen and learn to the voices of the hibakusha." Frydnes said Nihon Hidankyo members "have been instrumental in turning memory, turning pain and suffering into a force for change into a force for peace." He added that ever since the committee announced Nihon Hidankyo's award in October last year, they have seen "social movements, anti-nuclear movements, and civil society and private individuals from all over the world who are re-engaged in the issue of nuclear disarmament." Frydnes said that he believes the 80th anniversary of the attacks in August could be an opportunity for a turning point on the issue. In a speech he gave after the news conference, Frydnes said that many analysts now warn the world is standing on the edge of a "new and more unstable nuclear age." He said the survivors and their supporters "helped the world see with clear eyes what nuclear weapons really mean." He called them "the light the world needs." Frydnes addressed the young people in the room, telling them that they are "the future custodians of this memory" and "the new stewards of this truth." He urged them: "Take up the torch. Do not let silence grow. Tell the stories. Study the history. Resist the forgetting. Raise your voice."
