By Nagesh Narayana: Subscribe to Nagesh's RSS feed
August 5, 2010 8:31 AM EDT
He was 16 when he saw the destruction of Hiroshima from near Ground Zero in August 1945. As a rescue boy, he tried to lift the burnt out bodies from the debris, unaware of the after-effects of nuclear radiation.
An alarming fact of those who survived Hirsohima and Nagasaki atomic bombing was that they lived with a guilty feeling throughout their lives. A guilt that they could not save their siblings or families. A feeling of guilt that they too did not die sharing the same fate like their loved ones.
They're called Hibakushas and their voice against nuclear weapons is reflective of the country's voice to oppose nuclear weapons even to this day.
The boy grew up and married and had a daughter. But the trauma came when his second daughter was already dead when she came into the world or known as stillborn in medical terminology. But he felt that she was stillborn because she was born to a Hibakusha.
Now an 81-year-old survivor of nuclear bombing on Hirsohima on Aug. 6, 1945, he responded to Japnese newspaper Asahi Shimbun's call to write to the person to whom they want to pass on their experiences, on the 65th anniversary of the bombing.
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He chose to write to his stillborn daughter whom he could not even give a name but whose birth records he kept in tact all along. The guilt feeling is reflective in his letter and so is the case with many Hibakushas in Japan. His letter to his stillborn daughter reflects his agony. He writes to her:
"I witnessed very closely the actual suffering from the atomic bomb along with many hibakushas." He said he could not forget the stillborn daughter as she was born dead because of him.
"When your mother and I die, there will be no one who will be knowing anything about you." he wrote also revealing the fact that he underwent a surgery for cancer few months ago.
However, the man chose not to be named in public because he did not want his wife to know that he was talking about his stillborn child to the world. "I still cannot talk about this with my wife," he told Asahi Shimbun.
But he wants the letter to be published, because, he "wanted to pass on the fact that the atomic bombing does not end only with the sufferings of the generation of people who were directly exposed."
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