On Thursday, several thousand people attended a ceremony marking the 67th anniversary of the atomic destruction of Nagasaki during World War II. A single plutonium device, nicknamed Fat Man, almost instantly killed some 70,000 people. Countless others would later succumb to radiation illness and collateral diseases.
Three days earlier, Little Boy, a uranium bomb, had killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima. That city’s annual memorial was held on Monday.
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The survivors — known in Japan as hibakusha — sometimes told their stories with tears streaming down their faces, even six decades later. Robert Jay Lifton also wrote about the post-traumatic stress of the hibakusha in “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima.”When recounting their stories, he said, the survivors were “unable to remain open to experience of this intensity for any length of time.”
“Very quickly — sometimes within minutes or even seconds — hibakusha began to undergo a process of ‘psychic closing-off’; that is, they simply ceased to feel.”
Mr. Lifton tells of a Hiroshima grocer watching stunned survivors trudging down a road right after the blast, their skin blackened, their hair burned off, “like walking ghosts” who “didn’t look like people of this world.” A history professor told of seeing “blue phosphorescent flames rising from the dead bodies — and there were plenty of them.”
Even in today’s articles about the bombing of Nagasaki, there’s a focus on Hiroshima. Nagasaki feels that its suffering has been forgotten.