You’ve heard of the hibakusha, although you may not know them by that name. They are the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 80 years ago this month. The word means, roughly, “bomb-affected people.”
Their lives were transformed in a purplish flash of light brighter than 100 suns. It killed many of their loved ones in either a second of excruciating pain, or agonizingly over weeks and months, and left others literally and figuratively scarred for life.
About 99,000 hibakusha are still alive, at an average age of 86, according to Nobuhiro Mitsuoka, a Hiroshima-born researcher and former diplomat who works closely with bomb survivors. July marked the first time the number had dropped below 100,000. The living, visceral memories of those August morning nightmares fade as each hibakusha dies, as roughly 7,000 have each year recently.
Fewer and fewer people now hear firsthand accounts of the bombings, but we can’t let those memories disappear. Because through their suffering, and through their simple act of being, the hibakusha have done something remarkable: They have kept the world safe from nuclear warfare for eight decades, from a war that would surely have been more horrendous than the one they experienced, lit by bombs far more powerful.
In other words, the hibakusha have saved your life, and the lives of everyone you have ever known or loved or will ever know or love.
The world saw what they endured and, on several occasions, stepped back from repeating it.
Today’s hibakusha were children in 1945. Now many work as activists, filing lawsuits, holding rallies, telling their stories as living examples of the worst history has to offer. In 2024, an organization of bomb-affected people, the Nihon Hidankyo, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
“No nuclear weapon has been used in war in nearly 80 years,” the Nobel committee noted, crediting the “extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other representatives of the Hibakusha.”
Here’s where we knock wood. With talk of nuclear weapons cropping up more and more often, including in reference to Iran and Ukraine, the need to remember the hibakusha and their experiences — as well the many politicians and government officials who promoted nonproliferation treaties and who are themselves reaching very old age — is more crucial than ever.
It will be up to the rest of us to pass those memories down to our children, and to their children, as best as we can.
“They won the Nobel Prize for a reason — they are not just memory keepers, they are activists,” said Joel H. Rosenthal, president of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, who has met with these survivors and wrestles with the meaning of their legacy — and what the future holds without them.
“I’m terrified that the lessons are being lost to history,” he said. “We have no strategic agreements now. And the world is building up its nuclear arms. There’s not even a plan to have a discussion. There’s nothing. It’s every nation for itself. It’s terrifying.”
For years the hibakusha were shunned even in their own country, a war-ravaged land of ashes eager to put the privations and dark memories of the conflict behind it. To understand their journey, we should wrestle a little with the never-resolvable debate about what led to it.
Several recent new works of nonfiction demonstrate how the human race was simultaneously prepared and grievously unprepared for the forces unleashed by the first bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, and how it was the hibakusha who brought the reality home to the rest of the world.
These include last year’s “Hiroshima” and the just-released “Nagasaki” by M.G. Sheftall, both installments subtitled “The Last Witnesses.” This year also brought “Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan” by Richard Overy. They join a long line of extraordinary journalism and nonfiction writing that explored these seminal events, including John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” which helped open the world’s eyes to what had transpired on Aug. 6, 1945, in that hilly, seaside city.
Some scientists at Los Alamos and in Manhattan had certainly thought deeply about the ramifications. But the military and government authorities running the war in the United States essentially saw them as extra big bombs that would be the end of something — namely, World War II. Few grasped that they were actually the beginning of something: the nuclear age — and the opening of a Pandora’s box.
Military-industrial inertia had pushed their creation and use ever forward from conception to execution. As Rosenthal notes, practically every other once-accepted moral ceiling, such as a ban on mass bombings of civilians, had been abandoned by warring nations on both sides by mid-1945. In all, as many as 210,000 died in the blasts and the immediate aftermaths.
Was the bombs’ use justified? That question cannot truly be answered without somehow creating an alternate universe in which the bombs were not used. There are flaws on both sides of the debate.
My stepfather fought in the Pacific and told me once that had the war continued he would have been on the first landing craft in Tokyo Bay and surely would have been killed — so he supported the dropping of the bombs. Indeed, as Overy determines in “Rain of Ruin,” a belief that the bombs would save American lives was the chief reason they were used. But there is no way we can know how many on either side would have died in the absence of the bombs.
Others argue that the Japanese were on the brink of surrender, an utterly defeated enemy, and therefore the bombs were unnecessary. This too is not borne out by scholarship. Yes, there was a growing peace faction, but Japan’s army still had a tight grip on power and considerable resources on the home islands for a bloody final battle. Its leaders were determined to fight on.
Even after Emperor Hirohito recorded a message announcing that Japan would stop fighting — never using the word “surrender,” mind you — Japanese army zealots attempted a coup. This is all captured in a stunning piece of Japanese journalism rivaling Hersey’s, though not as well-known — “Japan’s Longest Day,” in which the staff of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported out every second of the power struggle over whether to accede to Allies’ demands, decided in the 24 hours before Hirohito’s broadcast at noon on Aug. 15, 1945.
In the United States, the announcement of the Hiroshima bomb was initially met with joy. President Truman called it “the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”
But almost immediately, the euphoria cooled. “In the days since 6 August, a sense of the enormity of the consequences of Hiroshima had darkened the mood of celebration,” the British historian Max Hastings wrote in 2008’s “Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45.”
So was born the “nuclear taboo.”
It has had a grip on humanity ever since. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has rattled the nuclear saber, lowering his nation’s official threshold for using nuclear weapons in 2024, but has not deployed them against Ukraine, even during disastrous periods for his military. Surely thoughts of the hibakusha and their ordeal have weighed on the minds of all leaders who have had the power to press the red button, and surely these survivors’ testimony has contributed to the universal restraint shown for 80 years now.
Col. Bryan R. Gibby, an associate professor at West Point, notes that the United States has at high levels considered the use of atomic weapons on several occasions since 1945 — during the Korea and Vietnam wars, including in the siege of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954; the Second Taiwan Straits crisis in 1958; and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s.
Each time a mixture of military and political concerns prompted restraint. The military concerns focused on whether the weapons would achieve their goals if detonated in jungles or mountainous regions; there was no guarantee they would, Gibby told me recently.
The political concerns, he added, focused on how our allies and the rest of the world would respond to their use.
It seems clear to me that these political concerns were directly connected to the hibakusha and the nuclear taboo.
The view is shared by those in Japan who work with the survivors to tell their stories.
“I deeply resonate with your view that the hibakusha, through their actions and the trauma they endured, helped save the world from future nuclear conflict,” the researcher Mitsuoka notes. “The idea that the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave rise to a moral taboo against nuclear weapons — which later served as a deterrent in moments of global tension — is, in my opinion, both significant and historically grounded.”
No hibakusha were interviewed for this essay. It would have been easy enough: Many of them make themselves available, and meetings can be arranged. But it would have felt somehow exploitative. Yes, they feel called to tell their story, but surely it is not easy.
In “Hiroshima,” Sheftall notes that even the faint smell of singed hair from the open door of a beauty salon, or the odor of smoke from roasting meat at a street festival, can summon traumatizing memories.
“There is just something distinct and not reproducible about their experience,” Rosenthal said. “I worry a little bit about instrumentalizing it: ‘What does it mean for us?’ Who are we to even dare to compare? When you visit Hiroshima, it is about these people and their lives and their tragedy, full stop. It needs to be honored, and the memory kept that way.”
So today I’ll leave the hibakusha alone.
But at the same time, I’ll say: Thank you for saving my life.
Wendell Jamieson is the author with Joshua A. Miele of “Connecting Dots: A Blind Life.” He has contributed to Military History Quarterly.
The post Contributor: They survived the bombing of Hiroshima, and then they saved the world appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
