Mr Tsuboi with Keiko Ogura
In 1945 Sunao Tsuboi, 20, could barely walk. But that was no exception to the second year college student as almost everyone around him was hardly walking too. And even if they could, there was no escape for the rain of fire.
Tsuboi had no choice but to sit down at the side of the street. He noticed some parts of his body were still burning. His face, hands, back, waist and legs were all burnt by heat rays. The heat was killing almost all inhabitants of Tsuboi’s city before his eyes, without any sort of discrimination.
He saw someone jump into the nearby Ota-a Tidal river, but that was not a solution as they subsequently understood. Even infants, who didn’t know how to swim, did it anyway. However, the river’s heated water, already full of bodies, was no hiding place from the rain of fire that was coming down on them.
Tsuboi, half naked and half burning, was blown ten meters by the blast. Nothing but dead bodies in the street and the river, dying people everywhere. Deep down Tsuboi knew he too was dying and soon would join them. That may not be a bad idea, he thought, as the world under his sky was just hell for any one to wish living under.
“Tsuboi will die soon,” he wrote down on a piece of paper and tried to sleep the kind of sleep one don’t wake up from…
What was actually happening?
At 8:15 a.m. August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb ever was used against a human population. The bomb exploded about six hundred meters above the center of Japanese city Hiroshima when the world was almost convinced the Second World War would end without any more major fights.
The 20-year old Tsuboi and other Hiroshima residents well understood the war and were trained for attacks from air, but the latest attack came both on an unheard scale and in an unexpected time. In a blinding, horrifying instant, that single explosion reduced an entire city into ashes.
In comparison to the destruction of natural disasters or conventional weapons used by wars, all agree until today that the Hiroshima tragedy represents an entirely new order of magnitude.
The atomic bomb, first produced and used by the United States which still remains the only country to ever have used it against a human population, showered the earth with high levels of radiation that penetrated deep into its victims’ bodies, destroying cells and tissue.
The physical damaged inflicted by the atomic bomb included burns from the intense thermal rays, injuries from the blast and cellular destruction radiation.
“Because of the number of casualties continued to climb for years, even decades, the total number of deaths attributed to the bomb depends on the date of the survey,” Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum located at the city’s part where the bomb was dropped tells its visitors.
Why it was absolutely unnecessary
Hiroshima Peace Memorial, which is visited by millions annually, comprises East and Main buildings and just before one enters these buildings is The Peace Park- a well kept beautiful garden separated from buildings by the Ota River, adding beautiful geography and colors to the view there.
Passing The Peace Park, entering into the East building first floor, the information is simply stunning. Along many very young students, who were visiting the Memorial, I learnt that the United States began studying the atomic bomb when World War II first started in 1939 fearing that the Germans – the enemy then – could have the technology.
The product of two billion dollars and what is called the Manhattan Project – the first atomic bomb – was later actually used against Japan which was extremely weak and didn’t need an atomic bomb to be defeated. If so, why the bombing then?
The United States was considering two solutions to end the war; one was invading the Japanese mainland and asking the Soviet Union to join that war against Japan which was, as said, extremely weak and at that time only asking for the imperial system to be continued.
The second option for the Americans was to use the bomb they tested successfully.
America’s political elite, in consultation with the British counterparts, got convinced that the Soviet influence after the war would be restricted hugely and the two billion dollars cost they authorized would be justified before their electorate’s eye if they end the war with the atomic bomb.
Hiroshima – a Japanese city with 350,000 people was bombed by the atomic bomb and the world entered into the nuclear age. Many died, effectively demonstrating to the developers of their recipe for catastrophe.
Thousands of Japanese like Mr. Tsuboi, lying on the streets, were witnessing each others’ deaths during that time. And just a few days later another bomb inflicted similar calamity on another Japanese city: Nagasaki.
The elevator at one of the buildings in the Hiroshima city, few minutes walk to the hypocenter of the atomic bombing, stopped at the third floor at 11:15am last Tuesday. Those who were coming out were visiting journalists and their guide.
A smiling old man dressed in a black suit was the first they saw when they got out of the elevator.
“Here is Mr. Sunao Tsuboi, surviving victim of the Hiroshima Bombing and co-chairperson of the Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations,” the guide announced to the guests who would later be stunned by the story of the man they just met.
“Survive, have revenge”
Unlike 140,000 people who died from the atomic bombing until December 1945, mainly those within a two kilometer radius from the hypocenter, very few survived through months, years and some even decades after the bombing.
“The American army, after they took control of Japan, came to us and asked us to come to their campus and the hospitals. We thought they will treat us as our doctors, who were scarce at that time, didn’t know how to treat us from radiation. But the Americans only took pictures of us and asked us a few questions and said ‘Thank you, you can go now.’ I remember there were huge disagreement and eruptions – we felt like guinea pigs,” Keiko Ogura, a victim, remembers. It turned out nobody knew what to do about the radiation effects at that time.
Ogura, who was eight at that time living 2.4 kilometer north of the hypocenter, now works as a guide at the Memorial center. She and others like her joined Mr. Tsuboi to setup seven national organizations, that first came as a family to victims who faced artificial seclusion, later to become one of the global speakers for the abolishment of all nuclear weapons.
“Survive and take revenge on the enemy- the Americans,” Mr. Tsuboi remembers telling a friend who woke him up from the middle of the street when he was sleeping to die. He was taken to a nearby hospital where they, thinking he wouldn’t survive, put him among the dead. He would surprise them and live – live until today.
A different call
“It was bad education,” Mr. Tsuboi says now referring to the advice he gave to a friend about the Americans. He now wants to educate the globe and the Americans compassion and care to one another. He made about twenty visits to preach a message of compassion and abolishment of all nuclear weapons including to the secretive state of North Korea, where he was nearly kidnapped, and to the United States.
“They may not like it but until I die I will beg them to abolish all nuclear weapons they have and also lead the world to become a zero nuclear world,” Mr. Tsuboi now has another message.
Today’s world
Upsetting advocates and sufferers from the bombings, a global deal could not be reached and even the sole superpower, the United States, who still has the most nuclear arsenal opposed such commitments until last year.
“I represent the seven survivor organizations of Hiroshima and I can assure you that we all followed your campaign with special interest. We were strongly drawn to your slogan: Change! Yes, We Can! And your victory is a great encouragement to us all,” Mr. Tsuboi wrote to President Obama who shifted the US policy over the issue since taking office last year.
In 2009, a Japanese nuclear disarmament resolution was adopted by the United Nations with 170 countries including the Unites States backing it. The US last year’s backing came for the first time in nine years coinciding with the current president taking office. The US is also co-sponsoring similar Japanese proposals tabled early this month. However, not everything coming from the US is good news for Hiroshima city.
Another test by the US
If you have, and if you test, you could use it, Mr. Tsuboi has a simple fear. The United States, even under Obama, just did what he fears the most.
The US government announced early this month that it had carried out a subcritical nuclear test at a Nevada underground test site in September.
“I am outraged by your trampling on the expectations and hopes of the A-bomb survivors and the vast majority of the Earth’s inhabitants,” Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba wrote in a protest letter sent to the US.
Since 1968 it has been a tradition for Hiroshima to send letters in protest to every country who conducts a nuclear test. “On behalf of the A-bombed city of Hiroshima, I vehemently protest,” the mayor said in a statement. The Hiroshima Memorial gate is still showing the city’s protest.
How to break up the statuesque
Who would enforce a nuke-free world? The ultimate authority, pundits agree is in the hands of the UN Security Council, which is often paralyzed since one of its five permanent members, the major nuclear powers, use their veto power to oppose such binding solution.
However the world is growingly upset with new countries acquiring the deadly weapon. India and Pakistan, troubled neighbors have now nuclear weapons.
Last Tuesday as Mr. Tusboi was expressing his concern over the current situation and how people are forgetting what happened, Iranian and Russian engineers started moving nuclear fuel into the main reactor at the power plant in Iran.
Though the latest developments are widely believed to be part of civil nuclear program usages – even the US didn’t protest-, worries however remain over Iran’s program to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, since experts say the process can also be used to create weapons grade material.
Just sixty seconds
Mr. Tusboi has been in and out of the hospital since the bombing; he suffers from chronic anemia, angina pectoris, large intestine and prostate cancers and few others, as he casually described it.
“President Obama seems very busy. Maybe when he comes to Tokyo, I may get sixty seconds to talk to him and that will do,” Mr. Tsuboi hopes though there was no response from the president even at the start of his office which surely was “less busy.”
Seeing the negative legacy derived from the release of nuclear energy with his own eyes, and visits to facilities where survivors are still suffering the after effects of radiation and talks with survivors could do the trick and the US Commander in Chief could strive to realize a nuke-free world soon. Mr. Tsuboi hopes to see it happen before death meets him. The old man could die soon, or live a bit longer, but without a ban on all nuclear weapons, the world’s fate is much uncertain.
