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Jul 7, 1985 · Hiroshima: The Aftermath. Survivors’ stories. By John Hersey. July 7, 1985. Photograph via Smith Collection / Gado / Getty. I. HATSUYO NAKAMURA. In August, 1946, a year after the bombing of...
Jul 6, 2015 · Hiroshima: The Aftermath: Directed by Lucy van Beek. With Benjamin Bederson, Peter Burchett, Winston Churchill, Allen Dulles. A documentary about the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima/Nagasaki and their aftermaths in both Japan and the United States.
- (240)
- Documentary
- Lucy van Beek
- 2015-07-06
- Overview
- ‘Bigger than lightning’
Regular nosebleeds, three bouts with cancer and blinding cataracts.
It’s been 75 years since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima — marking the end of World War II and the dawn of the nuclear age — but survivors like Masaaki Takano still live with the consequences.
“I'm mentally trying hard to pretend I’m OK,” Takano, 82, told NBC News by telephone from Japan in Japanese.
For decades Takano quietly lived with his ailments. He was not recognized as a “hibakusha” — a survivor of the bombing — because he was not within the immediate radius of the blast that killed an estimated 140,000 people, vaporizing them instantly or poisoning them slowly.
But last week, a Japanese court finally acknowledged that he and 83 other plaintiffs had been exposed to dangerous radiation from “black rain” — the nuclear fallout that poured from the skies in the aftermath of the explosion.
“We are doing this because we want to deliver the truth,” Takano said of the suit filed in 2015. “It’s too late to stand up after everyone dies.”
Takano was at school about 12 miles from the bomb's hypocenter, or detonation point, on Aug 6, 1945. He still recalls seeing a flash “bigger than lightning” and hearing a “massive explosion — bang!”
He was sent home while debris fell from the sky. Seven years old, Takano said he tried to catch some of the objects as they showered down.
In the following days, he had a high fever and diarrhea. Although he recovered, Takano later endured many illnesses because of the exposure to radiation. He also lost his mother to cancer 19 years after the bomb dropped.
For those closer to the hypocenter, the damage came faster.
Tetsushi Yonezawa, who turns 86 on Sunday, was traveling on a busy train just 820 yards from the bomb.
Once on the military truck that rescued him and his mother, he recalls seeing people with broken bones protruding from their flesh and blood flowing from their ears.
On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict.
Jun 20, 2018 · The aftermath of Hiroshima. Image Credit: Public Domain. As horrific as their immediate impact was, the two atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were especially devastating because the damage they unleashed was played out over many years.
- Harry Atkins
Nov 18, 2009 · On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, immediately killing 80,000 people.
The decision by the United States to drop the world’s first atomic weapons on two Japanese cities—Hiroshima first, on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later—was that rare historical moment...
