The atomic bomb survivors alive today were mere children and teenagers in 1945 when the United States attacked the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushering in the nuclear age.
Walking around modern-day Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you’ll find few indications of the wartime devastation seen in the black-and-white photos that have come to define the cities. Both are now sprawling metropolises crisscrossed by auto and pedestrian traffic at all hours. And both cities stand at the center of industrial hubs, with products that roll off assembly lines and are sent to all corners of the globe.
You can still find signs of the bombings, of course: the dome-like skeleton of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, or the brick fragments of Nagasaki’s old Urakami Cathedral, and memorials peppered along avenues and inside parks. Then there are the survivors who now look to share their personal experiences.
For decades, many Japanese were unable or unwilling to speak about what happened, either out of shame, stigma or fear. The hundreds of thousands of people who survived the attacks came to be known as “hibakusha,” which translates to bomb-affected people.
Of the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children killed, maimed or devastated by the bombs, less than 110,000 of the officially recognized hibakusha are still alive today. Their average age is 85. Hundreds die each month.
Japanese historians recognize that it won’t be long before the last known survivors are gone. There’s been a scramble in recent years to record their lived experiences as evidence for future generations and to deter nations with nuclear weapons from ever unleashing such a catastrophe again.
The photographer Kentaro Takahashi was forced to grapple with that thought recently as he took photographs of the area.
These are just several of the questions that came up when I traveled to Japan last fall with my colleagues W.J. Hennigan and Spencer Cohen to talk to survivors and hear firsthand the consequences of using a nuclear weapon. Today, Times Opinion published several of those accounts, along with Takahashi’s photographs. It is the latest installment in our series At the Brink, about the modern nuclear age. You can also hear more about our trip in a new episode of “The Opinions.”
“As I was looking through the viewfinder trying to photograph a landscape of Hiroshima, I had to question myself and imagine a landscape without the survivor in front of me,” the photographer Kentaro Takahashi said. “What will be left in this society to actually hand over the story that happened in the past to the people who will live in the future? Are we ready for that kind of world? Will the monuments talk to the people in the new era? Is the memorial park enough?”
Since being in Japan, I’ve repeated one of the more striking themes from our reporting: In the United States, we talk about the 1945 bombings as the first use of a nuclear weapon. In Japan, the survivors and their compatriots stress the need for those to be the last bombings. The hibakusha have dedicated their lives to raising this alarm. It is the responsibility of our leaders to ensure that their work has not been in vain.
