José Luis Picón I Málaga, May 16 (EFE).- The pain of memory, the stigma or the feeling of guilt are some of the common denominators of the “hibakusha”, the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan) in 1945, as stated in the book “Hiroshima. Testimonies of the last survivors”.
Its author, journalist Agustín Rivera, explains in an interview with EFE that this work brings together first-person voices gathered on his successive trips to Japan since 1995 and during his time as a correspondent in that country.
“There are fewer and fewer survivors, and many of those who remain cannot speak because of their difficulties, because they have Alzheimer’s or have lost their memory,” says Rivera, who is presenting the book edited by Kailas this Tuesday at the La Térmica cultural center, in Malaga.
But above all, he highlights, “there is a lot of stigma.” “Many have not told that they are survivors until a very old age. Because if they did, they could lose their jobs or have difficulties finding a partner or having children”.
He wanted to collect the testimonies not only of the first generation of “hibakusha”, but also of his children and grandchildren, and not only recount what happened on August 6 and 9, 1945 and also tell “what his life was like before and after of the bombs.
Two cities with resilience
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki are two cities that have had a lot of resilience. In the book I have tried to highlight that today they are happy, modern and cosmopolitan cities, which little by little are overcoming the trauma, without forgetting what happened but looking forward”.
He specified that he considered “very important to talk about Nagasaki, an unfairly forgotten city, because it seems that everything happened in Hiroshima, but the effects were proportionally much more serious there.”
This is influenced by the fact that Hiroshima “is closer to the classic Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto tourist circuit, and that until recently the bullet train did not reach Nagasaki either, but it is a city with a lot of charm.”
Among the testimonies, “the feeling of guilt for surviving or for not having been able to help others affected” abounds, as in the case of Masayo Mori. “That he feels guilty for not giving a 6-year-old girl water, and that has been a torment for her throughout her life.”
No hate or revenge
“It is very remarkable that the Japanese do not feel hatred or revenge against the Americans, and even feel shame and humiliation and think that if Japan had not launched the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States would not have entered World War II and would not there would have been a war in the Pacific.”
For Rivera, “there are no two countries in the world that are such close enemies and a few years later great allies.” And it is “admirable” how the Americans “helped to rebuild Japan”, a country that in the 1980s and 1990s “was about to overtake the US as the world’s leading economic power”.
He adds that “there is a Eurocentric vision in which it seems that the atomic bombs were a material disaster, with the cities devastated, but there was no human element.”
years of silence
“For many years, the images of corpses, charred bodies and malformations were forgotten and canceled, to put it in current terms. The season was not opened until the late 50s and early 60s, and one of the first artistic testimonies was the film ‘Hiroshima mon amour’, which spoke of that hell”.
He insists that “there has been a silence” and the idea has spread “almost that, thanks to the atomic bomb, World War II ended, but the Japanese Empire was about to surrender, with manifest weakness, and its only option they were the kamikaze pilots.”
Regarding the bombing of Nagasaki, he notes that “the USSR was about to invade Japan, and the US thought that if it did not drop that second atomic bomb, Japan could become a communist satellite country or split in two like Korea.”
Another testimony that impacted Rivera was that of Takako Gokan, a survivor that he located in 2020 in a town in Malaga, “who when she was 11 years old was the only one who survived in her class, and who has hidden that she was a ‘hibakusha’ until twenty years ago”.
“Now there are young people in Hiroshima doing podcasts or with Youtube channels who, without having any relationship with the ‘hibakusha’, are vindicating their memory. They are voices that do not hold grudges and that always look forward,” Rivera highlights. EFE