I go out for some house visits on Friday every two weeks. The patient that I visited today is an 80 year old gentleman. He is being cared for by his wife. It is not easy to believe this story, but he survived two kinds of serious malignant diseases in his 50s. After that, he has been suffering from rare diseases one after another. His wife says that it must be due to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.
He was a teenager when the bomb was dropped. Hiroshima is three hours away from our town by ship. He seems to have gone to Hiroshima with his teachers and schoolmates to rescue people the day after the bomb. His role was to recover numerous bodies out of the river and find things to show their ID. If he could find the name of the body, he carried them to some places for the people looking for their relatives, friends and acquaintances. If he couldn't, however, he carried them to the Body Dump Station. The bodies were thrown into the fire. He and his group were working in Hiroshima for a few days. They wanted to work more, but they didn't have enough food to continue their volunteer work.
People at that time didn't have any knowledge about the radiation. They didn't mind being exposed to residual radiation. Many people got invisibly injured like this. This fact is not widely known to the public.
Researchers and developers of the atomic bomb seemed to predict that no trees and grasses could grow in Hiroshima for the next 50 years. This prediction was fortunately wrong, but was it necessary to drop such a cruel bomb on Hiroshima? If the U.S. only wanted to stop the war, they should have dropped the bomb in the Tokyo Bay area. The Japanese authorities, including the Emperor, would directly have seen the mushroom cloud. One more thing, I'd like to ask Mr. Truman the reason why the U.S. chose Hisoshima and Nagasaki as victims of the atomic bomb; a wide city around which they could draw concentric circles in the horizontal area and a city that is closed by mountains on one side and open in the direction of the sea. Both geographic locations must have been attractive for the researchers of radiation.
(Vocabulary)
residual radiation 残留放射線
concentric circle 同心円
Comments