Word: hibakusha
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They are called the hibakusha, survivors of a day when the world went dark. About 85,000 people who lived in Hiroshima and its environs on Aug. 6, 1945, are still alive. For many, that morning was the beginning of a lifetime of struggle--to overcome not only the physical ailments associated with radiation but also the psychic trauma caused by years of rejection from their own society, which shunned the survivors out of fear they could contaminate others. French photographer Gerard Rancinan traveled to Hiroshima this year to photograph the hibakusha and record their stories. Seventy agreed to pose...
...Voice of Hibakusha Eyewitness accounts (interview transcripts) of the bombing in Hiroshima are catalogued here...
...opposed to the existence of nuclear weapons. Both as the director of the Peace Memorial Museum and as a hibakusha, he can speak with authority about nuclear force, but he makes his case briefly and without evident passion. "I am not a philosopher," he says. If pressed as to what he thinks the world will do with nuclear weapons, he admits that he is worried. At the same time he ascribes his own sense of practicality to the world: "Human beings are not fools. We are not likely to destroy everything. We must leave our traditions to the generations...
Shame of the Living. Many of the 75 hibakusha whom Lifton interviewed told of being torn between the gladness of survival and the pain of being alive because someone else was dead. In many cases, hibakusha survived because they ignored those in need...
Encounters with mass death are not new to mankind, and, indeed, Lifton draws comparisons between hibakusha and the survivors of the plagues of the Middle Ages. But, he says, the man-made holocausts of the 20th century have imposed a series of real and symbolic encounters with death on a scale so huge as to envelop people with a generalized psychic numbness...