Word: hibakusha
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...from sockets, flesh bubbled from bone, a city disappeared in a flash. Yet the damage report was not complete, as Yale Research Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton shows in this compassionate and important study of the malaise that still pollutes the spirits of many survivors. They are known as hibakusha (pronounced hi-bak-sha), which literally means "explosion-affected persons." To the Japanese the word incorporates the chill of such terms as zombie and leper...
...Esteem. Hibakusha, who number about 90,000 and account for one-fifth of Hiroshima's present population, are often refused employment on the grounds that they tire easily, lack drive or are prone to fatal malignancies. They are frequently shunned as mates for fear that they carry radiation-tainted genes...
...general, Lifton discovered, hibakusha hold themselves in lower esteem than do other Japanese. In telling of the hibakusha experience, the late Yōkō Ōta, Japan's best-known writer of "Abomb" literature (Town of Corpses, Human Rags), depreciated her work and herself with such statements as "Do I have the right to imagination? Can what I say about the dead ever be authentic?" A Japanese professor of English expressed the same idea with lines from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: "They can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with...