TheEconomistAugust 1st 2020 291F
or seventeen-year-oldTakeoka Chi-
sako, August 6th, 1945 was supposed to
be a day off. She had planned to meet two
girlfriends at 8:15 that morning, at a train
station on the west side of Hiroshima. She
was running late, and as she stepped out-
side her house she lifted a pocket mirror to
her face. Then she saw a flash and heard a
bang. When she regained consciousness
she found herself lying in a potato field 30
metres away, a mushroom cloud rising in
the sky. People with charred skin dangling
from their arms came rushing over a near-
by hillside. They cried for help, but were
too feeble to speak their names and too
weak to drink the water Ms Takeoka
brought them. “Then one by one, they
died,” says Higashino Mariko, Ms Take-
oka’s daughter.
Ms Higashino tells this tale with the
precision of an eyewitness. Yet she was
born eight years after American forces flat-tened Hiroshima with Little Boy, the first
atomic bomb used in combat. For decades
survivors such as Ms Takeoka, known in Ja-
pan as hibakusha, or bomb-affected people,
have told their stories publicly. Now their
ranks are “declining drastically”, says Taki-
gawa Takuo, director of the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Museum. So the city gov-
ernment in Hiroshima has recruited scores
of volunteers like Ms Higashino to become
denshosha, or “legacy successors” who take
on the job of recounting their experiences.
(Ms Higashino is unusual in that she inher-ited her own mother’s story; most take on a
stranger’s.) Nagasaki, which was bombed
on August 9th, has created a similar group.
These programmes reflect anxiety in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki about fading war-
time memories. In August Japan marks the
75th anniversary of the atomic bombings.
Although there are still more than 130,000
living hibakusha, their average age is over- This will be the “last chance” to hear
first-hand from witnesses during a major
anniversary, laments Kubo Masayuki, di-
rector of the Hiroshima National Peace Me-
morial Hall.
The suffering of the hibakushaanimates
Japan’s post-war pacifism, as well as anti-
nuclear activism internationally. Many
worry that the war’s lessons are being for-
gotten. Fewer than 30% of Japanese can
correctly name the dates of the atomic
bombings (in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the
numbers are higher). Yuzaki Hidehiko, the
governor of Hiroshima Prefecture, says
that “fading memories—not only in Japan
but around the world” are leading to grow-
ing naivety about the horrors of conflict.
Abe Shinzo, Japan’s prime minister, has
sought to revise the constitution that
America imposed on Japan after the war.
He has failed to gather enough votes in the
Diet to change Article 9, which renounces
war and bars Japan from maintaining
75 years after HiroshimaNever forget
HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
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