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Japan’s hibakusha see a repeat of Hiroshima’s radiation horror

Sasamori is a hibakusha, or heat radiation survivor — a name given to those who lived through the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II.

For them, radiation is an invisible enemy that has haunted them, claimed their loved ones, altered their bodies and threatened their lives…….The hibakusha like Sasamori have lived in uncertainty, watching their childhood friends fall ill and wondering if their bodies were ticking time bombs for radiation-related diseases.

Hiroshima survivors fear new nuclear fallout, By Madison Park, CNN, March 18, 2011 Los Angeles — The cities flattened by last week’s earthquake look eerily similar to the decimated buildings Shigeko Sasamori saw after an atomic bomb was dropped on her hometown in 1945.

The floodwaters from the tsunami — the waves of debris and bodies — remind her of the rivers in Hiroshima, Japan, swamped with corpses.

And the struggle to contain radioactive emissions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant makes Sasamori, 78, wonder if the crisis there will plague a new generation in Japan.

“Radiation is the most horrible thing, and it’s more horrible to me because humans make it,” she said from her home near Los Angeles. “We don’t have to make that.”

Sasamori is a hibakusha, or heat radiation survivor — a name given to those who lived through the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II.

For them, radiation is an invisible enemy that has haunted them, claimed their loved ones, altered their bodies and threatened their lives…….

Over the years, her family members developed radiation sickness, stomach cancer and thyroid cancer. Her father, mother and older sister died of cancer. Sasamori has battled thyroid cancer and intestinal cancer, common conditions after radiation exposure.

The hibakusha like Sasamori have lived in uncertainty, watching their childhood friends fall ill and wondering if their bodies were ticking time bombs for radiation-related diseases.

“I try to ignore it, but it never goes away,” said Komaki, who grew up in Hiroshima after the bombing and is now chief of thoracic radiation oncology at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

“A lot of people who are exposed to radiation in that city, it’s always in their minds.”…………..

We became outcasts,” said Hideko Tamura Snider, who was 11 when the bomb fell in Hiroshima. “A lot of people hid that they were there. We were employment risks. What if you get sickly and tired? You’re a liable employee. They don’t want to hire you.”

In the 1950s, the Japanese public grew more aware of the hibakusha partly because of a nuclear test on nearby Bikini Atoll that left several Japanese fisherman with radiation illness….

Hiroshima survivors fear new nuclear fallout – CNN.com

March 19, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, Japan