Terumi Tanaka, 88, who survived the Nagasaki atomic bomb in 1945. Thousands of survivors of the atomic bombing are still struggling to get public health benefits from Japanese government. (Photo: AFP)
By UCA News reporter
Aug 10 2023
Thousands of survivors of the US atomic bombing in Japan are still fighting an uphill battle to get public health benefits nearly eight decades on, says a report.
A total of 6,796 survivors are fighting to obtain an atomic-bomb survivor’s certificate for recognition and to have access to special public health benefits, Asahi Shimbun reported on Aug. 8.
The report came a day before the 78th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug 9 and two days after Hiroshima anniversary on Aug 6.
Chiyoko Iwanaga, 87, is among those citizens affected directly by the radiation and asking to be recognized as hibakusha, a Japanese term used for defining survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
She lives in Nagasaki and visits the prefectural office and city government office almost every month to convey her desire to be quickly recognized as hibakusha.
“We want to recognize us as hibakusha. We’re not saying this just because we want support,” Iwanaga said.
People like Iwanaga and others are defined as “hibaku taikensha” meaning people who were exposed to radiation but were outside the zone the government designated for receiving the benefits, Asahi Shimbun reported.
The exclusion of thousands has been the result of a complicated method used by the government to decide the victims.
The designated zone for hibakusha stretches 12 kilometers in the north-south direction and seven kilometers in the east-west direction from ground zero which was an administrative decision taken in 1945 right after the bombing.
Reportedly, the government’s stance is that the hibaku taikensha “are not directly affected by radiation,” rendering them ineligible for any kind of benefits or support.
The only exception given to them is for mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the bombing, which Iwanaga believes is discrimination against the victims.
“Why is a mental disorder the condition for us? I can’t accept that. Isn’t that discrimination?” Iwanaga says.
Even though she was not at the epicenter of the nuclear bombing in Nagasaki, Iwanaga claims that her exposure to the radiation has resulted in lasting effects on her overall health.
A week after the exposure to residual radiation, her hair fell out when she combed, her gums bled, and her face swelled, claims Iwanaga.
Iwanaga further pointed out that she experienced symptoms such as losing her voice for several days a year and coughing up phlegm mixed with blood,
She was diagnosed with hypothyroidism in her forties. At present, she suffers from high blood pressure, diabetes, and Meniere’s disease — an inner ear problem that can cause dizzy spells and hearing loss, also called vertigo.
According to the survivors, the benefits given to the hibaku taikensha differ between Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
In 2021, the Hiroshima High Court considered internal exposure of Hiroshima A-Bomb victims, who may have drunk contaminated water or ingested food following a radioactive “black rain” that fell in the suburbs after the bombing, as a criterion to declare them as hibakusha.
“If the possibility could not be denied, the victims would be considered as hibakusha,” the court said during the ruling.
Last April, the government revised its standards and began including only the Hiroshima survivors while excluding those from Nagasaki, stating a lack of evidence for “black rain” in the area.
“There is no objective record of rain falling outside the designated zone,” the government said.
Hiroki Hayashida, 82, refutes the government’s claim saying that radioactive water and ash were spread across the erstwhile Toishi village, now Toishimachi district in Nagasaki.
Hayashida was four years old during the bombing and states that his memory of the bombing and its aftermath is hazy.
However, he relies on the eyewitness accounts of his sister-in-law, Risu, who had lived with him until her death in 2008.
He cited her saying that she saw “crops covered in white ash in the fields behind” their house in Toishi.
Hayashida claims that he has suffered from heart valve disease since he was about 18 and continues to visit a hospital for chest pain and other heart-related diseases.
“The atomic bomb may have affected me,” Hayashida told Asahi Shimbun.
In the fiscal year 1999, the Nagasaki city government and other organizations surveyed 8,700 residents who lived outside the designated zone to find evidence of radioactive rain or ash.
The survey revealed 129 testimonies related to rain and 1,874 related to ash and other substances.
Despite the above facts uncovered in the survey, the government remains unwilling to provide relief like that of Hiroshima, the hibaku taikensha allege.
Hayashida and thousands of other survivors hope that the government will consider their testimonies, acknowledge their plight, and one day give them the benefits that they deserve.
“I spoke in the hope that the testimony about the ash, which I heard about from my sister-in-law, would be useful in helping hibaku taikensha,” Hayashida said. – UCA News
