On a recent weekend, an 84-year-old survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing retraced his movements on a map: The inferno during his 20km walk home, the “black rain” of falling radioactive particles and how he felt sick days later.
His audience of eight listened intently, some asking questions and taking notes. They hope to tell his story to future generations after he is gone, to take their listeners to the scene on Aug. 9, 1945, the way Shigeyuki Katsura saw and felt it.
In a government-organized program in the western Tokyo suburb of Kunitachi, 20 trainees aged from their 20s to their 70s are studying wartime history, taking public speech lessons from a television anchor and hearing stories from Katsura and another Kunitachi resident who survived Hiroshima.
Photo: AFP
“It’s been 70 years since the bombings and we survivors are getting old. Time is limited and we must hurry,” said Terumi Tanaka, the 83-year-old head of a national group, the Tokyo-based Japan Confederation of A and H Bomb Sufferers’ Organizations.
In a way, they are going backward in this digital age, learning face-to-face from their elders in order to carry on a storytelling tradition. It is not unlike Kabuki actors inheriting their seniors’ stage names and performing their signature pieces.
The same stories may be in video and text on the Internet, but organizers feel that in-person storytelling adds an invaluable human touch.
The Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing in Hiroshima killed about 140,000 people from injuries and immediate effects of radiation within five months and another atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later killed 73,000 people. The death toll linked to the attacks and their radiation effects has since risen to 460,000 people, with the number of survivors declining to 183,000 people, according to the latest government statistics.
Most survivors live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Katsura said about 20 survivors live in Kunitachi, but only a few, including himself, are healthy enough to make public appearances.
Tanaka, a retired engineering professor, survived Nagasaki, but lost five relatives there when he was 13 years old. He said it would be almost impossible for storytellers to describe the horrors as vividly as the survivors, but hopes their imagination, compassion and commitment to peace can make up for any shortfall.
High-school teacher Mika Shimizu, 32, hopes to do just that, by putting a survivor’s experience in language her peers and others as young as her students can relate to.
“Even if we hear the same story, the way each of us retell it would be different, because we all have different sensibilities,” she said.
Another trainee, Sachiko Matsushita, missed her chance to find out directly from her father, who hid his exposure in Nagasaki for most of his life and largely kept the story to himself. Initially she wanted to revisit her father’s path, but now is devoted to passing on Katsura’s.
“I’d much rather hear the stories directly from people and pass them on to people,” the 47-year-old company worker said.
Katsura was 14 when he and his schoolmates, put to work for the war effort, were delivering a cart filled with weapons parts fromoschool to a factory when the Fat Man plutonium bomb exploded over Nagasaki.
“Having witnessed what the man-made nuclear weapon did to humans, I must condemn it as absolutely wrong and the mistake should never be repeated,” he said.
“That’s what drives me to tell my story and I’ll continue to do so as long as I live,” he said.
The course in Kunitachi is modeled on one started in Hiroshima in 2012. The first group of 50 Hiroshima storytellers debuted this year, with about 150 others in training.
Kunitachi official Mamiko Ogawa said storytelling requires a deep understanding of both the historical background and the survivors’ emotions, along with a touch of the teller’s personality. That is what makes it different from digital archives.
“I think the stories are best conveyed when told by real people,” she said. “I hope the trainees would fully absorb the survivors’ experience and feelings, so they can tell the stories using their own sensibilities.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.