World & Nation He saw a Marshall Islands nuclear bomb test up close.
So he lived under a Japanese name, Masaichi Egawa, until eight years ago, when he first publicly revealed his identity during a cruise where atomic bomb survivors shared their stories. Revealing that he was also an A-bomb victim would have meant more trouble. Lee had been bullied at school because of his Korean background, his classmates ridiculing the smell of kimchi in his lunchbox. Prospective marriage partners also worried about genetic damage that could be passed to children. He suffered severe burns on his neck that took four months to heal.īack at work, co-workers wouldn’t go near him, saying he had “A-bomb disease.” Little was known about the effects of the bomb, and some believed radiation was similar to an infectious disease. The whole sky turned yellowish-orange, and he was knocked face first to the ground, Lee said. 6, 1945, Lee, a second-generation Korean born in Japan, was on his way to work at Japan’s national railway authority in Hiroshima when the uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy exploded. The city, a wartime military hub, had a large number of Korean workers, including those forced to work without pay at mines and factories under Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Some 20,000 ethnic-Korean residents of Hiroshima are believed to have died in the nuclear attack. Ikuko Murai remembers when the American Jeeps would come after school to take her and other young survivors to a lab at the top of a hill.
scientists have been quietly working in Hiroshima for decades According to a recent Asahi newspaper survey of 768 survivors, nearly two-thirds said their wish for a nuclear-free world did not appear to be widely shared by the rest of humanity, and more than 70% called on a reluctant Japanese government to ratify a treaty banning nuclear weapons. The knowledge of their diminishing time - the average age of the survivors is more than 83, and many suffer from the long-lasting effects of radiation - is coupled with deep frustration over stalled progress in global efforts to ban nuclear weapons. These last witnesses to what happened 75 years ago this week want to reach a younger generation who they feel is losing sight of the horror.
For nearly 70 years, until he turned 85, Lee Jong-keun hid his past as an atomic bomb survivor, fearful of the widespread discrimination against blast victims that has long persisted in Japan.īut Lee, 92, is part of a fast-dwindling group of survivors, known as hibakusha, who feel a growing urgency - desperation, even - to tell their stories.
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