We’re turning our attention to the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We are inviting you to spend time with the stories of Japanese hibakusha, those who survived the nuclear attacks.

In this chilling animated video by The New York Times, Akiko Takakura narrates her story of surviving the bombing of Hiroshima with accompanying animation that shifts between the past and present.

“On August 6 and 9, respectively, America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing between 110,000 and 210,000 people. The power of the blasts shattered windows to smithereens. Concrete crumbled and became coral pink from radiation exposure. The searing heat of wildfires reduced thousands of wooden buildings to cinders. For many victims, death and cremation occurred concurrently, as their bodies were reduced to ash by the heat of the blast. Those who survived became Hibakusha, ‘the exposed.’ Some survivors were disfigured by their injuries; others faced cancer and chronic disease from radioactive fallout.” Dr. Becky Alexis-Martin (article)

Some Japanese hibakusha have found kinship with global hibakusha who have been impacted by nuclear weapons detonations. Setsuko Thurlow has traveled the world calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

“When Setsuko Thurlow, a Hiroshima survivor and lifelong disarmament activist, jointly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to ICAN in 2017, she said that Japan’s hibakusha – literally, ‘bomb-exposed people’ – have always stood in solidarity with others around the world harmed by the bomb.

‘People from places with long-forgotten names, like Moruroa, Ekker, Semipalatinsk, Maralinga, Bikini. People whose lands and seas were irradiated, whose bodies were experimented upon, whose cultures were forever disrupted.’

Like the Japanese atomic bomb survivors, she said, these people were not content to be victims. ‘We refused to sit idly in terror as the so-called great powers took us past nuclear dusk and brought us recklessly close to nuclear midnight. We rose up. We shared our stories of survival. We said: humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.’” - International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

Learn more. Please share resources you turn to so we can add them on our site:

• She Was 300 Yards From the Atomic Bomb Center — and Survived by André Hörmann and Anna Samo, Op-Docs, The New York Times (video)

• My Reason for Not Watching Oppenheimer (A Perspective from Hiroshima) by Yukiyo Kawano (article)

• Hiroshima governor: Here’s what Oppenheimer means to me by Hidehiko Yuzaki, Governor of the Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan (article)

• Hibakusha Stories, firsthand testimonies from hibakusha (website)

• Yukiyo Kawano (website) and (art)

• “Dwelling in My Falling”: Yukiyo Kawano’s Nuclear Vision by Mark Auslander & Ellen Schattschneider (article)

• Nagasaki survivor visits U.S. town that fueled his city’s destruction, PBS News Hour (video and article)

• The Hibakusha’s Decades Long Journey to Ban Nuclear Weapons, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (website)

• My Experience and Damages: Dr. Raisuke Shirabe, Atomic Bomb Disease Institute, Nagasaki University (webpage)

• Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha by Robert A. Jacobs (book)

• [Letters from Hibakusha] Overcoming Grief, NHK Hiroshima Broadcasting Corporation (video)

• The Vow From Hiroshima directed by Susan Strickler (film trailer and website)

• The Human Cost of Nuclear Testing, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (webpage)

• Part 3: Under the Mushroom Cloud from The Apocalypse Factory by Steve Olson: Follows the story of Raisuke Shirabe’s survival of the Nagasaki bombing and the horrors he and others experienced in the bomb’s aftermath. (book)

• The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai (book available as pdf) [originally published in 1949]

• Nagasaki: Voices of the A-Bomb Survivors, Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Testimonial Society, 2016 (book available in libraries)

• Collection of Memoirs of the Atomic Bombardment of Nagasaki 1945-55 by Kodo Yasuyama, edited by Shunichi Yamashita. Nagasaki: Nagasaki Association for Hibakusha’s Medical Care (book)

• Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard (book)

• Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima by M. Susan Lindee (book)

• Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath by Paul Ham (book)

• Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor's Story by Caren Stelson (children’s book) [releases Oct 2023]

• Disarming Doomsday: The Human Impact of Nuclear Weapons Since Hiroshima by Dr. Becky Alexis-Martin (book)

• Hiroshima by John Hershey, August 23, 1946, The New Yorker (article) 

• Our Friend the Atom, The aesthetics of the Atomic Age helped whitewash the threat of nuclear disaster by Dr. Becky Alexis-Martin (article) “The horrors of Hiroshima were revealed to the [American] public not by the American state, but by New Yorker journalist John Hersey in 1946.Public attitudes towards nuclear weapons began, understandably, to sour, triggering a cultural shift towards anti-nuclear pacifism.”