its central four square miles were gone! Three days later on August 9th, 1945 the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar transformation. For those who survived they became known as the most important people living. Can you imagine working in a garden, sitting down eating fruit or reading a book. Watching children play in a park and the unthinkable become the commonplace. Minutes later if youre a survivor your wondering around without feeling, past corpses, neighbors trapped in burning mounds of rubble, children running around without skin. A Hiroshima survivor Wakashi Shigetoshi was quoted has saying that the suffering he saw around him in the immediate aftermath of the bombing; no longer moved him in the slightest. At that time human beings on the point of death were no longer human; they became mere substance, and the man watching them lost his humanity also became but a substance. (Linden 1994). The novelist Oe Kenzaburo has described those who survived this experience as onpeople who, despite all, didnt commit suicide. On those two August mornings the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki endured what many came to fear would be the fate of humanity as a whole. Those who lived through this horrifying ordeal were the first trueresidents of the atomic age. The Japanese call those who survived the bombing hibakusha meaning survivor or exposed one. Official Japanese registries in the 1980s recognized 368,259 survivors, of those the vast majority 71% in Hiroshima and 69% from Nagasaki.Assessments of how many people was killed or the number of survivors remain inconclusive. Current Japanese estimates state that 90,000 to 120,000 people dead in Hiroshima in the first four months after the bombing. In Nagasaki authorities estimated 60,000 to 70,000 deaths. Counting the survivors should have been easier then counting the dead yet this too proved to be difficult. You see many survivors had substantive reasons for keeping their experience to themse...
