일본 핵 공격 이후……

 

64 years ago, Sangy Yamaguci’s world exploded. I was outside when the atomic bomb fell, he says. This was Yamaguci at age 14. He was near the epicenter in Nagasaki. His upper body ravaged by the radiation from the American bomb. The image can’t erase all these years later, the children burned and dying. Since that day, Yamaguci has repeated one prayer that humanity will never again feel the flames of a nuclear bomb. He’s 79 and suffering from radiation-induced organ failure.

 

But Yamaguci is hopeful his prayer will be answered after hearing this speech from President Obama. “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a morale responsibility to act. I state clearly and with conviction, America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

 

The promise of peace resonates among survivors here in Nagasaki whose average age like Takasi Miyata is more than 70. He was 2.5 kilometers from the epicenter in 1945 and fled with his family on foot to where he lives now and where he tells a young about his childhood. “Mushroom cloud.”

 

The bombing survivors who live here also feel the connection to the American president by location. Just by coincidence, this part of Nagasaki happens to be named Obama. President Obama’s hope of a nuclear free world turned coincidence to pure adulation. It is an odd connection coming to life in caricatures of Obama all over the section of the Nagasaki . “This is the epicenter?” Miyata even wore an Obama shirt under his kimono as he gave me a tour of where the bomb fell. “Do you remember when the bomb fell?” “Yes, I remember. I hope to never I came.”

 

Time is running out for people like Yamaguci who urge president Obama to make good on his promise. We victims are dying, he says, but we’re gone, it will be difficult for people to remember the cruelty of the atomic bomb. 3,000 people died instantly in Nagasaki. 140,000 in Hiroshima. Tens of thousands more in the days that followed. Those who survived are left to preach the horror and pray history will not repeat itself.

 

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