NAGASAKI/HIROSHIMA (Kyodo) — “I wonder if I can ever have children in the future?”

These words were written in a note from a Fukushima high school girl to 83-year-old Masahito Hirose in the fall of 2011, outlining her worries about the health effects from radiation. The girl and her classmates had visited Nagasaki on a school field trip and listened to Hirose speak about his experiences as a survivor of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings.

This prompted Hirose to decide he wanted to use his own experience of living with the impact of radiation to support young people in Fukushima Prefecture in the long term.

In March 2012, five atomic-bomb survivors’ groups in Nagasaki opposed arrangements for some of the debris from the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, to be processed in other parts of Japan.

Although the major purpose of the arrangement was to help ease the burden on the disaster-struck regions, such opposition was not uncommon, as many people nationwide feared this would further spread the radiation contamination.

But Hirose worried that such opposition from atomic-bomb survivors themselves, who knew first-hand how it was to be affected by radiation, may make people in the March 2011 disaster areas feel they had been abandoned. So as a member of the groups he immediately proposed finding ways to show solidarity and extend support to those in the disaster-struck regions.

Two years have passed since the catastrophe and the high school students who had written to Hirose have graduated. When he e-mailed them, many came back with positive and forward-looking responses, such as, “I want to continue to think about the issues I’ve experienced (through the disaster) in university.”

“I hope to continue to watch them grow,” Hirose said.

Along with other atomic-bomb survivors in Nagasaki, Hirose set up a group in February to liaise between Fukushima and Nagasaki. It is planning to arrange for lectures by survivors about their experiences of the bombing at high schools in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture.

“The day will definitely come when the expertise and experiences accumulated here from the atomic bombing will become useful in Fukushima,” Hirose said. “I want to keep conveying the message that Nagasaki will never abandon Fukushima.”

Meanwhile in Hiroshima, the other Japanese city to have suffered from atomic bombing, 80-year-old Mitsuo Kodama’s approach to raising public awareness about the horrors of radiation has drawn renewed attention since the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Kodama, who was 12 years old when exposed to radiation from the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945, gives testimonies of his ordeal by showing people a photo of his damaged chromosome.

“Never again should mankind create somebody like me,” he said.

It was in the fall of 2007 when Kodama finally learned for the first time about the amount of radiation he had been exposed to — about 4,600 millisieverts according to tests conducted by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.

His exposure level was so high it has only appeared in “a handful of people,” even in the foundation’s records that cover long-term studies of some 120,000 atomic-bomb survivors and others. It is estimated that over 90 percent of people exposed to such an amount of radiation have died.

In Kodama’s case, of the 100 cells tested, 102 chromosome abnormalities were found, according to the test results.

Kodama was inside a junior high school building about 870 meters from the hypocenter of the blast when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Of some 300 classmates, only 19 survived. Soon after, he suffered from various acute symptoms such as fever and loss of hair, and has undergone surgery for cancer 19 times so far.

He understands that a case like his — having survived the blast from within such close distance — is extremely rare. Yet, he also constantly feels disappointed and regretful. Because there are so few like him, “It is so difficult to get people to understand the horror of radiation,” he said.

Perhaps one cannot simply compare the experiences of radiation exposure through an atomic bomb blast and that in the long-term from a nuclear power plant accident. Still, “radiation gnaws at the human body far into the future,” Kodama said. “We must get rid of it from the face of the Earth. I want to pass on my experience to the people of Fukushima too.”

Kyodo News, May 12, 2013