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 AN OLD JAPANESE DOCTOR WHO SURVIVED HIROSHIMAINTERVIEW AND PHOTO BY TOMOKAZU KOSUGA TRANSLATED BY LENA OISHI 
Japan is still (as of press time on this issue) the only country in the world that has been a victim of the atomic bomb. Since the demons dropped onto the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 63 years ago this past August, the country has continued to quietly suffer from the repercussions. One 91-year-old hibakusha [that’s Japanese for “A-bomb survivor”] doctor continues to call out the dangers and brutality of the A-bomb to the rest of the world. His name is Shuntaro Hida. On August 1, 1944, a year before the bomb dropped on the city, Dr. Hida was posted to Hiroshima’s army hospital as a military doctor. He experienced the bomb blast at just 3.5 miles away from its epicenter, and he has since seen everything there is to see as a doctor specializing in the treatment of A-bomb victims. Dr. Hida knows the effects of the bomb not only from the perspective of someone who was actually there but also from the specialized viewpoint of an army medic. It’s no wonder then that almost 6,000 radiation-sickness sufferers in Japan and around the world have sought his expertise. So what exactly happened on that fateful day in Hiroshima? Vice spoke to Dr. Hida, who remembers every single detail about the experience. Vice: How did you manage to avoid being hit by the bomb directly, despite being in Hiroshima at the time? Dr. Hida: I was dozing off on my futon the night before the bombing on August 6, when somebody suddenly shook me awake. It was an old man who came from Hesaka village, which is a couple of miles away from Hiroshima. His granddaughter had cardiac valvular disease and often had seizures, so I regularly went to the village to check up on her. That night she suffered another one, so I got on the back of the old man’s bicycle and he rode me to their place. This meant that I got out of Hiroshima just in time to be saved from being directly hit. I was exposed to the radiation, but from a distance of just over three miles from the epicenter. Did you actually see the moment when the A-bomb was dropped? Yes, I did. I think I’m the only person who actually saw it with his own eyes and then wrote about the experience later, because most people in Hiroshima were killed the instant they saw that bright flash of light. Let me explain how I actually saw the bombing. I spent the night at the old man’s place after looking at the child. The next morning, I decided to give her a sedative before going back to the hospital, because if she woke up and started crying she might have another seizure. I took out a small syringe from my pocket, tilted it upward, and pushed out some liquid to let any air out. Suddenly I saw a plane flying above Hiroshima in front of me. That must have been the Enola Gay. Tell us what you saw when the bomb hit Hiroshima. The first thing I saw was the light. It was so bright that I was momentarily blinded. Simultaneously, I was surrounded by an intense heat. The bomb released a 4,000-degree heat wave in the instant that it hit the ground. I panicked, covered my eyes, and lay low on the floor. I couldn’t hear any noise and the trees weren’t rustling. I thought something was up, so I cautiously looked through the window toward where I’d seen the flash of light. The skies were blue with no cloud in sight, but there was this bright red ring of fire high up in the skies above the city! In the middle of the ring was a big white ball that kept growing like a thundercloud—this really round thing. It kept getting bigger and bigger until it finally hit the outer fire ring, and then the whole thing blew up into a huge red fireball. It was like I was witnessing the birth of a new sun. It was so perfectly round! When I was a child, I saw Asama Mountain erupt from really close up, but this was much more full-on. The clouds were white, but shining in rainbow colors as they rose up. It was really beautiful. People call it the “mushroom cloud” but it’s actually a pillar of fire: The bottom part is a column of flames and the top part is a fireball, which metamorphoses into clouds as it keeps rising up. Then, below the pillar of fire, pitch-black clouds started spreading horizontally above the mountains surrounding Hiroshima. They consisted of sand and dust that were being pushed up from the ground due to the pressure generated from the blast. They were coming toward me like a tidal wave. We were on a hill and there was a cliff next to us, but the next moment the dust clouds had crept right up. Before I knew it, the old man’s house was swallowed up and crushed by the wave. Luckily the thatched roof acted as a cushion, saving the child and myself. It was then that I realized that something terrible must have happened, and rushed back to the hospital in Hiroshima on the old man’s bike. CONTINUED AN OLD JAPANESE DOCTOR | 1 | 2 | >
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