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Nagasaki Marks 61st Anniversary of U.S. Atomic Bombing

Nagasaki2006

In Japan, the city of Nagasaki is marking the 61st anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing. Over 200,000 people died in the 1945 atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We play an excerpt of a speech by a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing. [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. At the time of the explosion, Sakue Shimohira was in an air raid shelter a kilometer from the epicenter. She was ten years old. She spoke recently at a rally in New York’s Central Park.

SAKUE SHIMOHIRA: [translated] Suddenly I felt a blinding flash. It was too enormous and intense to describe. Just a flash. Next, the blast blew us off. When I regained consciousness, I found my younger sister in the corner of the shelter and my nephew under the tatami mat. Auntie Matsuda, blackened all over her body, with her baby, also seared, in arms, arrived and collapsed. She had a big open wound on her throat. We gave her water. When she was drinking it, water was also streaming out of her open wound. She said, "It tasted so good. Thank you," and died. My brother, too, vomiting yellow matter and crying, "I don’t want to die." And he died. Both my mother and my elder sister were found dead and seared around our house.

AMY GOODMAN: Atomic bombing survivor Sakue Shimohira. She was ten years old when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.


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