Jim Carrier
Miyako Jodai points to where her home was when the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki.
Japan currently recognizes a group of 106,825 people with a mean age of eighty-five as the last living victims of atomic bombs used in wartime. Dying at a rate of 6,000 per year, these last witnesses, called hibakusha, offer first-person accounts of the days when two atomic bombs fell on Japan, as well as stories of the effects of radiation on human beings.
Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses
By M. G. Sheftall
Penguin Random House, 560 pages
Publication date: September 10, 2024
Gathered in two volumes by historian M.G. Sheftall, the reminiscences in Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses and Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses, amount to a minute-by-minute recreation of August 6 and August 9, 1945, and the entwining happenings that brought these witnesses to this historic crossroad. Even after reading multiple accounts of the atomic bombings, I am still awed by Japan’s atomic tale. The books are best read together for their full impact.
Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses
By M. G. Sheftall
Penguin Random House, 496 pages
Publication date: August 5, 2025
Sheftall, a professor on the Faculty of Informatics at Shizuoka University with a Ph.D. in modern Japanese history and culture and fluent in Japanese, is a unique storyteller capable of opening the lives of fifty people in depth throughout these two volumes.
The books weave the ordinary with extraordinary: the simple lives, homes, and occupations of Japanese citizens meld with the enormous might of American nuclear machinery. The author opens with the bombing preparations on the island of Tinian, and slowly carries us to ground zero, detailing all of the horrible effects wrought on human victims.
The tragedy captured in these profiles is that of innocent lives upended by warmongers keen on world dominance, and then caught in what turned out to be lifelong health battles resulting from a single moment of atomic radiation.
While both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been physically reconstructed, rebuilding after a nuclear war is not like rebuilding after a conventional bombing like the London blitz. As the patients of one of Sheftall’s key sources, Dr. Masao Tomonaga, put it, the atom bomb is still inside the human victims. They are developing new cancers, a resurgence of leukemia, and a unique type of cataract. Added to these is the stress from fear that they may still get sick and die from a bomb dropped eighty years ago.
For more on the story of Nagasaki, Japan, today, see Jim Carrier’s article “The Bombs Still Ticking” from the August/September 2025 issue of The Progressive.