Doctor who survived A-bomb

1917-2017

SHUNTARO Hida, who has died at the age of 100, witnessed the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.

He dedicated the rest of his life to caring and campaigning for the survivors, known in Japanese culture as “hibakusha” (literally, explosionaffected people).

Hida was a 28-year-old medical officer at Hiroshima Military Hospital when, with the threat from the Allied forces escalating, he was sent to the village of Hesaka, near Hiroshima. His task was to dig a tunnel in which the hospital’s staff and patients could shelter in the event of evacuation. On August 5 1945, with his digging work complete, Hida visited a young patient in the village, staying overnight.

The next morning the US bomber Enola Gay dropped its cargo, an atomic bomb.

“The first thing I saw was the light,” Hida recalled. “It was so bright that I was momentarily blinded. Simultaneously, I was surrounded by an intense heat.” He was lifted off his feet by the blast.

Borrowing a bicycle, he rode back to Hiroshima, encountering catastrophically injured civilians. Finding his route blocked by flames, he doubled back to Hesaka, where he joined army doctors attempting to treat survivors who had made it as far as the village. Over the next few days, the number of patients there would swell to 27 000.

In his work Hida became acquainted with the symptoms of radiation poisoning. Patients who had been expected to survive would suddenly develop a high fever. They shivered violently, their hair fell out and they started bleeding from the nose and mouth. Many who had been sheltered from the bomb or who had arrived on the scene after it fell also began to fall sick and die.

The reason would remain unclear to Hida until the mid1970s, when he began working with the UN bringing attention to the realities of radiation poisoning. The reports by US doctors in the intervening decades provided him with compelling evidence of how radioactive elements could enter the body and cause health problems long after the exposure.

“Radiation will slowly turn a healthy person into a sick one,” he told the World Conference of Religions for Peace in 2009. “Needless to say, not a single nuclear weapon must be allowed to remain. They are instruments of murder.”

He was born in Hiroshima on January 1 1917 and graduated from the academy of medicine of the Imperial Japanese Army in 1944. He later moved to Tokyo, setting up his own clinic in 1950.

He served for many years as director of the Hibakusha Counselling Centre, set up by the Japan Confederation of Aand H-bomb Sufferers Organisations.

Retired from medicine in 2012, Hida was in demand following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. He gave lectures on the dangers of failing to confront the deadly effects of radiation, and was moved by the mothers with young children who attended. — © The Daily Telegraph, London