FEATURE: Atomic bomb survivor dedicating life to collecting A-bomb photos

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NAGASAKI, May 22 Kyodo -
Yoshitoshi Fukahori felt compelled to do something to share his painful atomic
bomb memories with others.
So three decades ago, he started to collect and systematically organize
photographs of the devastation following the atomic bombing of his hometown of
Nagasaki.
''Photographs don't lie,'' said the 80-year-old Fukahori, who chairs a civic
group called the Committee for Research of Photographs and Materials of the
Atomic Bombing.
''If you want to convey the agony and suffering brought about by the (atomic)
bombing, photographs speak more than a thousand words...That's why I'm
intrigued by this work,'' he said.
The United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities toward the end of
World War II in 1945 -- Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki three days later. The
death toll in Hiroshima is estimated at 140,000 and in Nagasaki at more than
70,000.
Japan surrendered to the Allied powers on Aug. 15, 1945, and is the only
country to have suffered an attack by nuclear weapons.
In 1979, Fukahori founded the committee with five others after realizing that
there were not many photos left showing the aftermath of the bombing of
Nagasaki. The photos that were available were not organized well as most of
them provided no clues about who took them or when and where they were taken.
So Fukahori, who was working as a medical administrator at a Nagasaki hospital,
and his colleagues on the committee asked people in the local community to help
them gather atomic bomb-related photos.
The idea received a positive response and photos have been passed to the
committee slowly but steadily.
One of the major contributors was the late Tsutomu Iwakura, who gave the
committee around 600 photos related to the Nagasaki bombing and later played a
key role in the 10-Feet Movement, a civil campaign that retrieved 100,000 feet
of film footage on the two bombings from the U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration.
''We cheered when we first saw that pile of 600 photos but soon realized the
importance of our work, which is to preserve historical data for later
generations,'' Fukahori recalled.
Iwakura recommended that the committee first create a database for the photos
in its possession. There are currently around 3,000 photos in the committee's
database system.
Fukahori believes there are still undiscovered A-bomb photos, perhaps buried in
family albums or in other places in Japan or abroad.
''If one Marine took that many pictures...there must be a lot more photos
because about 25,000 troops were stationed (in and around Nagasaki),'' Fukahori
said, referring to U.S. Marine Joe O'Donnell who photographed the devastation
in Nagasaki shortly after the end of the war.
When the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Fukahori, who was 16 at the time,
was working at a city-run railway station located approximately 3.5 kilometers
from the epicenter, but he was not seriously injured.
He rushed to a university hospital in search of his family and saw many injured
people moaning and crying for help.
''They begged, 'Young boy, please give me water,''' Fukahori said. ''I went
back and forth several times between the hospital and a nearby river and gave
them water using a broken bottle. It seemed an endless task and I eventually
had to shove people aside to leave the scene.''
It turned out that his parents had been evacuated to a safe location outside of
the city. But his older sister died at his uncle's home, which was located
within a 1 km radius of ground zero.
''My mother and I had to cremate her body and that is the most painful moment
of my life,'' he said.
''Since then, I've always felt the need to speak about how people suffer from
an atomic bombing. I will continue with this work as long as I can because I am
the only original member left'' on the photo committee, Fukahori said.
Fukahori was encouraged by U.S. President Barack Obama's speech in Prague in
April outlining his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.
''I feel the times are catching up with our labors and now is the time to seize
the momentum,'' Fukahori said, noting that what Obama set out was the same
thing that he and many other A-bomb survivors have been calling for over 60
years. He added that the committee will ask Obama to visit Nagasaki as well as
Hiroshima during a future trip to Japan, which diplomatic sources say could
take place as early as this fall.
==Kyodo