Nuclear Incident Evokes Empathy, Pain Among Japanese Americans

For Kaz Suyeishi, 72, of Los Angeles, Japan’s latest nuclear incident brought back painful memories of an August morning in 1945 when she was a teenager in Hiroshima.

“I feel sorry for those people who are suffering. It scares me,” said Suyeishi, head of the 1,000-member American Society of Hiroshima-Nagasaki Survivors.

“I’m lucky I’m still alive. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else.”

Suyeishi was outside that Aug. 6 when the atomic bomb hit, and was thrown alongside a house, which collapsed on her. Amazingly, she suffered few immediate injuries, but the radiation left her vomiting blood, with a high fever and skin irritations.

She said it took a year for her to recover from those symptoms.

“Having radiation sickness is like carrying a time bomb around with you,” she said. “You don’t know when it’s going to blow. Someday everyone has to die, but you don’t want to die of radiation sickness.”

Other Japanese Americans were also troubled by Thursday’s accident at a uranium processing plant in northeastern Japan. Even though most of their families left Japan generations ago, they can’t forget their native land’s troubled history in the atomic age.

“It resonates deeply with me,” said Lon Kurashige, an assistant professor of history at USC, whose great-grandparents were Japanese. “I’m not sure why. I don’t have any immediate relatives over there. There’s just something I can’t name that makes me more empathetic about this.”

But Japanese Americans, even Suyeishi, hesitated to condemn the use of nuclear power in Japan. Nuclear bombs raise questions of morality and warfare, they say. But nuclear energy relates to government policy and science.

“I really don’t understand [nuclear power]. I’m not a scientist,” said Suyeishi, who was born in Pasadena but lived in Japan from the age of 8 months until she was 22.

“I don’t know if they should use it or not. . . . Everything is modern and convenient today, but it’s also very dangerous.”