In John Hersey's 1985 edition of Hiroshima he included a new chapter, an update on what had happened in the lives of the six people he wrote about in the original version of the book (which was itself published in a single issue of The New Yorker in 1946, filling the issue completely). In the new chapter, Hersey noted that the Japanese did not call the survivors of the atomic bombings survivors:
In referring to those who went through the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Japanese tended to shy away from the term "survivors," because in its focus on being alive it might suggest some slight to the sacred dead. The class of people to which Nakamura-san belonged came, therefore, to be called by a more neutral name, "hibakusha"--literally, "explosion-affected persons."
In order to renew my slight knowledge of some aspects of Japanese culture, I plan to re-read Hiroshima now that Japan has had another tragedy befall it, one that wasn't of its own making, but one that now also involves nuclear energy release and radioactivity levels above the normal background level. As far as hibakusha are concerned, the United States has more than its share nowadays, mostly young people who've been seriously and sadly affected physically and mentally by exposure to the shock waves from IEDs and other high explosives in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
