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HIROSHIMA, Japan: Eighty years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of the remaining elderly Japanese survivors are increasingly frustrated by growing nuclear threats and the acceptance of nuclear weapons by global leaders.

The US attacks on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and three days later on Nagasaki killed more than 200,000 people by the end of that year. Others survived but with radiation illness.

About 100,000 survivors are still alive. Many hid their experiences to protect themselves and their families from discrimination that still exists. Others couldn’t talk about what happened because of the trauma they suffered.

Some survivors have begun to speak out late in their lives, hoping to encourage others to push for the end of nuclear weapons.

An English-speaking guide at Hiroshima’s peace park

Despite numerous health issues, survivor Kunihiko Iida, 83, has devoted his retirement years to telling his story as a way to advocate for nuclear disarmament.

He volunteers as a guide at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. He wants to raise awareness among foreigners because he feels their understanding of the bombings is lacking.

It took him 60 years to be able to talk about his ordeal in public.

When the US dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima, Iida was 900 meters (yards) away from the hypocenter, at a house where his mother grew up.

He was 3 years old. He remembers the intensity of the blast. It was as if he was thrown out of a building. He found himself alone underneath the debris, bleeding from shards of broken glass all over his body.

“Mommy, help!” he tried to scream, but his voice didn’t come out. Eventually he was rescued by his grandfather.

Within a month, his 25-year-old mother and 4-year-old sister died after developing nosebleeds, skin problems and fatigue. Iida had similar radiation effects through elementary school, though he gradually regained his health.

He was almost 60 when he finally visited the peace park at the hypocenter, the first time since the bombing, asked by his aging aunt to keep her company.

After he decided to start telling his story, it wasn’t easy. Overwhelmed by emotion, it took him a few years before he could speak in public.

In June, he met with students in Paris, London and Warsaw on a government-commissioned peace program. Despite his worries about how his calls for nuclear abolishment would be perceived in nuclear-armed states like Britain and France, he received applause and handshakes.

Iida says he tries to get students to imagine the aftermath of a nuclear attack, how it would destroy both sides and leave behind highly radioactive contamination.

“The only path to peace is nuclear weapons’ abolishment. There is no other way,” Iida said.

A regular at anti-war protests

Fumiko Doi, 86, would not have survived the atomic bombing on Nagasaki if a train she was on had been on time. The train was scheduled to arrive at Urakami station around 11 a.m., just when the bomb was dropped above a nearby cathedral.

With the delay, the train was 5 kilometers (3 miles) away. Through the windows, Doi, then 6, saw the flash. She covered her eyes and bent over as shards of broken windows rained down. Nearby passengers covered her for protection.

People on the street had their hair burnt. Their faces were charcoal black and their clothes were in pieces, she said.

Doi told her children of the experience in writing, but long hid her status as a survivor because of fear of discrimination.

Doi married another survivor. She worried their four children would suffer from radiation effects. Her mother and two of her three brothers died of cancer, and two sisters have struggled with their health.

Her father, a local official, was mobilized to collect bodies and soon developed radiation symptoms. He later became a teacher and described what he’d seen, his sorrow and pain in poetry, a teary Doi explained.

Doi began speaking out after seeing the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster following a strong earthquake and tsunami, which caused radioactive contamination.

She travels from her home in Fukuoka to join anti-war rallies, and speaks out against atomic weapons.

“Some people have forgotten about the atomic bombings ... That’s sad,” she said, noting that some countries still possess and develop nuclear weapons more powerful than those used 80 years ago.

“If one hits Japan, we will be destroyed. If more are used around the world, that’s the end of the Earth,” she said. “That’s why I grab every chance to speak out.”

At Hiroshima, learning from survivors

After the 2023 Hiroshima G7 meeting of global leaders and the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the grassroots survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo last year, visitors to Hiroshima and Nagasaki peace museums have soared, with about one third of them coming from abroad.

On a recent day, most of the visitors at the Hiroshima peace park were non-Japanese. Samantha Anne, an American, said she wanted her children to understand the bombing.

“It’s a reminder of how much devastation one decision can make,” Anne said.

Katsumi Takahashi, a 74-year-old volunteer specializing in guided walks of the area, welcomes foreign visitors but worries about Japanese youth ignoring their own history.

On his way home, Iida, the survivor and guide, stopped by a monument dedicated to the children killed. Millions of colorful paper cranes, known as the symbol of peace, hung nearby, sent from around the world.

Even a brief encounter with a survivor made the tragedy more real, Melanie Gringoire, a French visitor, said after Iida’s visit. “It’s like sharing a little piece of history.”

WASHINGTON: Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed that the Justice Department move forward with a probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation following the recent release of documents aimed at undermining the legitimacy of the inquiry that established that Moscow interfered on the Republican’s behalf in the 2016 US presidential election.
Bondi has directed a prosecutor to present evidence to a grand jury after referrals from the Trump administration’s top intelligence official, a person familiar with the matter said Monday. That person was not authorized to discuss it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. Fox News first reported the development.
It was not clear which former officials might be the target of any grand jury activity, where the grand jury that might ultimately hear evidence will be located or which prosecutors — whether career employees or political appointees — might be involved in pursuing the investigation. It was also not clear what precise claims of misconduct Trump administration officials believe could form the basis of criminal charges, which a grand jury would have to sign off on for an indictment to be issued.
The development is likely to heighten concerns that the Justice Department is being used to achieve political ends given longstanding grievances over the Russia investigation voiced by President Donald Trump, who has called for the jailing of perceived political adversaries, and because any criminal investigation would revisit one of the most dissected chapters of modern American political history. It is also surfacing at a time when the Trump administration is being buffeted by criticism over its handling of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation.
The initial, years-old investigation into Russian election interference resulted in the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, who secured multiple convictions against Trump aides and allies but did not establish proof of a criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump campaign.
The inquiry shadowed much of Trump’s first term in office and he has long focused his ire on senior officials from the intelligence and law enforcement community, including former FBI Director James Comey, whom he fired in May 2017, and former CIA Director John Brennan. The Justice Department appeared to confirm an investigation into both men in an unusual statement last month but offered no details.
Multiple special counsels, congressional committees and the Justice Department’s own inspector general have studied and documented a multi-pronged effort by Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf, including through a hack-and-leak dump of Democratic emails and a covert social media operation aimed at sowing discord and swaying public opinion.
But that conclusion has been aggressively challenged in recent weeks as Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and other allies have released previously classified records that they hope will cast doubt on the extent of Russian interference and establish an Obama administration effort to falsely link Trump to Russia.
In one batch of documents released last month, Gabbard disclosed emails showing that senior Obama administration officials were aware in 2016 that Russians had not hacked state election systems to manipulate the votes in Trump’s favor. But President Barack Obama’s administration never alleged that votes were tampered with and had instead detailed other forms of election interference and foreign influence.
A new outcry surfaced last week when Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released a set of emails that FBI Director Kash Patel claimed on social media proved that the “Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”
The emails were part of a classified annex of a report issued in 2023 by John Durham, the special counsel who was appointed during the first Trump administration to hunt for any government misconduct during the Russia investigation.
Durham did identify significant flaws in the investigation but uncovered no bombshells to disprove the existence of Russian election interference. His sprawling probe produced three criminal cases; two resulted in acquittals by a jury and the third was a guilty plea from a little-known FBI lawyer to a charge of making a false statement.
Republicans seized on a July 27, 2016, email in Durham’s newly declassified annex that claimed that Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic candidate for president, had approved a plan during the heat of the campaign to link Trump with Russia.
But the purported author of the email, a senior official at a philanthropic organization founded by billionaire investor George Soros, told Durham’s team he had never sent the email and the alleged recipient said she never called receiving it.
Durham’s own report took pain to note that investigators had not corroborated the communications as authentic and said the best assessment was that the message was “a composites of several emails” the Russians had obtained from hacking — raising the likelihood that it was a product of Russian disinformation.
The FBI’s Russia investigation was opened on July 31, 2016, following a tip that a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had told an Australian diplomat that he had learned that Russia was in possession of dirt on Clinton.