Chico Harlan/THE WASHINGTON POST - Terumi Tanaka, 78, holds his purple health pamphlet while sitting next to fellow bomb survivor Mikiso Iwasa in Tokyo.
TOKYO — Before leaving the house Thursday morning, Terumi Tanaka grabbed his briefcase, which contained a gently worn purple pamphlet summarizing what could go wrong.
The pamphlet lists his date of birth, his current address and his blood type. It allows him to receive free tests, whenever he wants, for diseases such as liver cancer and leukemia. It has lots of blank charts, too — space for doctors’ notes if things ever go bad, because if you carry one of these booklets, you never really know.
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Like thousands of others in Japan, Tanaka carries the pamphlet — a government-issued “Atomic Bomb Victim Health Handbook” — because he is a survivor of the atomic bomb that fell on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, when he was 13.
In 1957, Japan issued the pamphlets to those who had survived the blasts at Nagasaki and Hiroshima three days earlier, absorbing all the beta particles and gamma rays and neutrons, becoming case studies for the harm they could cause.
Amid a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, millions in Japan are worrying about the particles in the air, where they might spread and what might happen if they come too close. At least 20 million Japanese are old enough to remember the A-bomb attacks, and the worry resonates in particular with survivors, who have spent decades grappling with the inherent uncertainty of radiation exposure.
Just a few months before Tanaka received his pamphlet, a friend from Nagasaki died of leukemia. Both Tanaka and his friend had been about 2.2. miles from the hypocenter, which means the only difference between death and survival is something Tanaka — 78 years old and totally healthy — cannot explain.
But for the 54 years since receiving it, Tanaka has kept the pamphlet, a little bigger than a passport, close at hand, a persistent reminder of the uncertainty he faces.
“Everybody should realize,” Tanaka said, holding the aging booklet, “that this becomes the most important thing in your life.”
On Thursday, at the coastal Fukushima power plant, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces tried to douse water on a series of radioactive units that have refused to cool. They did this using helicopters, armed with 7.5-ton payloads of water; more conventional methods had become too dangerous. A television camera from 20 miles away showed the scene unfolding, the power plant shimmering in its obscene heat.
In his Tokyo home, Tanaka watched on television, and he leaned closer to the screen to follow the helicopters — fluttering specks, like insects.
It looked like a long shot, Tanaka thought.
Like radiation itself, nuclear power is a part of Japan’s legacy. Short on natural resources, this island nation depends on its 54 nuclear reactors for 30 percent of its energy supply. In the first decade after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, occupying U.S. forces banned press reports and many studies on the effects of radiation, and that’s the primary reason, as Tanaka emphasizes, that Japan took so long to promote health care for blast survivors. But there’s also this: Japan, in 1954, launched its own nuclear power research program. It wanted domestic support for the initiative.
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