HOLLADAY — News footage of smoke rising from Japan's damaged Fukushima nuclear plant after a powerful earthquake and tsunami was shocking enough. But Tosh Kano knows the real horror is still to come.
He's been there.
The worst part about surviving radiation poisoning isn't the constant sickness or the fear that each day will be the last, says Kano, 65, a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. It's the isolation that comes afterward that is most difficult to bear.
"These people will be shunned, just as my family was shunned," he says. "It's heartbreaking and unbelievable, but it will happen.. I feel so sorry for survivors who have been exposed to the radiation. This is just the beginning of their torment."
Kano was in his mother's womb on Aug. 6, 1945, when the United States destroyed Hiroshima with an atomic blast, helping to bring World War II to an end. A mother of two young children, Yorie, age 3, and Toshiharo, 18 months, Shizue Kano was three months pregnant with Tosh when the family home — located just 800 yards from the epicenter of the blast — was lifted into the air by the force of the explosion, then flattened.
Remarkably, she and the children survived, along with Tosh's father, Toshiyuki, who was walking under a viaduct, on his way to work, when the A-bomb lit up the morning sky. Two months later, though, 18-month-old Toshiharo died from radiation sickness. When Tosh was born six months after the blast, his parents were relieved that he appeared to be healthy. But it wasn't long before the problems began.
"From the time I was a few weeks old until I went to junior high, I was sick all the time," recalls Tosh, who is believed to be the youngest survivor of the Hiroshima explosion. Eager to share his story, especially with Japan experiencing another nuclear tragedy, he recently joined me for a Free Lunch of ham-and-cheese sandwiches on his lunch break at Holladay City Hall, where he is public works director.
"It's not only the physical scars that affect you, it's the psychological scars," he says. "I still don't know what's ultimately going to happen to me. If I see blood on my toothbrush in the morning, I get a sick feeling. This is something I've lived with for 65 years. As a boy, I had mumps seven times and came down with every other childhood illness you can think of. My body simply had no resistance."
In 1950, Tosh's family moved to Tokyo, where he was shunned by neighbors and schoolmates because he was one of the "hibakusha" — an atomic bomb survivor.
"I was so isolated and unhappy — I tried to kill myself many times," he says quietly. "Today, I am glad I didn't go through with it, but at the time, my life was miserable.
If I'd stayed in Japan, no girl would marry me because of the fear I would produce deformed babies. That perception and fear was always there, and I'm afraid it will continue with the victims of the nuclear plant radiation today."
When Tosh was 15, he was grateful for the chance to move to the United States with his parents and sister. With help from an aunt who lived in Salt Lake City, "we started a new life in Utah, with new hope," he says. That hope extended to their health: Tosh's mother lived to age 93 – the longest known survivor of the Hiroshima A-bomb.
"She held no bitterness about what happened to our family," says Tosh. "She and my father always told me, 'We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.'"
Years from now, he wonders if people will say the same thing about the Fukushima nuclear plant survivors. "Nighttime will be their worst enemy," he says, "because they'll awake in the night like I did, wondering if they will die tomorrow. All you can do is have hope. And pray that something like this will never happen again."
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