Remembering Bikini

TOKYO -- On the night of March 1, 1954, the No. 5 Fukuryu- maru was trolling for tuna off the Bikini atoll in the Pacific.

Suddenly, fisherman Matashichi Oishi saw the midnight sky flash orange and a rumbling shook the trawler. As he and 22 other crew members rushed to the deck, tiny white flakes began to fall on them like snow.

An underwater volcano, they thought. But it was something far more destructive: an American hydrogen bomb.

The No. 5 Fukuryu-maru, or Lucky Dragon, was about 100 miles off Bikini island in the central Pacific when the United States tested its bomb there, engulfing the fishermen in heavy radiation.

The bombing 50 years ago Monday provoked huge protests in Japan and reinforced the image of the Japanese -- the target of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks -- as unique witnesses to the atomic age.

"We were the victims of the nuclear arms race," said Oishi, 70, who runs a laundry in Tokyo and recently published a book on the bombing. "The Bikini incident is not a problem of the past. It's an issue of nuclear weapons that affects all of us today."

Devastating effects

For the fishermen exposed, the effects were devastating.

By the time the trawler returned home two weeks later, some crew members had lost hair, developed skin burns or had discolored faces. They suffered from diarrhea and jaundice, and their white blood counts dropped dangerously low. The boat's radio telegraph operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died in September 1954, aged 40.

Survivors have suffered from liver and blood disorders, including Oishi, who was operated on for liver cancer. In addition to Kuboyama, 11 crew members have died in the half-century since the exposure, at least six of them from liver cancer.

Fears at the time were high that such exposure was much more widespread. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 66 nuclear tests at Bikini as part of "Operation Crossroads." The atoll is part of the Marshall Islands, almost midway between Hawaii and Tokyo.

A Japanese government survey estimated about 850 other Japanese fishing boats were exposed to radiation, and some 160 fishermen eventually came forward to collect U.S.-paid compensation. Oishi's boat, however, was the only boat confirmed to have been there at the time of the explosion.

Most of the other boats are thought to have entered the affected area soon after the explosion. The survey did not measure any potential impact on foreign trawlers.

No follow-up studies

Officials knew of the testing program, but Oishi says fishermen were not well informed about where and when bombs would explode. No follow-up studies have been conducted on those other boats and nobody knows the total number of fishermen who might have been affected, says Kazuya Yasuda, curator of Tokyo's No. 5 Fukuryu-maru Exhibition Hall, where the boat is now on display.

The exhibit includes a crew diary and artifacts like a glass bottle of the "ash of death" -- radioactive flakes of coral vaporized in the blast -- that fell on Oishi and the rest of the crew. The exhibit was renovated ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Bikini bombing.

The Japanese government sought $6 million in compensation and got $2 million in 1955. In 1983 the Marshall Islands, then U.S.-administrated, got $183.7 million.

The package for Japan included condolence money for Kuboyama, about $5,600 each plus medical costs for 160 surviving crew members and other exposed fishermen, and damages to Japan's fishing industry, according to Foreign Ministry documents.

The payments settled the issue between the governments, but the victims' suffering endured.

The crew faced a stigma common in Japan for victims and the physically ill. Oishi fled the prying eyes of his neighbors in his hometown of Yaizu, 100 miles southwest of Tokyo.

He returned to the capital but the effects of the bombing kept coming back. Oishi's first baby was born with birth defects in 1960 and died. His daughter suffered three broken marriage engagements after prospective husbands learned Oishi had been exposed to radiation.

"For years, I only wanted to hide my past. But after seeing my colleagues die like social outcasts, I felt it wasn't right. I thought it was so unfair," Oishi said. "So I came out of the closet. I couldn't let our past forgotten like nothing happened."

Since he broke his silence in the early 1980s, Oishi has spoken at schools, town halls and museums.

"As a survivor of the nuclear test, I have to let people know the threat of nuclear weapons," he said. "I'll keep telling my story as long as I live."