hibakusha

今年もあの日が巡ってきました。

8月6日。広島に原子爆弾が投下された日です。

今年は梅雨明けも遅く、新型コロナウィルス感染症拡大の影響もあって、愚息らの夏休みという感覚にも乏しく、気が付いたら8月になってしまっていた、もう8月6日なのか、というような感じです。

今朝はラジオで平和記念式典の模様を伝える中継を聞きながら新聞を読んでおりました。

あの日から75年、海外メディアの報道も目立ちます。


(HIROSHIMA, Japan) — The dwindling witnesses to the world’s first atomic bombing marked its 75th anniversary Thursday, with Hiroshima’s mayor and others noting as hypocritical the Japanese government’s refusal to sign a nuclear weapons ban treaty.

（中略）

Survivors, their relatives and other participants marked the 8:15 a.m. blast anniversary with a minute of silence.

Thursday’s peace ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was scaled down because of the coronavirus pandemic. The fewer than 1,000 attendees was one-tenth of those attending in past years.

Some survivors and their relatives prayed at the park’s cenotaph before the ceremony. The registry of the atomic bombing victims is stored at the cenotaph, whose inscription reads “Let all the souls here rest in peace for we shall not repeat the mistake.”
(Mari Yamaguchi. Survivors Mark 75th Anniversary of World's First Atomic Attack. TIME. August 5, 2020.)


ところで、多くのメディアの記事で"hibakusha"という単語が使われています。


An aging group of survivors, known as hibakusha, feel a growing urgency to tell their stories, in hopes of reaching a younger generation.
(ibid.)


"hibakusha"（被爆者）は「生存者」（survivor）と補足説明されていることが多いようです。


While no records reveal the exact number of American hibakusha — Japanese for “atomic bomb survivors” — that country’s government made a lifetime commitment to serve them, dispatching teams of doctors to the United States every other year to track their health.
(Washington Post. Augut 4, 2020.)


TOKYO — The hibakusha, as the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known in Japan, have achieved a powerful feat of alchemy, transforming their nightmarish memories of the blasts and their aftermath into a visceral force for promoting a world free of nuclear arms.
(New York Times. August 5, 2020.)


この"hibakusha"なる英単語は辞書にも入っていて、ランダムハウス英和辞書によれば、英語辞典のエントリとしては1970年から認められるとありました。世界で唯一の被爆国として、日本は後世に何を伝えていくことができるでしょうか。