Nagasaki survivor calmly waits out nuclear crisis in Tokyo

[ClarkUSA]

TOKYO (Reuters) – Kazuko Yamashita was five when the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, destroying her home in a second and leaving her with a lifelong fear that every time she becomes ill, this time it is finally cancer.

Now, 66 years later, she wears a dark pink sweater, her dyed hair in a neat bob, and waits out Japan's current nuclear crisis in her daughter's Tokyo home, a two-storey house she also shares with her two granddaughters who play on a sofa behind her.

"I may be a bit too callous about this due to the fact that I was really heavily exposed to radiation, but I don't think this is anything to turn pale over," she told Reuters.

"People seem to be much too sensitive, though of course it's not really for me to say, and heavy radiation exposure is a serious thing. But I was 3.6 km (2.2 miles) from the bomb, and they've evacuated for 20 km (around the stricken nuclear plant). I really don't understand this kind of feeling."

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On that hot summer day in 1945, Yamashita was shielded from the worst of the destruction by a heavy quilt thrown over her as the bomb exploded.
"I didn't see a thing, but the noise was incredible -- the sound of glass flying around, and so many other things. Then when I got up a few minutes later, everything had changed. There was nothing left of the house but the supporting pillars, and the world around us was red," she said.

"Now everybody's making such a fuss about the reactors in Fukushima. But it's nothing like that."

Perhaps due to her mother's influence, her daughter, Shigeko Hara, is also quite stoic -- even though she too suffers from a thyroid disorder typical of the children of atom bomb survivors.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_japan_family