The bomb fell on Nagasaki, “the mourning is universal,” says the son of the survivor in Nijmegen

It may feel far away, both in terms of distance and in terms of time. More than nine thousand kilometers and eighty years there are between the memorial service that was held in Nijmegen on Saturday evening for the prisoners of war of camp Fukuoka 14b at Nagasaki and the fall of the atomic bomb on that southern Japanese city. But the relatives of the prisoners and the representatives of the Japanese community who came together still carry this past.

“This is my family history,” says Ron Meijer (79) who came from Breda for the commemoration. His stepfather, a KNIL soldier, was put to work in the camp as a welder, and survived the nuclear attack by ‘stupid happiness’. Meijer finds out when he is 48 that the father he has had until then is not his biological father. That was a Japanese marine.

“When I was another baby, my stepfather didn’t mind that. But as I got older, my Japanese features came to the fore more and more and I got more and more the face of his seepage spirits.” The face of the people who hit his stepfather in the camp and had dressed him. Meijers drew youth. Only when stepfather and son together made a ‘processing trip’ to Japan at the end of the last century, could he leave his feelings of hate behind.

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Systematically bombard

Nagasaki is the second and last city that was hit by a nuclear weapon. After the German capitulation in May 1945, the US Army started systematically bombing Japanese cities, with the aim of breaking morality and thus also forcing the Japanese to surrender.

When that surrender was not forthcoming, the US decided to attack with two nuclear bombs. The first – – “Little Boy” – fell on Hiroshima on August 6. The second – “fat man” – three days later on Nagasaki, where tens of thousands of people are immediately killed. Due to the radiation of the nuclear bomb, the death toll increased to at least 70,000 before the end of that year. At that time, the city had an estimated around 200,000 inhabitants. Japan capitulated six days later, with which the Second World War came to an end.

The current geopolitical situation is evident from the factful years later to think about that, says initiator Rob Schouten. “The tension has never been so great in terms of nuclear threat.” That is why, according to him, the story about the atomic bombs must be passed on to subsequent generations. “So that there is a realization that this should never happen again.”

For the commemoration of Saturday evening, Schouten joined forces with the organizers of the Sunset March. Since October 2014, that veteran club has been trying to 48 Allies daily who died during Operation Market Garden when they crossed the Waal. Every sunset they silently cross the city bridge the crossing, “the largest war memorial in Europe.”

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Forced laborer

The moment the bomb falls on Nagasaki, Everhard Schouten, father of initiator Rob Schouten, is employed as a forced laborer at the Mitsubishi shipyard. As a 21-year-old KNIL soldier, he was prisoner two years earlier by the Japanese army and housed in camp Fukuoka 14B, where at least 547 other prisoners of war are stuck in the summer of 1945.

That Thursday morning he is working in a trench tunnel when about 1,800 meters away from him, the atomic bomb explodes. That saved him, says his son. “But he has carried the trauma all his life.”

The bomb also leaves its mark physically. Due to the exposure to the radiation, Everhard gets cancer at a young age. In the last years of his father’s life, son Rob is busy getting him recognized by the Japanese Supreme Court as ‘Hibakusha’. “That recognition as an official victim of the atomic bomb was very important for my father.”

And complicated. “We had to consult coupons from the dermatologist to show that his skin cancer did indeed come through the radiation from that bomb.” After three years of correspondence, Everhard Schouten received his Hibakusha certificate.

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Origami cranes

On the bridge in Nijmegen, when the sun is under, the quiet journey starts, about fifty people are walking with it. Just before departure, a woman hand out hand-folded origami cranes, for happiness “and because this is also about Japan.” There is a journalist from the local newspaper The Nagasaki Shimbun.

At the monument for the fallen Allies, initiator Rob Schouten addresses those present in English. “Eighty years ago, the bomb fell on a city far away. But the mourning, the loss, the scars; they are universal.” After the speech, representatives of the Japanese embassy in The Hague and the Dutch embassy in Tokyo together lay together. Other attendees also put flowers on the monument, some embrace each other.

In Nagasaki, in the Peace Park, thousands of people stood still on Saturday morning at the atomic bomb that put the city in ruins eighty years ago. Mayor Shiro Suzuki called on world leaders to learn from that violent history and argued for concrete steps to nuclear disarmament. “Postponement is no longer permissible.”

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