The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaky left thousands of victims, but it also left thousands of orphans and their history is unknown to the general public.
Survivors
One hopes that after this tragedy the survivors and the rest of Japan would turn to help these unhappy children, but for many it was just the opposite, they took advantage of them until they caused their death in many cases.
Shoso Kawamoto, a survivor of the US atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, has been telling the "untold story" of the nuclear attack on August 6, 1945
Following the devastation, some orphans died of starvation and many girls were sold to the Yakuza [organized crime syndicate] to work as prostitutes, Kawamoto said.
“We were desperate for survival, desperate for food,” the 82-year-old museum volunteer recalled. “Some orphans assaulted whoever had food and snatched it from their hand.”
Orphans did not receive any support during the chaos of the postwar period, so they had no choice other than to work for the Yakuza, who came to Hiroshima and started taking care of them, he said.
takakao Gokan was 11 years old when the atomic bomb spread terror in Hiroshima,she is now 86 and tells it in first person.
"I felt like a star full of needles went through my body. And suddenly the fire arose. I don't remember well, but a few minutes later, I heard a great crash that threw me at a distance of more than 8 meters. I heard a person yelling at me : “Danger!” At that moment the entire school building collapsed and a soldier covered me overhead. It was probably he who shouted “Danger!”. Everything was dark and I couldn't hear anything. Little by little "I started to see and a little light came in. I dug through the remains to get out and when I could see myself I noticed that my face was swollen and my skin hung down. I didn't recognize anyone's faces."
Takako Gokan
"At that moment Ishizaki, one of my teachers, appeared and carried me on his shoulders to the school gym where my injured classmates were. They gave me an injection of camphor. I was almost dead. Everything was scorched, full of ashes ... no You could tell if there were people or buildings. There were no doctors, no food, no medicine. We were just lying down and trying to sleep. They put a heart-shaped flower leaf on the wounds. The heart heals everything. As a result of the explosion two fingers of my right hand joined me. They separated when I put that flower. I was in the gym for three months. It was very hard. I remember a child my age who asked for water and no one could give it to him, of course. dying. His face was full of roe and flies. That memory still comes to me today; it marked me a lot. I don't remember his name. I saw a window from which smoke was coming out. And I understood that the child, my companion, had died and they were burning him. She had burns on her arm and bugs. I wondered if I would be next. "
Another survivor of Hiroshima
Yasuaki Yamashita 6 years old when the bomb
Family members and acquaintances came to the gym asking why we were there. A lady asked me for my name. She was looking for her daughter, but she did not find her, and she gave me some fruit. For the first time since the atomic bomb fell I felt some life. We slept on the ground. We were still without beds or medicine. In all that time (two weeks had already passed) only one doctor came from Tokyo twice. Nearby was a stone staircase. When the bomb exploded, someone died instantly. Only the shadow of the person remained. "
The role of the Yakuza, that sinister organization in the trade of children was deplorable, the unfortunate who fell into its clutches suffered horribly.
One of the Yakuza's businesses was sexual exploitation,
After helping the Japanese government procure "comfort women" for Japanese and then American soldiers, the yakuza continued to develop the commercial sex industry in Japan. The 1970s and 1980s proved to be a prosperous time for Japan and the yakuza. Towards the end of the 1960s, the tourism industry exploded as Japanese citizens earned larger incomes and a strong yen made travel abroad relatively inexpensive. Tourism was not utilized to strengthen cultural education, though. Rather, Japanese men lined up at airports to experience wild weekends abroad with an itinerary focused on sex parties. Although the yakuza did not invent sex tourism, they capitalized on this new tourism frenzy by organizing large-scale sex tours throughout East Asia.
The yakuza first exploited this new industry in Taiwan and then Korea. In Korea, they organized trips to kisaeng parties. Kisaeng is a Korean word traditionally associated with female entertainers, very similar to Japanese geisha, but with the influx of tourists these women simply became known as prostitutes. By the end of the 1970s more than 650,000 Japanese citizens visited Korea annually with eighty percent of visitors listing kisaeng as the primary focus of their trip. Sex tourism became so popular that major airlines such as Japan Air Lines listed kisaeng parties amongst the recommended tourist activities in their guidebooks for Korea.
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| Many kisaeng, like those shown above, became known as prostitutes in the 1970s. |
During the 1970s the yakuza expanded the sex tourism industry to Thailand and the Philippines where many of the sex workers were sold into sex slavery by their poor families. The Yakuza did not control the industry in these countries; instead they worked with local gang members to bribe local village leaders to convince families to sell daughters into the sex industry. The yakuza also financed many of the clubs in which Japanese men frequented in these foreign countries and led many of the sex tours as guides to the best "sex spots."
Japan has not ratified the United Nations' Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (UNTIP). Although several news stories highlighted the plight of foreign sex slaves in Japan throughout the 1990's, the Japanese government did little to decrease human trafficking until 2004. In 2004 the U.S. Department of State placed Japan on the "Tier 2 Watch List" which harmed Japan's image as a safe and relatively crime free country and motivated the Japanese government to act.*
* http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1265/human-trafficking-the-japanese-commercial-sex-industry-and-the-yakuza-recommendations-for-the-japanese-government
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