Discrimination still haunts Japan's Nobel-winning A-bomb survivors

HIROSHIMA, Japan — Having survived the atomic bomb that flattened his hometown of Hiroshima when he was nine months old, Kunihiko Sakuma has never forgotten the stain it left on him in the eyes of some of his fellow Japanese.

Growing up, he constantly heard rumours that survivors carried diseases and their future offspring might be tainted by the radiation from the August 1945 blast.

Sakuma left Hiroshima to seek a new life in Tokyo. He started dating a woman, only to find her mother disapproved of her relationship with him.

Last week's awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to survivors' organisation Nihon Hidankyo has been seen as a timely reminder for a world many believe has never been closer to nuclear conflict.

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But victims and experts are divided over whether the international recognition of those who survived the world's only atom-bomb attacks can help heal the private pain of discrimination and prejudice that they and their families say still lingers.

Nearly one-fifth of Japan's hibakusha, as survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known, said they had faced discrimination, mainly in finding a marriage partner but also in seeking jobs, according to a survey of 13,000 survivors in 2005 by the Asahi newspaper.

"The impact of the bomb was not limited to the tragedy that happened when it was dropped," said Sakuma, 79, a bald, bespectacled man who heads a Hiroshima organisation for A-bomb sufferers.

It has "had a huge impact on people mentally and in many other ways", he told Reuters from his office, filled with maps of the city, newspaper clippings and pamphlets about the blast and its aftermath.

'Monsters'

The US bombs that laid waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed tens of