A REMARKABLE MAN

Remembering a heroic doctor.

Shuntaro Hida (1917-2017) was a longtime antinuclear campaigner whose work as a young doctor began when tending to victims of the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945. Petitjean, a French writer and filmmaker, has directed several documentaries, among them Atomic Wounds, which profiles Hida. The two men met in 2005. Writes Petitjean, “He struck me as the embodiment of an indisputable hero, someone who’d seen pure evil and stood up to it for long enough to remember what it looked like and to describe it.” Hida’s outspokenness only continued after the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011. “He wasn’t surprised by the incident, merely disgusted by human stupidity,” the author writes of Hida. Petitjean’s short book offers a warm tribute to this “frail figure” whose eyes “gleamed with intelligence and humanity” as he recounted his experiences in Hiroshima. In excerpts from interviews and speeches, Hida offers a rare account of the horrors that he witnessed. “I realized their flesh was decomposing,” Hida says of the bomb’s victims. “Everyone knows the human body decomposes after death, but these people were still alive. None of it made any sense. I overcame my disgust and continued to examine them.” Of the 300 or so doctors in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, 60 were killed in the blast, and Hida was one of only a couple dozen doctors left with the impossible task of helping more than 100,000 victims. Hida himself suffered from radiation poisoning. “My bones have aged very quickly, and my back’s always been in a terrible state,” he says. He needed surgery at age 61 and had to be hospitalized again at 70. “I will keep fighting,” Hida tells Petitjean. True to his word, he kept traveling throughout Japan—speaking out against the dangers he had seen with his own eyes—until he was nearly 100.

Invaluable testimony from a witness to war.