| Sharu said: ... |
Nuclear bomb (report by embassy officials after visiting Hiroshima)
Nuclear bomb and destruction it has caused had a great effect on population of Japan. It has been mentioned in the imperial rescript and official statements of Japanese government as one of the reasons of surrender. Since it's mentioned as an immediate cause of the defeat, naturally mass media widely exagerates its destruction force and duration of the effects after the explosion. Rumors distorts said media statments and carry them to the point of a nonsense. One of the rumor suggests that even now the presense of people in the explosion area is dangerous for one's life. Many times we heard it from Americans and Japanese that women who visited the region exposed to nuclear explosion become incapable of childbirth and men turn impotent.
These kind of talks have been stirred up by the radio broadcast from San Francisco suggesting that no life could exist in the area of an explosion for 70 years.
Interesting that Japanese media along with providing specific and truthful evidences not only failed to debunk this information but instead popularized it, propably pursuing two aims: first of all, justify uncommitted surrender with inability to fight against such a horrible weapon, but also to prevent people from visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki in search for relatives and friends they have lost.
+ 8 more pages I'm too lazy to translate. This have been written a whole month after the events, the report depicts situation of mass radiophobia stirred up by the media.
