A Remarkable Man: Dr. Shuntaro Hida from Hiroshima to Fukushima

Nuclear safety regulations are a charade and one of the few people willing to say so publicly was an intrepid doctor who treated fellow Hiroshima victims on the day of the bombing and for years afterward, according to this elegantly written and stomach churning account from filmmaker and biographer Petitjean (Back to Japan). Originally published in 2015 as a companion to Petitjean’s documentary on Dr. Shuntaro Hida (1917–2017), the book notes that, after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Hida began to publicly rail that the government was almost certainly covering up the scale of the danger. In a series of extensive interviews, Hida, who was already famous as an empathetic doctor to the socially shunned “hibakusha,” or survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan, relayed to Petitjean a disturbing series of allegations about how the U.S. government, which carried out studies on the hibakusha, also doctored evidence to downplay radiation’s dangers. The baseline data about nuclear safety used by regulatory entities all over the world is the same data derived from those studies, Petijean points out. Hida’s harrowing recollections of the 1945 bombing and of survivors’ suffering paired with Petitjean’s down-the-rabbit-hole research on nuclear safety make for a high-stress combo. Readers will need to brace themselves for this one. (June)