被爆者

Hibakusha is a modern word with ancient-looking weight. It means a person affected by bombing, and in practice it became the specific term for survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The written form 被爆者 joins be subjected to, explosion, and person. Bureaucratic language can become moral language when history is cruel enough.

In the first postwar years, the term emerged within Japanese administration, journalism, and survivor communities. It did legal work, social work, and painful social sorting. Many survivors faced illness, grief, and discrimination in marriage and employment. The word named them, but it also marked them.

As survivor testimony reached the wider world through memoir, diplomacy, translation, and peace activism, hibakusha entered English largely untranslated. That was correct. Survivor was too broad, victim too passive, and patient too narrow. The Japanese word carried history inside it.

Today hibakusha refers most directly to the surviving victims and descendants entangled in the atomic age, but it also names a moral authority in debates about nuclear weapons. The word was born in disaster. It became a warning.