A very much alive 66-year-old Nagasaki man is erroneously on a list of people killed in the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of the city, the man revealed Sunday.
Teruo Ideguchi, who works as a volunteer telling younger generations about his atomic bomb experiences, said he recently discovered he is registered as having died the day the bomb was dropped, Aug. 9, 1945.
"Such an error is no surprise as there was confusion immediately after the attack and I almost died," the philosophical Ideguchi said.
"I felt like I came back to life," he said, adding that the city now plans to review its atomic bomb related documents.
The Nagasaki Municipal Government apologized for the mistake and promised to delete Ideguchi's name from the list soon.
According to Ideguchi, he initially discovered the error in early June on a list of atomic bomb victims compiled in 1984 by Nagasaki teachers and subsequently visited the city office to point out the mistake.
The city began compiling its list of victims of the bombing in 1968 and updates it Aug. 9 every year, adding people who died in the previous year of health conditions related to the blast.
There are 126,630 people on the current list. Four people's names have been deleted in the past due to similar errors.
Nine-year-old Ideguchi was home, about 1.4 km away from ground zero, when the atomic bomb exploded. He suffered head injuries and lost part of his memory for a month after the blast.
He became a volunteer narrator of atomic bomb experiences after retiring.