After years of silence, a Japanese former fisherman exposed to radiation during the 1954 U.S. hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific has written a book that tells his own story of that almost forgotten incident.
"I can't avoid writing about it, now that half of my fellow crew members have quietly passed away because of exposure to radiation," said Matashichi Oishi, one of 23 former crew members of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5), which was showered with radioactive ash in the wake of the test.
"The incident has been forgotten all too soon," Oishi said. "I feel very sorry for them because their miserable deaths were largely ignored by society."