On Aug. 9, 1945, a 9-year-old Chiyoko Iwanaga was 10.5 km away from the hypocenter of the atomic bomb that leveled Nagasaki.
Although she said she escaped the flash of thermal radiation and bomb blast when she unwittingly dove into a drainage ditch, Iwanaga believes she lives with health effects resulting from the atomic bomb to this day.
Despite inhaling the smoke or eating vegetables that were covered in ash from the Nagasaki blast, there are people the Japanese government has never recognized as hibakusha, the official term to refer to those who survived the atomic bombings.