Censored Japan A-bomb stories published

Banned reports detail Nagasaki's 'disease X'

Sunday, June 19, 2005; Posted: 4:14 p.m. EDT (20:14 GMT)

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Censored stories written by an American journalist who sneaked into Japan soon after Nagasaki was leveled by a U.S. atomic bomb have surfaced six decades later.

They offer an unflinching account about the "wasteland of war" and its radiation-sickened inhabitants.

The national Mainichi newspaper this month began serializing George Weller's stories and photographs from Nagasaki, about 614 miles southwest of Tokyo, for the first time since they were rejected by U.S. military censors and lost 60 years ago. <snip>

By hiring a Japanese rowboat, catching trains and later posing as a U.S. Army colonel, Weller, an award-winning reporter for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News, slipped into Nagasaki in early September 1945, the paper said. <snip>

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/19/japan.atomic.ap/index.html



A Nagasaki Report
By George Weller
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/specials/0506/0617weller.html

Considering american ignorance at the time as to how we were going to be received by the natives (sound familiar?), he had more guts than MacArthur's early landing. At the time of his arrival, even the experts were unsure as to whether or not we were going to be tolerated, guerilla warred, or who knows what. His account is invaluable. I hope some scholar takes it and runs with it.