Sumiteru Taniguchi | Nagasaki survivor, 88

Sumiteru Taniguchi, 88, whose survival of an atomic attack at age 16 was recounted in the book

Nagasaki

and in a PBS broadcast, died Aug. 30 in that Japanese city, according to a statement from a group he helped lead, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. The cause was cancer.

He was on a bike, delivering letters, about a mile from the center of the second atomic bomb dropped by U.S. forces in 1945. Hiroshima had been leveled three days earlier. More than 200,000 people were estimated to have been killed in the two blasts.

"I didn't feel any pain and there was no blood," he said. "But all my energy seemed to vanish."

He was carried to a grassy spot on a hill and placed alongside other victims. "When the morning came," Mr. Taniguchi said in 1994, "no one lying with me was still alive."

He was not rescued for three days. He was eventually taken to a Japanese military hospital. His skin was stripped away from his back, exposing his muscles. He spent almost two years lying on his stomach, while his back oozed with blood and infections.

"The doctors were clueless about how to treat me," he said.

In January 1946, a film crew from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey came to the hospital and recorded Mr. Taniguchi being treated for his wounds. The three minutes of silent color film were so gruesome that they were not shown in public for more than 25 years.

"From shoulders to waist, his raw, bloodred tissue glistens under the lights," author Susan Southard wrote in "Nagasaki."

He was not released from the hospital until 1949. He later went back to his job as a mail carrier and was not considered completely healed until 1960, although he continued to have medical problems throughout his life.

At a 2010 United Nations conference to review terms of a treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear arms, Mr. Taniguchi held up a picture of himself as a young man, with his back exposed on the hospital bed.

"I am not a guinea pig, nor am I an exhibit," he said. "But you who are here today, please don't turn your eyes away from me. Please look at me again."

Mr. Taniguchi became a determined advocate for the elimination of nuclear arms. He often traveled overseas to speak at conferences, including in the United States, and called for the Japanese government to pay the medical expenses incurred by the survivors.

He noted that the United States had never shown remorse for the damage caused by atomic weapons, but he was even harsher toward his own country.

"No one in the Japanese government has ever apologized about getting involved in that war, either," he said.

After the end of World War II, Japan adopted a constitutional provision renouncing war and prohibiting the deployment of military forces outside the country's borders. Amid 70th-anniversary observances of the atomic attacks in 2015, legislation was passed and signed by the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, allowing Japanese forces to take part in international conflicts.

Mr. Taniguchi denounced the change in policy, calling it a betrayal of Japan's pacifist principles.

When he was 24, Mr. Taniguchi had a marriage that was arranged by friends and family. "She cried a lot on our honeymoon," he told the Chicago Tribune in 2001. "It wasn't the scars . . . but fear how long I would survive."

His wife, Eiko, applied lotion to his scars and massaged his back. She died last year. Survivors include two children; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. - Washington Post