Tsutomu Yamaguchi: Survivor

His is a truly remarkable story:
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, engineer and atomic bomb survivor: 
born Nagasaki 16 March 1916;  died Nagasaki 4 January 2010.

How I survived Hiroshima – and then Nagasaki

Tsutomu Yamaguchi must be one of the luckiest people on the planet. In his only interview with a British newspaper, he tells David McNeill about the moment when the same white light filled the room again

Yamaguchi had been recognized as "hibakusha," translated as "explosion affected people," by the Japanese government.

There are over 200,000 officially recognized hibakusha in Japan, and they are reportedly entitled to a small monthly allowance from the government. Many still suffer from exposure to radiation.

In March 2009 - nearly 64 years after the bombings – the Japanese government certified that Yamaguchi was indeed targeted twice.

"My double radiation exposure is now an official government record,"

A bitter twist of fate.

Despite being 3km (just under two miles) from Ground Zero, 

the blast temporarily blinded him, 

destroyed his left eardrum and 

inflicted horrific burns over much of the top half of his body. 

The following morning, he braved 

another dose of radiation as he ventured into Hiroshima city centre, determined to catch a train home, away from the nightmare.

But home for Mr Yamaguchi was Nagasaki, where two days later the "Fat Man" bomb was dropped, killing 70,000 people. 

In a bitter twist of fate, Yamaguchi was again 3km from the centre of the second explosion. In fact, he was in the office explaining to his boss how he had almost been killed days before, when suddenly the same white light filled the room. "I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima," Mr Yamaguchi said.

EPILOGUE: to be contrasted with Violet Constance Jessop, with titanic luck on her shoulders.

Faux, Faux, Faux -swindlers selling fake works

Art swindlers selling fake Goya get paid in photocopied bills

Brothers from Girona had tried to cheat 

an Arab sheik into buying the painting

The fake Goya painting with the photocopied Swiss francs.

Two brothers from Girona who planned on swindling an Arab sheik into buying a forged Goya painting found out they were the ones who had been swindled when the 1.7 million Swiss francs they had received in payment turned out to be all in photocopied bills.
Spain’s National Police found out about the transaction in December 2014 when customs authorities in Avignon, France reported that they had detained the brothers after they entered the country from Turin with the fake bills.
From that point, the police uncovered details of a string of backstabbing deals that had led to the pair’s arrest. The identities of neither the siblings nor the sheik have been revealed.

The brothers originally bought the painting in 2003, thinking it was authentic

It all began when the brothers reportedly tried to sell the sheik a forged painting by Francisco de Goya – Retrato de don Antonio María Esquivel (Portrait of Antonio María Esquivel) – for €4 million.

The transaction took place in Turin where a person who said he represented the sheik gave the brothers 1.7 million Swiss francs. In turn, the siblings called a loan shark in Girona to give €300,000 to another person in the Catalan city who also claimed to represent the sheik.

The €300,000 was to pay the intermediaries’ commissions.

But when the brothers traveled to a Geneva bank to deposit the money, they were told that the bills were photocopied fakes.

The brothers, who now face swindling charges, bought the painting in 2003, thinking it was authentic, with a down payment of €20,000. They had promised to pay €270,000 but never delivered the rest of the money because the seller failed to come up with an authenticity certificate.

In 2006, a Girona court ruled that the painting was a forgery and forgave the remaining debt they held with the original seller.

Extra views here and in The Midi Libre too in French

AND  More on ART Fraud  02/ o5/ 2014

  The Spanish dealer, the Chinese forger and the $80 million art scam

The FBI says Knoedler paid $20.7 million for dozens of forgeries painted by Qian, and then sold them on to collectors for $43 million. Weismann paid $4.5 million for several works, selling them for $12.5 million, it says.

The scam began in the early 1990s, and continued until 2009, when doubts began to emerge about the authenticity of the pieces. Collectors asked for authentication, which the gallery was unable to provide. 

ampliar foto

                                                 Chinese painter Pei-Shen Qian 

reflect on 70 Years since the Atomic Bomb

Within the framework of this exhibition at Born Centre Cultural-Ajuntament de Granollers
Casa Asia offers this talk with the purpose to reflect on the terrible destruction effects inflicted by nuclear weapons, an absolute evil able to lead the human race to its own extinction.
The session will included Yoshiko Kajimoto's witness, who was a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, taken place the dawn of the 6th of August 1945 and that caused more than 140.000 deaths that year. His thoughts will help to remember the consequences this event still has on millions of people and to raise awareness about the danger nuclear weapons have and the need to get rid of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8QY5gt1weE

26:00 to 26:00  and  48:10 to 49:20 to

On Aug. 6, 1945, Kajimoto was a 14-year old worker in a factory that produced propeller parts. When the atomic bomb detonated, the factory building collapsed. Kajimoto’s leg was crushed under the debris. When she managed to pull out her leg, much of the skin had been torn off. Looking around her, she found that many of her friends were already dead. She left the ruins of the city with her surviving friends.

Kajimoto, who was 14 and was working in a factory

when the bomb exploded, described the horrors of the bombing. 

As she carried a classmate on a stretcher away from the factory,

Kajimoto walked barefoot, her shoes lost in the blast.

"We had to carry the girls over areas where dead bodies were scattered,"

said Kajimoto. "We tried to step in between the corpses. We

were able not to step on the bodies, but we couldn’t avoid

stepping on the skin that had melted from their bones. 

The skin was wet, slimy. I’ll never forget that feeling."



Yoshiko Kajimoto and her 14- to 16-year-olds fellow workers 

in a factory in Misasa, 2.3 kilometres from the blast,

tried to get back into the partly destroyed factory

to rescue their friends, who were shouting beneath fallen walls and

beams. Nobody could find the first-aid kits, so the children tore off

their blouses and headbands and wrapped them around their friends'

wounds: 'Those headbands that everybody wore really saved a lot of

people!' she would recall.


They were called the hibakusha - literally, 'bomb-affected people' - a

neutral term that pointedly did not connote 'survivor' or 'victim'. For

years they existed in a nether world, the flotsam of official indifference

and the jetsam of American experimentation. To Japanese society,

they were untouchable, the people you did not employ or let your

son or daughter marry.

Seventy-seven year old Kajimoto is a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often classified into two groups—those who were in the city when the atomic bomb struck and those who went into the city following the explosion. Kajimoto belongs to the former.

Although over 60 years have passed since the bombing, Kajimoto did not tell her story to the public or to anyone outside of her family until eight years ago. Her husband was a survivor as well and talking about their experiences from Hiroshima had always been a private, intimate dialogue between the two.

When her husband passed away, it was Kajimoto’s granddaughter who encouraged her to tell her story publicly. At first, her fear of public speaking overcame her. Eventually, however, she discovered the impact of her own words.

Kajimoto’s father, who was not near the epicenter of the blast at the time, came into the city soon afterward to look for his daughter, rummaging through the rubble and corpses. He died 18 months later from radiation poisoning.

Kajimoto herself was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1999 and underwent a successful operation to remove two-thirds of her stomach. Several of her surviving friends, however, were less fortunate and succumbed to radiation poisoning by the 1990s, she said.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki film they didn't want us to see

From palliative care to End-of-life dreams and visions

Ending the circle. with three stepping stones.

Daily mail NEWS.  (click on her name) 

People who have had a near death experience describe hauntingly similar visions? Intensive care nurse PENNY SARTORI has spent years investigating them.

A) Palliative Care is comprehensive care, provided by an interdisciplinary team, for patients living with a chronic, often progressive illness and their families. Care is focused on alleviating physical and psychosocial symptom burdens, and promoting quality of life according to the patients' goals.

        Major issues addressed are:

• pain and symptom management

• information regarding the illness

• advance care planning

• psychosocial and spiritual needs

• coordinated care with other community resources.

B) DEATHBED VISIONS: A STUDY OFFAMILY OBSERVATIONS IN NORTHERN KERALA 

This is an interview-based study of 104 families and their observations of the last weeks and days of a dying family member. Socio-demographic factors such as gender, age, occupation, or cause and place of death were not found to be significant. Hindu patients appeared to be more likely than Muslim patients to report these experiences. Use of opiates (or not) did not appear to influence reports.

• Forty families reported “unusual experiences and behaviors” from the dying person in their last period of life. 

• Thirty of these dying persons displayed behavior consistent with deathbed visions—interacting or speaking with deceased relatives, mostly their dead parents. 

• There were six cases of reported premonitions of death and five possible confusional states with one patient reported to have had both a deathbed vision and confusional experiences. 

C)) End-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs) are well documented throughout history and across cultures with impact on the dying person and their loved ones having profound meaning. Published studies on ELDVs are primarily based on surveys or interviews with clinicians or families of dead persons. 

This study uniquely examined patient dreams and visions from their personal perspective. This article reports the qualitative findings from dreams and visions of 63 hospice patients. Inductive content analysis was used to examine the content and subjective significance of ELDVs.   

Six categories emerged: 

• comforting presence, 
• preparing to go, 
• watching or engaging with the deceased, 
• loved ones waiting, 
• distressing experiences, and 
• unfinished business.

Child labour's lost and won -... experience childbirth

Beginnings.. ends and means:

                 Child labour's lost and won

1) For The childbirth study  at Orebro University Hospital in Sweden
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-130023/How-acupuncture-ease-childbirth-pain.html#ixzz3RzZ2uQwZ 

2) Labour rituals.  Huichol Indians – 

The father share it with  his labouring wife 

3) TEST yourself.

 How many children will you deliver knowing the labour involved? 

Now, enjoy the rest of the entry. 

• Ever wish for a moment in your life you could feel what it's really like to deliver a baby? 
• Few volunteers experience pain of childbirth in an experiment conducted in China's Shandong Province. 
• A faithful handful in China have been lining up to find out what it is like to experience the agonizing contractions that women endure during childbirth. 

Now finally someone has found a quick fix to the souring moods of males across the world during pregnancy of their wives.

Differences. Some experience no pain, while others experience the full force of child birth.
From those who went through, say, 28 hours of hard labor, while the fortunate ones had her kid in 3 hours

EXPERIENCE CHILDBIRTH PAIN - Chinese Hospital Offers you  a Childbirth Simulation