Sitting inside on concrete floors and held aloft by metal supports is a weathered 94-foot long fishing boat.
5 underwent five ocean voyages, the last of which began on January 22, 1954.
Nobody on board Lucky Dragon was aware of the expanded exclusion zone.
Captain Hisakichi thought as long as they stayed away from Enewetak his crew was safe.
The Castle Bravo nuclear test.
Castle Bravo was the USs first hydrogen bomb and the most powerful nuclear machine detonated.
It was too powerful, in fact.
Castle Bravo’s engineers had erred in calculating the yield of the weapon.
The crew of Lucky Dragon rushed to the deck to watch in astonishment at the glowing sky.
Minutes later, the blast of the detonation gently rocked their boat.
For six hours the crew worked on the deck pulling the lines, inhaling the toxic concoction.
The white particles got into their eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.
It prickled and stung and inflamed their eyes.
The crew had no idea the dust, later nicknamedshi no haior death ash, was dangerous.
They scooped the dust off the deck with their bare hands.
On reaching Yaizu, the crew was whisked away to a hospital and put under quarantine.
Their heads were shaved and their irradiated clothing and possessions were buried.
Six months later, Castle Bravo claimed its first victimthe chief radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama, aged 40.
The US Government initially denied that the crew had been exposed to radioactive fallout.
The FDA itself imposed rigid restrictions on tuna imports into the United States.
The Lucky Dragon, March 17, 1954.
An inspector checks each fish which arrives in port to find out if it can be eaten.
If the fish is considered safe to eat, it is stamped to indicate this.
Fish that is found too radioactive to eat is disposed by burying them deep in the ground.
A nationwide signature campaign against nuclear testing gathered more than 32 million signatures, orone thirdof Japan’s population.
The surviving crew of the Lucky Dragon received about 2 million each ($52,000 in 2019).
As they watch the mushroom cloud erupt in the distance, the blast wave hits them overturning their boat.
The ship plunges to the bottom with the crew on board.
Theoretical poster for the 1954 movie Gojira, the first Godzilla movie.
Godzilla became an allegory of nuclear weaponsa monster that embodied mankinds corruption of the natural world through nuclear weapons.
It retired from service in 1967, and was purchased by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.
Daigo Fukuryu Maru at Yumenoshima Park, Tokyo.
Photo credit:Guilhem Vellut/Flickr
Photo credit:Guilhem Vellut/Flickr
Photo credit:Takayuki Miki/Flickr
