Photo/Illutration Plaintiffs report a "partial win" in front of the Nagasaki District Court at 2:22 p.m. on Sept. 9. (Masaru Komiyaji)

NAGASAKI—The district court here on Sept. 9 ruled that 15 people who experienced the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki outside a “government-designated area” should be recognized as official “hibakusha” victims.

The court ordered the city and the Nagasaki prefectural government to give the 15 plaintiffs health handbooks for atomic bomb survivors.

The lawsuit was filed by 44 “hibaku taiken sha” who live in Nagasaki and Isahaya cities. They were aged between 78 to 91 when the suit was filed in 2018, and four of them have died.

The central government has provided relief measures to victims, such as financial support for medical care for damage caused by the atomic bombing, if they were within an oval area measuring about 12 kilometers north-south and about 7 km east-west from Ground Zero.

But those outside the zone when the atomic bomb was dropped were not given such health certificates.

The number of “hibaku taiken sha” who weren’t provided those relief measures in Nagasaki Prefecture as of the end of March 2024 was estimated at 6,300.

In the lawsuit, the 44 plaintiffs argued that their treatment by the central government has been “extremely unfair.”

The focus of the lawsuit was whether the 44 plaintiffs were “in a situation where they were affected by radiation emitted by the atomic bomb.”

In the ruling, Presiding Judge Shinsuke Matsunaga accepted the argument that “black rain” fell in places outside of the government’s designated area.

That decision was based testimonies from three former villages outside of the designated area as well as the results of a survey conducted in 1999 and 2000.

The judge also accepted that the blast of the bombing blew from the Nishiyama district to areas outside the designated area. Plutonium derived from the atomic bomb was also detected in the three former villages.

In a similar ruling in 2021, the Hiroshima High Court acknowledged that 84 hibaku taiken sha in Hiroshima should be recognized as victims of the atomic bombing because there was no evidence that could deny the assertion that their health problems were caused by radiation from the bomb.

The plaintiffs in Nagasaki asserted that the Hiroshima ruling should apply to their case.

The Nagasaki District Court accepted the argument by 15 of the plaintiffs.

An earlier lawsuit by Nagasaki “hibaku taken sha” was denied by the Supreme Court in 2017.

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