‘Then the city started to burn, the fires were chasing me’ – 80 years on, Hiroshima survivors describe how the atomic blast echoed down generations

I’m not sure if it was the effect of the atomic bomb, but I have always had a weak body, and when I was born, the doctor said I wouldn’t last more than three days.

These are the words of Kazumi Kuwahara, a third-generation hibakusha – a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan 80 years ago.

Kuwahara, who still lives in Hiroshima, was in London on May 6 this year to give a speech at a Victory Over Japan Day conference organised and hosted by the University of Westminster. Now 29, she told the conference that she felt she had been “fighting illness” throughout her 20s. When she was 25, she needed abdominal surgery to remove a tumour which post-surgery tests showed was benign.