HIROSHIMA: For months after the world’s first atomic bomb to be used in war was dropped on his hometown, Sunao Tsuboi expected each day to be his last.

Tsuboi was 20 on August 6, 1945, and was walking to university when the bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy”, exploded over Hiroshima, hurling him 10 metres and burning much of his body. When he regained consciousness, the city was engulfed in a sea of flames. Nagasaki was bombed three days later and World War 2 ended a week after that. But for Tsuboi, the battle continued.

“For nearly 100 days, the doctor told me, ‘this is the day you will die,’” said Tsuboi, whose genial face is visibly scarred. “But I am a human phoenix. I was reborn.”

The Hiroshima city government says the bomb killed more than 220,000, including those who died of cancer years later.

Now, Tsuboi and others worry that as survivors age and memories fade, the question of Japan assuming a greater military role, or even becoming a nuclear power, is taking on new life.

“It’s been too long since the war,” said Tsuboi, sitting in the office of a survivors’ group near Hiroshima’s Peace Park. “Young people aren’t concerned, and adults are forgetful too. People have become too accustomed to peace.”

Kumi An, a 28-year-old Hiroshima native out for a day of shopping at a local mall, is a case in point.

“I think of the bombing when the anniversary approaches. But the rest of the time, I’m busy with my own life,” she said.

Japan, where people are raised on stories of the suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has long been staunchly pacifist and anti-nuclear, and its constitution renounces war. But now, with the threat from North Korea looming, and survivors of the bombing dying — their average age is over 71 — things may be starting to change.

“Definitely public opinion is starting to shift in a new direction,” said Takashi Inoguchi, a Tokyo University political scientist.

There have been calls to revise the constitution, whose key Article Nine renounces war as a means of settling international disputes. And last month, Japan passed a law allowing the largest post-war dispatch of its military to help rebuild Iraq.

There are even hints of changing views on the long-term taboo of whether Japan should have its own nuclear weapons. Japan currently relies on the “nuclear umbrella” provided by the United States — which dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in an alliance that serves as its foreign policy cornerstone. The North Korean nuclear crisis may change things further.

Regional tensions have risen, even prompting some US politicians to float the possibility of Japan going nuclear.

Debate on the issue may be increasing, but analysts say any chance of Japan going nuclear remains extremely remote. Survivors like Tsuboi are still worried, however.—Reuters