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2025 June 11 - 17 [OBITUARY]

Meteorologist Masuda who helped win ‘black rain’ lawsuits dies

Akahata ‘current’ column

Masuda Yoshinobu, a meteorologist and permanent advisor to the Japan Association for a Non-Nuclear Government, died on June 9 at the age of 101. He was a Japanese Communist Party member.

In the year when the Pacific War began, Masuda worked at the Miyazu Weather Station (Kyoto Pref.) and spent his days observing the weather. As days went by, weather forecasts became encrypted and were treated as a military secret.

He was upset that he could not inform local farmers and fishermen, whose livelihoods were dependent on weather conditions, of the daily weather forecast. He was then assigned to an imperial naval base. There, he told the sailors the weather conditions and saw them off although he knew that many of them would never return.

At the time when the war ended, he resented the fact that most teachers had taught their children government propaganda such as, “The ‘kamikaze (divine wind)’ will blow.” He said, “They were partly responsible for all this destruction.” However, he himself regretted that despite knowing that there was no such thing as a “divine wind”, he had not told anyone about it.

After the war, he investigated the radioactive “black rain” that fell soon after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and published his own map, called the “Masuda Rainfall Areas,” describing where the “black rain” fell. His map shed light on A-bomb survivors who had been initially excluded from the government Hibakusha relief measures, contributing to winning their victorious “black rain” lawsuits.

In recent years, he took part in efforts to protect the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) from government intervention in order to prevent scientific studies from being used for war purposes again.

Proud to be a part of the JCP that had risked its very existence in opposition to the war of aggression, until just before his death, he worked to increase the “Akahata” readership.