MESSAGES FROM HIROSHIMA

Akio Nakanishi (male)
'Chokubaku'  1.1 km from the hypocenter / 18 years old at the time / current resident of Tokyo3140

The scenes of the A-bombed city are introduced here. The photographs are not directly connected with the messages.

Q1. What were your most unforgettable A-bomb experiences like?

A1. I was a student at Hiroshima High School under the old educational system. The day after the bombing, I walked through downtown Hiroshima in search of my friends. I looked for them among the floating corpses that filled the rivers. The scenes are still indelibly printed in my eyes.

Q2. How do you feel about the A-bomb fatalities?
A2. Utterly sad and tragic. I feel the present Japan is built on those countless sacrifices.

Q3. What do you want to tell future generations?
A3. That there is no justice to war. I want Japan to take the initiative to realize total elimination of nuclear weapons from the Earth. I wish for permanent maintenance of world peace.
(2005)

Even if I write, between written words and reality there would be the difference between heaven and earth.

In 1945, I was an eighteen-year-old second-year student in Natural Sciences, Division B at Hiroshima High School, under the old educational system. As a mobilized student, I engaged in rolling duralumin at a steel sheet factory called Toyo Kohan in Kudamatsu in Yamaguchi Prefecture. I stayed in the company dormitory together with 40 or 50 other students from Class 1 and Class 2 of Science B.

Because sea mines were set in the Seto Inland Sea, no ships could pass there. That caused a coal shortage. By August 3, work had to stop at the factory. Toyo Kohan and Nippon Oil each had a large oil tank in Kudamatsu. The Nippon Oil site was bombed. Toyo Kohan was not bombed, but with operations on hold, the student workers were to be sent home for a one-week leave, taking turns in two shifts.

On the evening of August 5, the first group, including me, took the train from Kudamatsu. Five classmates and I were going to get off at Hiroshima Station. Twenty or so others were going further to the Osaka area. However, in the late afternoon of that day our train got stuck before it reached Yokogawa Station, one stop before Hiroshima. We had to walk from there. My friends A and B planned to stay at A's house near the Kan'on Bridge, and I was to join them there by 8 o'clock the following morning so we could together go to the shore and fish. My home was in Midori-machi, a few minutes on foot from Hiroshima High School. We left the train and headed for home separately. Passing Koi Station, I walked as far as Yokogawa, if my memory is correct, then took a local train there.

That night another friend C also stayed at my home. We slept in separate rooms. When I woke up the next morning at 7 o'clock my mother told me that, unable to sleep because of mosquitoes flying around inside the room-size mosquito net, he had gotten up around 4 o'clock and left saying he would go back to Yokogawa while it was still cool. C later told me, "About 7 a.m. that day, I took a bus from Yokogawa to Hamada. As I had gotten quite a way from Yokogawa, I saw a flash and heard a loud explosion."

On waking that morning at seven, I went to my high school teacher D's house four or five doors from mine, and reported to him that half the students had been discharged for a week off, that I had led them from Kudamatsu to Yokogawa, and that we had disbanded there.

When I returned around 7:30 a.m., my mother and three sisters were in the dining room talking. Suddenly an air raid alarm sounded. Almost at the same time, a flash hit my eyes. I yelled at them, "Get outside away from the veranda!" When they ran outside, I said again, "Hit the dirt!" They did so silently. I remember seeing roof tiles flying through the air like tree leaves.

When it was calmer around us after a while, I rose to find my mother missing. Startled, I called to her and found her underneath a glass door that had fallen out from the veranda. We had covered the glass panes of the doors with paper to prevent them from shattering. That kept her from getting injured. When all rose from the ground, I wondered what this was all about. It was different from such previous experiences as a bombing in Kudamatsu that led to a fire. Our house was surrounded by thick concrete walls, which obstructed any view of what was happening in town.

Besides my mother and three sisters, there were my older sister's three or four-month-old infant and two girls between age one and three or so. Because my older sisters covered them, they were uninjured.

When I returned to the rooms through the veranda, they were all empty. Everything that was there was gone including our air raid hoods. The roofs were missing. All of the paper sliding doors and fittings had broken off. Our padded air raid hoods and such were perched on upper beams. Not knowing what had happened, I decided to go to my school. I readied myself and went outside the house. Strangely, it was too dark to see anything in the direction of downtown. As I walked along a path through a lotus field, I met a young woman stripped to her waist walking from the opposite direction, her breasts bleeding. "My home is right there, so get some first aid from my family," I advised her.

The high school wall stretched about 1,000 meters [almost 1,100 yards] along the road. On that road I saw people coming toward me in a line. Skin peeling off, they looked as if tattered clothes were hanging from their bodies. Their exposed flesh was such deep red that I would have bet it had been treated with mercurochrome. I sensed something terrible must have occurred. On reaching the school, I found that all the buildings had been destroyed. The janitor's room was the first one I should have caught sight of, but that and the corridor connecting it to the main building were gone. The science lab built with reinforced concrete remained, so I went there. Teacher E came out. At a loss to understand the situation, we thought of going to the roof. We went up, joined by Teacher D, but it was so pitch dark with smoke that nothing was visible. We could detect no hole that a bomb might have made, nor did we see any fire. When the three of us went down again, it seemed best to go home for the time being. Teacher E was on duty that night, so he had to stay at school. Teacher D and I wondered what could have happened and what we should do now. Eventually, however, all we could do was go home.

My family had a dug-out air raid shelter in our garden. With no other choice, we sheltered there. Strangely, unlike before, we could see far out from the back of the shelter. All the wooden fences around the house had fallen, allowing a view from the rear of the shelter. Soldiers passing by inquired if we were uninjured. There was an army marine unit in Ujina then. I suppose soldiers from there were walking toward downtown Hiroshima.

Just as teacher D and I were talking about the uselessness of staying home, a propaganda leaflet fluttered down. It said that the same type bomb as this would be dropped again. This is serious, we thought, and discussed where to go. Concluding that it would be best to go to Oko Station on the Ujina line, we headed for the station together: teacher D and his wife, their two children, six adults and three children of my family.

At the station, we found that nothing remained but the roof. We ate potatoes we had brought for lunch and stayed until early evening. Ujina-line trains passed, fully loaded with the injured and the sick from Hiroshima. They were being transported to Ujina Station, and from there by boat to an island. Their badly swollen arms were covered with blisters, and their clothing had been blown off. Only scraps of trousers were left on their legs, also swollen and, with skin falling, deep red as if coated with mercurochrome.

When night fell, no electricity came. There was nothing around the station, and we had brought no bedding. So we returned home to sleep. I remember that, starting around then, one injured relative after another came to our place. All of us had severe diarrhea that day, but when my mother suddenly remembered bottles of beer kept in three or four tiers under the floor of our six-tatami mat living room, we opened them and drank beer in place of water.

On the following morning, we scratched together a meal of potato and sorghum. I was supposed to go to Matsuo's place by 8 a.m. I wound gaiters around my lower legs and went out with a lunch box and a canteen. As I approached the center of town, I saw many people lying on the Miyuki Bridge. Everyone was begging for water. This was the very same scene photographed by a newspaper reporter that day.

I continued to walk. Around Senda-machi, scorched dirt was piled knee-high on the broad streetcar road. If I carelessly walked on it, my gaiters would catch fire. To avoid that, I had to trace a narrow path allowing one person to walk at a time. Unable to go in the direction of the Kan'on Bridge, I went to Kamiya-cho instead, and tried to go toward the Yokogawa Bridge area, where my older brother lived. That too proved inaccessible, and so too was the road to Sarugaku-cho, where a cousin lived. There was no more footpath, and walking further meant that my gaiters would catch fire.

In Kamiya-cho, I saw a badly burned streetcar. Its wooden floor had burned. Its driver, charred black and lying on the ground, still held the lever. All passengers, thrown out to the tracks, had also been charred. At the entrance of a bank, I saw a dead man still seated, burned black.

I ended being unable to go farther than Kamiya-cho. Having achieved nothing all day, I simply stopped by my school in the evening, talked with friends, and went home.

The following day, and the day after, I walked searching for familiar people. Roads leading to A's place were impassible. Because he had planned to go fishing with B, I assumed they had gone toward the Motoyasu River. I searched along the river. But it was covered with corpses, the majority of which were floating face down. I could only see them from the bridge, unable to turn them face up.

I continued to walk daily looking for A throughout town until the war ended. A had a younger brother, a freshman in Hiroshima High School at that time. According to what I heard from this brother after the war, he and his father survived. His mother was in the basement. The two of them tried to rescue her, but the fire closed in. In the end they fled from the site. Later his injured father was admitted to the army hospital in Ohno Village. The rain fell in mid-September, causing a landslide that hit the hospital. His father's whereabouts remained unknown. In the end, A's younger brother became the only survivor in the family.

On the morning of August 6, because I had failed to join them at 8 a.m. as promised, A and B went out by themselves. They had just barely got on the boat, naked but for loincloths, when they got hit. Both fell, A's younger brother told me, and clung to the side of the boat, trying to climb back on. I assumed that their corpses must have drifted from the river to some island in the Seto Inland Sea. I traveled myself to many islands and searched. Corpses drifted out to sea, and I saw a large number floating near Ujina. In the end, however, I was unable to find either A or B.

At that time, a relative lived on the former main street in Sarugaku-cho. His daughter, who had joined us at our house after the bombing, was convinced that her parents had died but wanted to identify their corpses. I accompanied her to the house. She told me that her father was repairing a bicycle when she left home that day, so I looked for a bicycle as we dug in the ruins. This led us to white bones that looked like his remains. "We've found him, we've found him," we said and brought them back to enshrine at home.

Her mother was with us too, but she happened to be out helping with house evacuation work. Nobody knew which site she had been assigned to. Assuming she must have been on an island on the Seto Inland Sea, the daughter and I walked around on Ninoshima and other islands. According to what I later heard, she learned that her mother had died at a hospital in Kure Town near Hiroshima. About a year later, she and her sister dug the ground there. What guided them in locating their mother was memory of the pattern on the kimono she had worn.

At our house, the roof tiles were blown off and the roof itself was crushed. Pillars were all that remained on the second floor, other fixtures shattered and blown away. Still, because the tatami mats held, relatives with nowhere else to go gradually collected.

 On August 15, I heard the radio announcement on the termination of war.

I thought the remaining half of the students still at Kudamatsu wouldn't be able to go home unless someone took their place. I decided to replace them and got on a train around Koi. I went as far as Ohno, where the train stopped. Iwakuni was bombed the day before, I was told, stopping transportation. So I started walking, with my lunch box and a Japanese sword wrapped in a bag. When I left home, my mother had advised me to bring the weapon as a cautionary measure because one never knew what might happen in this situation. There I ran into a military officer attached to my school. "I'm on my way to Kudamatsu," I told him. "I'm also headed for Kudamatsu," he said, "so let's walk together." He and I walked from Ohno to Iwakuni, and farther. On our way, we saw holes made by bombs here and there, as well as dead horses with badly swollen bellies. We finally got on a train at the station one stop after Iwakuni and reached Kudamatsu.

Once there, we said to the students who were still there: "The mobilized groups are about to disband. So why don't you all go home." Around that time, 20 or 30 Koreans our age were there for labor mobilization. I remember saying to them as we parted, "Now that the war is over, you can return to Korea. Let's meet again someday."

Of my classmates G and H who went back to Hiroshima, the latter lived near us. His father, a Hiroshima University of Science and Literature professor, was hit by the explosion and died near Senda-machi. He suffered minor burns and took a year off from school. Both H and G are still well.

This is about my older brother, who lived by the river in Yokogawa. Drafted as an army lieutenant, he was stationed in the Western Headquarters. On August 6, he happened to be home. Just as he rose after breakfast holding his little son in his arms, the bomb exploded. Past noon that day, black rain fell and it got pitch dark. As flames gradually closed in, he went down the stone steps by the house leading to the river, his son in his arms. He waded into the water for safety and held onto a boat, or perhaps a raft. After a while, saying his stomach hurt, he lay down on the steps and passed away just like that. Perhaps his intestines had burst or there was bleeding in the liver. His wife had shards of glass inside her entire body. Despite the fact that they were not removed, she remained healthy until she died around 1985. Their son remains healthy.

One of my cousins who stayed at our place died of radiation disease. In those days families were unable to take care of the dead at home. There was an embankment facing Oko Station some distance away from Midori-machi in the direction of Ujina. Because there were no houses around the embankment, that was where bodies were brought and cremated. What we all did was pile wood, place a body, start a fire, burn the body, and collect the ashes the following day. In the evenings, the stench of corpses wafted toward houses in Midori Town.

Whether an air raid warning went off or B-29s roared, even as we shook one another from sleep and everyone woke instantly, we just sat on our bedding, saying it was no longer any use running.

The following is after the war ended. An older brother-in-law who was an army major flew from Tokyo on hearing that Hiroshima was totaled. He had intended to pick up our bones, so he was surprised to find us alive. My other older brother-in-law, who had been drafted into the navy, belonged to its flying corps in Takuma, Kagawa Prefecture in Shikoku. He traveled by seaplane from Takuma to Ujina carrying a number of funerary boxes with the same intention. He too was surprised to find us alive. At the army and navy, they had been told that no one in Hiroshima had survived .

In early September, we learned that the U.S. Army was entering Hiroshima. I was alarmed as the only male in the family, having to care for my mother, older sisters, and others. Because the roads were drivable by then, we borrowed a truck from a neighbor and took shelter in Tokoroyama, far from downtown Hiroshima. It was a rural area in the mountains with just five or six households, about one hour on foot from a town called Tsuda. For some time, we went back and forth between that place and our home in Midori-machi.

(After the A-bombing, could you obtain food?)
Around the time of the bombing, we tried this way and that to obtain food. Tokoroyama being a rural area, everyone was kind enough to share food with us.

(What did your father do for a living?)
He was a lumber dealer. He died in January 1945.

(When did you find out that it was an A-bomb?)
My brother-in-law working in the Army told me. It may have been before the end of the war.

(What aftereffects did you have?)
I just had loose bowels. That goes for everyone in my family.

(When did you move from Hiroshima to Tokyo?)
In 1947, because I was accepted into the University of Tokyo's Department of Medicine.

(Have you ever written about what you have spoken now?)
I haven't. Even if I write, between written words and the reality there would be the difference between heaven and earth. I have never written anything, thinking it would be of no use to write.

(On August 16, 2002, dictated to my wife.)