Escape from collapsed school building
I experienced the atomic bombing in a classroom around 850m from the hypocenter.
I was a 1st year student at Hiroshima Prefectural Junior High School No. 1 (Hiroshima 1st Junior High).
The old wooden school building collapsed in an instant, and around half of the 1st year students who were waiting to take over building demolition work or were studying there (just over 150 students) were trapped under the rubble.
I miraculously managed to escape by myself.
I pulled out a number of my friends who were asking for help from under the collapsed school building, but there were still many other friends who could not move and were calling for help.
There were some who had had their head split open and some who had been crushed to death.
Once the gloom immediately after the bombing gradually lifted, I could see many human figures by the pool in the schoolyard.
When I went to the pool to get some help to rescue the others, I found that the people there were the remaining half of the 1st year students who had been involved in building demolition work behind the city hall.
They were burned and in a terrible state.
Many of the injured had come to the pool looking for water.
They were in the pool and the water had turned a cloudy brown color.
Surprised at the sight of the seriously injured, I gave up on finding help and returned to the school building, but the flames were getting closer.
Schoolmates who had maybe noticed the smell of smoke and realized that they could not escape started singing the national anthem and the school song.
The voices of my friends, burned alive, that I could not help, are seared into my memory forever.
Lines of refugees in tatters
I fled blindly, surrounded by smoke, and arrived at the main road in front of the Red Cross Hospital.
It was there that I came across a line of people in rags, covered in burns and looking like ghosts, with their hands held out in front of them.
I joined the line too.
I moved forward with them, watching a young man walking unsteadily, holding in his palm his left eyeball, which had fallen out. Suddenly a woman's hand grabbed my leg.
I tried desperately to brush her aside.
She was trapped to the waist by a collapsed wall, and was asking for help.
The injured soldiers walking beside me also passed by, pretending not to see her.
Vomiting many times along the way, I mustered all my energy to cross Miyuki Bridge, but passed out near Tanna Station on the former Ujina line.
When I came to I had been brought into a nearby home.
That evening I made my way back to my evacuation home in Hesaka on the Ujina line, changing to the Geibi line.
By the time I got there it was close to midnight.
Viewed from Hesaka Station, the sky over Hiroshima was blazing a bright red color.
Facing the direction of the school, I put my hands together and apologized continuously to the friends I had left behind.
Hovering on the brink of death
I was suffering from a high fever when I heard the Imperial decree announcing Japan's defeat on August 15.
At that time almost all my hair had fallen out, and my gums were continuously bleeding.
My mother had heard a rumor that the atomic bomb (or "flash-boom" as we called it) had contained poison, so she boiled the medicinal herb dokudani and gave it to me to drink, as well as baking the leaves and applying them to my festering wounds.
Around August 20 the fever reached 42 degrees.
Purple spots appeared all over my body, and even the doctor gave up, not knowing how to treat it.
However in September the fever mysteriously started going down.
Cancer attacks surviving friends
Of my 300 classmates at the time, only nineteen managed to overcome acute radiation sickness and go back to school.
When we were in the second year of high school, one classmate passed away from uncontrolled hemorrhaging, and just before graduation from university another passed away from leukemia.
After that, the illness that has taken all of those friends who have passed away as we get older is cancer.
There are already sixteen who have passed away, and the three surviving, including myself, are suffering from compound cancer.
My "abnormal chromosome" resulting from the bombing
My friends contracted cancer when they were young, but mine was late-occurring cancer, from the age of 60.
First was rectal cancer.
I was told that the stomach cancer that came three years later was not metastasis but rather primary cancer.
I was also told that the thyroid cancer that I contracted when I was 70 was not metastasis but compound cancer peculiar to atomic bomb survivors.
Since the age of 65 I have had operations in 16 places for skin cancer.
I was told by specialists at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation that because I experienced the bombing at close range, a chromosomal abnormality known as "translocation" was found.
There were 102 instances of translocation found in 100 cells, and because of this the amount of radiation I experienced was 4.6Gy gamma rays.
Apparently a half lethal dose is 4.0Gy gamma rays (mortality rate of 50%).
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