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Memoir of the A-Bombing:
"Exposed to the bombing upon entering Hiroshima City,
walking through the A-bomb hell"
(March 2017)
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by Yoshio Asano
Atomic Bomb Witness for this Foundation
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Exposed to the bomb while doing weeding work
When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, I was a second-year student at Hiroshima Second Middle School.
On August 5, 1945, the day before that fateful day, I had been on the river bank at Hon River, on the south side of what is now Peace Memorial Park, for building demolition work.
Then on the 6th, the 321 first-year students and 4 teachers who took their turn to do the building demolition work lost their lives in the atomic bombing.
On the 6th, the second-year students were to do weeding work in a potato field at the Eastern Drill Ground.
It was around 2.1 km from the hypocenter.
All the students were thrown by the blast and suffered horrible burns to their face, arms and elsewhere.
In the year that we survived, second-year students at the time, turned sixty, we gathered memoirs written by 88 of us and made it into a book, so that we would leave a written record of the A-bomb experiences.
There were various expressions used to describe the moment of the blast:
"it was like the flash of a camera,"
"it was like lightning had struck,"
"it was like someone had laid out a carpet of orange light."
The memoirs record that the students' bodies were thrown, and when they came to, they saw that their friends' faces and hands were red with the skin peeling away in tatters, so they were saying to each other
"What happened to you!?"
"No, what happened to you!?",
and as they were doing so they came to feel the pain from their own burns.
Seeing the mushroom cloud from the sea at Kure military port
The reason that what should be a description of my personal A-bomb experience sounds like a record of what happened to someone else is because when the atomic bomb was dropped I was not in Hiroshima.
As we would be working in a potato field on the 6th and doing building demolition work on the 7th and there were no classes, my mother asked me to go to my grandfather's house in Kamagari island to get some sweet potatoes.
So I skipped work, and on the morning of the 6th I was on a boat that had left Hiroshima Port at 7am heading for islands on the Seto Inland Sea.
At the islands near the military port at Kure were battleships and aircraft carriers that had been bombed and sunk and were in a pitiful state.
I was looking at them regretfully, thinking "So this is what war is," when there was a flash of light.
Wondering what it was, I looked up at the sky.
There was something that looked like an advertising balloon shining pink and orange that drifted up to the sky.
A cumulonimbus cloud then covered the whole sky as though it was chasing it.
On the boat were many voices, saying things like maybe an ammunitions warehouse or gas tank had exploded.
We had only left Hiroshima Port an hour before that, and it was unimaginable that there had been an air attack by a B-29 fighter plane, not to speak of an atomic bombing.
When we arrived at the Kamagari island and I was telling my grandmother that I had seen a huge explosion off the coast of Kure, my grandfather then came home from the Town Hall, saying that Hiroshima is completely destroyed, and that the mayor of a village neighboring Hiroshima had called to say that he is going there to rescue.
I spent that night at my grandfather's house.
The following day, the 7th, I went home to Hiroshima from Kawajiri Station on the Kure line, which runs along the coast opposite the island.
Trains coming from Hiroshima were full of people with severe burns and injuries.
The train that I took to Hiroshima stopped temporarily a number of times on the way.
It reached Yano Station, which is three stops before Hiroshima, but did not go any further than that, so I walked the 12-13 kilometers to my home in Hiroshima.
Procession of ghosts
When I was walking, there were endless groups of people, who had experienced the bombing, fleeing from Hiroshima.
They were wearing burned clothes that remained on their bodies, which had severe burns, and from the end of their hands that they held out in front of them hung down burnt skin, like rags.
They looked exactly like a "procession of ghosts".
As I came closer to Hiroshima, the damage became greater, with houses around me going from semi-destroyed to completely destroyed.
Our house too, at 2.3 km from the hypocenter, had broken pillars, collapsed walls, the cupboards and paper screen doors were in a mess, and the tiles from the 1st and 2nd floor rooves looked like a giant had rummaged through them.
Even so, miraculously my mother and younger siblings were safe.
Walking through ground zero on the 8th
At the time, whenever there was an emergency such as an air raid, we were supposed to contact the school.
So on the 8th, I walked the approximately 4 km to Hiroshima Second Middle School.
On the gatepost was a piece of paper that said "Site for corpses", and around 30 dead bodies were lying in the playground.
The school building had been leveled to the ground and there was no one around who looked like a teacher, so pulled by my curiosity, I headed for the city center.
At the time, we had absolutely no idea about the atomic bomb, and had no knowledge of radiation－we did not even know that word.
So without any concern I headed for the city center.
The tragic sights I came across on the way were so awful that they cannot be explained in written or spoken words, and there were a number of scenes that I still cannot forget to this day.
Next to Aioi Bridge, which is near the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall (the Atomic Bomb Dome), was a train that had been derailed by the blast and was completely burned, and there were the white bones of four or five people sitting on what must have been the seats on the train.
They must have died instantly.
In a fire cistern nearby, several charred corpses were there burned and dead, looking like chopsticks standing.
In the midst of the huge fire that was burning tens of thousands of buildings, the water in the cistern had evaporated, and of the dead bodies that had soaked themselves in the water remaining at the bottom of the cistern, the only flesh remaining was below their knees.
When I recall these bloodcurdling scenes, all color is drained from my memories, and they appear in my mind like a black and white film.
Motivation to give my atomic bombing testimony
The reason that I decided to give my testimony of the atomic bombing happened a few years ago.
I was watching television, where a foreign tourist visiting Peace Memorial Park was saying
"It's good that this was a park. If people had been living here, there would have been even greater damage."*
Previously when I was a newspaper reporter I had reported many times on the atomic bombing and peace, and in this way, had been involved in recording and passing on the pleas of the hibakusha in writing.
But as one of the few "surviving witnesses", I thought once again that I should pass on the message speaking in my own words.
Now 71 years had passed since World War II ended, and still it is said that the nuclear weapons nations have a total of 15,000 nuclear weapons.
There is also no end to the indiscriminate terror attacks by ISIS in the Middle East even now.
Just thinking of what could happen should such fanatical groups obtain nuclear weapons makes my blood run cold.
In May 2016, President Obama visited Hiroshima for the first time, and dedicated flowers at the Cenotaph for A-bomb Victims.
I hope that the visit to Hiroshima by the American president, who has huge influence around the world, will become great momentum for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and with that wish in mind I will continue my atomic bombing testimony activities.
* The area now known as Peace Memorial Park was previously an urban district called Nakajima.
It is estimated that at the time of the atomic bombing, about 6,500 people lived in the Nakajima district.
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Mr. Asano reading a memorial address at the Hiroshima Second Middle School
ceremony for the victims of the atomic bomb
(August 6, 2016)
(from the City of
Hiroshima records of the Peace Memorial Ceremony, an event commemorating the
70th anniversary of the bombing)
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Profile
[Yoshio Asano]
Born in 1931.
Formerly a reporter at Chugoku Shimbun newspaper.
Head of sports department, culture department, assistant managing editor, bureau chief and auditor before retiring.
While working at the newspaper, was awarded the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association Award in 1965 as a member of the investigative team for the long-running series "Hiroshima 20 Years Later".
Visited Italy in 1982 on the invitation of a Christian group as representative of hibakusha.
Chugoku Shimbun advisor.
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