I was born in 1929. It was the year that the global Great Depression started. Share prices on the New York Stock Exchange dropped dramatically, and Japan was also impacted, falling into a serious recession. The streets were filled with unemployed people, and I also heard that there was a sharp increase in the number of suicides. I was a baby at the time, so I had no way of knowing such things, but I am a person who has lived through the atmosphere of such an era. The way that was used to get Japan out of that recession as quickly as possible was war.
　When I was two years old the Manchurian Incident occurred; when I was in 2^nd grade at elementary school the Sino-Japanese War broke out; and when I was in 6^th grade in elementary school the Pacific War started. In this way, there was a long period of fifteen years of war. With the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan's defeat, that war ended. I was 15 years old at the time. I had grown up during fifteen years of war.
　Up until it was destroyed by the atomic bomb, Hiroshima was a military city. There was a huge military division near Hiroshima Castle, and Ujina Port was used as a departure port for military troops to attack the Chinese mainland and countries in Southeast Asia. Elementary school students like myself were taken to the port by our teachers, where we held small Japanese national flags and cheered for the soldiers who were leaving, shouting "Banzai! Banzai!" I grew up and entered an old-education system girl's high school, but rather than actually going to school, every day we were sent to work in factories as mobilized students. At the time in 1945, there were three large military factories in Hiroshima: a munitions depot, a military clothing factory, and a food supplies warehouse. I was just like a temporary staff member, and went to work in all of the factories. When America was building the atomic bomb, I was wiping rust off old guns in the munitions factory, washing and repairing military uniforms in the military clothing factory.
　And then on the day of August 6, I was mobilized to the tobacco factory in Minami-machi, and was working covered in the powder of the tobacco for the military. Because we were working inside the factory, only one of us died, trapped under machinery, but the rest of my classmates and I survived, although we had light injuries in our head and neck from the shards of glass that shattered with the bomb's blast.
　But the situation was terrible for the students younger than us. They had been mobilized to clean up after building demolition in the area behind Hiroshima City Hall (around 1.2km from the hypocenter, in what is now known as Kokutaiji). Those students suffered full-body burns, and were so burnt that they may as well have been naked. Their skin formed blisters and peeled and hung from their fingertips and dragged from their feet, and the sight of them was nothing but tragic. Some of them came back to the school, but there were no doctors and no medicine. The only way they could be treated was using old tempura cooking oil that was left in the home economics classroom. Having fled from the tobacco factory back to the school, we treated their wounds, but they just died one after the other, squirming in pain. I cremated one of those students myself, in a corner of the school ground. Crying, I picked up her small bones, which were a pale pink color like the petals of cherry blossoms. I hope never to have the same experience again.
　I am an old woman now, having turned 91 this year (2020). Even now, I cannot forget those students who died at such a young age. Every day I pray for the repose of their souls, and think my hardest about what should be done now to protect eternal peace.

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