Hiroshima Returning to Life

Plants sprouting in the burnt plain.

Less than ten days after the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, World War II came to an end. Hiroshima had been completely destroyed by the A-bomb, but gradually electricity, transportation, and other functions were restored. The people collected any unburned materials they could find and began rebuilding their homes and their lives. After the atomic bombing, rumour had it that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for 75 years. Then, when red canna flowers became the first to bloom in the charred rubble, they were a tremendous source of courage and hope. Eventually, Hiroshima residents who had evacuated to the countryside and soldiers who had been away fighting the war came back, and Hiroshima started its long journey toward recovery.

Children Living in Shacks

Children in Post-war Hiroshima

Despite serious shortages of classrooms and textbooks, schools reopened.

Children who had been evacuated returned. The schools in Hiroshima City had either been destroyed by the bomb or were being used for relief or temporary shelter for A-bomb victims. Thus, only about one fourth of the former schools could actually be used as schools. Still, by borrowing other buildings or clearing school grounds of rubble in order to hold classes there, teachers gradually put together places where children could learn.

Open-air Classroom

A-bomb OrphansIt is said that 2,000 to 6,500 A-bomb orphans lived in Hiroshima after the war. Having lost their families to the A-bomb, they were left all alone. Many lived in "war casualty children's homes," but some ended up living on the street, supporting themselves by shining shoes or doing whatever else they could.

A-bomb Orphans at a Memorial Ceremony (Ninoshima Island, Hiroshima City)

The Development of Nuclear Weapons

The Cold War─A Stand-Off between the U.S. and the U.S.SR

The Cold War started as soon as World War II ended. In a "hot war" people actually fight each other with guns and other weapons. The term "Cold War" was commonly used because the conflict was extremely intense but did not actually involve the physical weapons of war. The main antagonists in this conflict were the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States of America. These two countries tried to become more powerful than each other by having more nuclear weapons, and more powerful ones. Then, more countries got the bomb: England in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964.

Radiation Victims Exposed by a Hydrogen Bomb Test

The Soviet Union successfully conducted its first atomic bomb test in 1949. To counter this development, the U.S. developed the hydrogen bomb, a weapon far more powerful than the atomic bomb. In 1952, it successfully tested the world's first hydrogen bomb on an island in the South Pacific. In 1954, when the U.S. conducted another hydrogen bomb test on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, a Japanese fishing boat named Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No.5) happened to be in the vicinity and was contaminated by radioactive fallout. By the time they got back to Japan, the ship's crew were becoming seriously ill. They were all hospitalized, and one of them died. The Japanese people already knew the horror of atomic bombs, but they were quite shocked to learn that people could be killed even by a test.

The World's First Hydrogen Bomb Test (carried out by the U.S.)