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Memoir of the A-Bombing
"My atomic bomb testimony"
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by Kaneji Ota
Atomic Bombing Witness for this Foundation
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Introduction
Seventy-three years have passed since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
That bomb instantaneously took away the lives of tens of thousands of people with its heat wave and blast, and by the end of that year, around 140,000 people had lost their lives.
The hibakusha (survivors) have suffered the after-effects from the radiation up to the present.
Nuclear weapons are the most evil weapons in human history, and their abolition is the wish of all humankind.
I believe that it is the responsibility of us living now to continue to work to ensure that Japan maintains its three non-nuclear principles, and that nuclear weapons are abolished and eternal peace is achieved, so that what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happens again.
Each year, when August gets closer, I remember the scenes on that day when the bomb was dropped.
However, on the other hand, the thing that we fear the most is that memories of the bombing will fade.
In actual fact, my memories of the details of that time fade with each passing year, and more and more I find myself trying to recall what happened at the time.
Damage from the bombing
In 1945 I was 5 years old, and there were four in my family: my parents, my 3-year-old brother and I.
Our house was 900m from the hypocenter.
On the morning of Monday, August 6, the weather was fine.
I walked out the front door behind my mother to go to kindergarten, and at that moment there was a flash of light and a blast, and for a few seconds or minutes I fell unconscious.
When I came to at the sound of my mother calling me, the house had collapsed, and the whole family had fallen into the air raid shelter that had been dug under the house.
We called out to each other in the dark, held each other's hands, and came up to ground level.
Looking around, I saw that the whole house had collapsed and it was impossible to know where the road was.
We fled to Tenma River, which was 30m from our house, walking over houses that had collapsed on top of one another.
We finally reached the gangi (stairs leading to the dock), but there was nowhere to step as it was full of people who were charred black.
There were people
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with long nails were sticking out of their eyes, their faces covered in blood.
On land, collapsed buildings had caught fire, and the fires were spreading, so we went down to the river.
On the way down I was surprised when a black hand that was severely burned grabbed my leg, and a low, groaning voice said "give me water, give me water."
The person's skin had completely peeled away and he was covered in blood.
My leg slipped out of his grasp.
I asked my father if we should give him water, but my father told me that we should not, because if you give water to people with burns all over their body they will die.
When we got down to the river it was just after high tide, and the water came up to my neck.
Burned, blackened wood came floating from upstream, so my father picked one piece of wood and stood it up on the riverbank.
He then got a mattress that came floating down and put it on top of the wood.
We then hid under the mattress and protected ourselves from the burning flames and the summer heat.
The suffering of the victims
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"People who had fled from the fires
gathering at the steps of a pier for water"
Drawn by Yuna Matsuda and Kaneji Ota
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When the tide receded and we could cross the river, we decided to go to the small house that my father had previously built in the mountains in Koi so that we would have somewhere to go "in case anything happened".
We walked along the Tenma River, Fukushima River, Yamate River and others, weaving our way through all the floating corpses.
Our house in the mountains had not collapsed, but window panes were broken and there were shards of glass all over the vegetables and sweet potato leaves in the surrounding vegetable patches.
While we were in our house in the mountains, we were eating those vegetables, but we gradually got weaker and weaker, and finally there was nothing to eat.
My father and I went to the town together, bought some food provisions and came back, but they did not last for very long.
The heat wave had left my mother with burns mainly at the front of her upper body, and she was enduring the pain.
I also remember that whenever she combed her hair, huge amounts of her hair would come out and be left in the comb, and she was crying as she looked at herself in the mirror.
After that, my father, then my younger brother, then I, all had our hair falling out, and the whole family became completely bald.
We picked the dokudami (medicinal herb) that we had planted in the area around our house, rubbed it in our fingers, then applied it to our wounds, or drank it as tea.
But it did not have any effect.
Eventually our wounds were festering with maggots, and when I think about my parents removing each maggot one by one with chopsticks, I really have so many sad memories.
As time passed we became weaker and weaker, and around November or December, my father, brother and I went to my aunt's house in Takehara, and my mother went to another aunt's house in Mihara.
They looked after us for about three months.
There were hospitals in Takehara and Mihara, we had enough food to eat, and our aunt's family looked after us very well.
I am so grateful, because I am alive today thanks to my aunts.
After that, I was reunited with my mother at Hiroshima Station, and I remember being so happy.
The whole family returned to our house in the mountains, and we finally got better.
Looking towards the center of the city from the mountains, there were burnt ruins as far as we could see, with some places just barely standing, including A-Bomb Dome, Honkawa National School, and Aioi Bridge, which was the target of the bombing.
Every day, my father and I desperately collected wood from the burnt ruins of our house, so that we could build a new house in the same place in the city.
I helped my father, and by around March or April 1946 we had built a black house out of the burnt wood.
However right near our house, people who looked like soldiers cremated black corpses that they carried there on stretchers, day and night; there were so many corpses there I lost count.
Words cannot express the smell that came from that place; it was an awful scene.
Thoughts about the bomb
I really want to yell out in a loud voice that the atomic bomb is inhumane and a mistake.
I believe that the most important thing is to continue to tell the next generation about the bombing, so that memories do not fade, and with the hope that the stories of the suffering inflicted by the bombing will continue to be passed down forever.
If we do that, I am certain that we will definitely achieve eternal world peace one day.
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Profile
[Kaneji Ota]
Born in 1939.
Experienced the bombing at home 900m from the hypocenter at the age of 5, as a kindergarten student.
Involved in activities as an atomic bomb witness from 2015.
Appeals for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the achievement of eternal world peace by communicating the truth of the atomic bombing.
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