City in Flames: One Hiroshima Survivor’s Story
The Hiroshima bombing through the eyes of a child.
August 6, 2023, is the 78th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, when the United States became the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in a war.
Over the years, many Hiroshima survivors have given first-hand accounts of what they experienced.
US Refusal to Negotiate with Japan
The American public of 1945 was told that the bombing was necessary to end World War II and prevent more American casualties, and many people believe that to this day.
However, we now know that may be untrue — Japan was trying to get the Soviet Union to broker a truce with the US weeks before the bombing, a fact that Truman was aware of.
It was the US insistence on unconditional surrender and refusal to negotiate or offer acceptable terms that prevented Japan from surrendering. Had the US taken a different approach, the war might have ended without the use of nuclear weapons.
One of the Hiroshima Survivors Tells Her Story
Hiroshima survivor Hisayo Yaguchi was in fifth grade that fateful August.
She told her story in a 1951 book that compiled the testimonies of children who were Hiroshima survivors.
Hisayo was in eleventh grade when the following account was written.
Hisayo and her classmates were sitting in a school assembly when the bomb was dropped.
She describes what she experienced:
[T]here was a sudden, terrific flash, and we were all blown to the ground.
There was a deep yellow light around us which was so strong that we couldn’t open our eyes. ‘It’s hot!’ I cried and tightly covered my face with both hands.
Severely Injured, along with Other Children
Hisayo saw everyone around her running and ran after them. She was in a state of shock and didn’t realize her own injuries.
It wasn’t until she collided with a cart that she came to her senses and realized the condition she was in:
I was bare from the waist up and all that was left of the trousers I had been wearing were the elastic bands around my waist and ankles. I was stripped to my underpants by the bomb.
She was also severely burned.
Trying to escape the approaching flames, Hisayo jumped into the Mitaki River, which was more like a creek. She lay there, feeling faint until her friend Ken-chan came and pulled her to her feet.
She and Ken-chan walked through the city, both suffering extreme pain from their burns.
Hisayo writes:
…I soon could walk no longer, since the burns all over my body sapped me of what strength I had.
My arms and legs were stiff. The burned areas were blistered. My right side was also blistered with the skin peeling downward exposing raw flesh. On my feet, I could clearly see the marks left by the thongs of my wooden clogs.
The two children met some nurses who brought them to an air raid shelter.
Surrounded by the Dying
The shelter was full of horribly burned people.
She and Ken-chan cried from the pain. They were not the only ones. Hisayo says:
Not only the two of us but the others in the shelter were crying, too. These cries… They were not just ordinary cries but screeches of agony… Still, the nurses didn’t offer us any treatment but only brought more injured people into the shelter…
I looked around but couldn’t see anyone who seemed to be alive. So many people had died even in this small shelter. I became very frightened. People were dying one after another before my very eyes.
Surrounded by dying, screaming people, Hisayo, who was only ten or eleven years old, was terrified. She and Ken-chan were so scared they wanted to leave, but it was pouring rain outside, which made them hesitate. The pain was still very intense for both of them.
Hisayo writes:
Both of us were crying from pain; both blowing our breath against the other’s burns to soothe the pain. We didn’t know what would happen to us and our sobs were also our prayers.
The two children waited in the shelter, but the nurses didn’t come back, so they eventually left.
Walking Through a Hellish Landscape
Walking through the city, Hisayo writes about what she saw:
There was a procession of burn victims… Their hair was hanging over their faces and their bodies were red with burns. Almost all of them were naked. These people moved slowly onward, with one and then another dropping by the roadside.
On the river side and in the fields, men and cattle lay dead and dying side-by-side…
There was a pregnant woman with burns over her entire back lying near the bridge, stark naked.
Hisayo finally reached her home, but it was badly damaged. The roof, doors, and windows had been blown off, but the structure was still standing.
Other than her aunt and older sister, her whole family was there — but they were all gravely injured.
She says of her older brother, “His face was a burned mass. I looked at him once, but I couldn’t bear to look at him a second time.”
A Little Boy Who Didn’t Understand
Her little brother also had a burned face and was, in fact, burned all over.
Her father told her that the little boy had been playing in the street with other children when the blast occurred. The father was buried under the house, and when he freed himself, the younger brother ran up to him crying, ‘Father! Father!’
The little boy looked his father in the eyes and asked him, ‘Why did this happen?’
Hisayo’s brother was too young to understand the concept of war. According to her, although he used to put on his air raid helmet and follow his family to the bomb shelter when enemy planes flew overhead, “[H]e didn’t really understand what air raids were about at all.”
The family could do nothing for him. Hisayo describes his death:
He kept on shouting, ‘Mummy! Daddy!’ My father and mother were at his side holding his hands…
Mother had burns all over and crouched beside my brother because she couldn’t sit all the way down…
It made me cry to hear him call first for Father and then for Mother, and I called out his name many times. But I, too, was burned all over and I lay weakly on my side crying together with Mother as we watched him die.
Losing Her Family, One by One
Hisayo developed a fever and doesn’t remember what happened next clearly.
She only remembers a few images. She remembers seeing her brother’s dead body put in a cabinet.
Also, she says, “[B]urned sharply into my memory is the picture of the sea of fire that hung over the city of Hiroshima that night.”
Hisayo and her entire family ended up in Yamazaki Hospital in Kirikushi, where doctors admitted they didn’t know how to treat their injuries.
Her older brother died on the tenth, her sister on the twenty-first, and her mother on the twenty-seventh.
The Death of Hisayo’s Mother
Her mother, who was lying next to her, lingered the longest. The two critically injured people lay side-by-side next to each other for weeks but were barely conscious of each other.
One day, Hisayo’s mother told her, “Hisayo, when you get well, you must be good to your aunt. You must repay her kindness. Yes, your mother is going to die…”
Hisayo says:
I cried out frantically, ‘Mother! You mustn’t die! You mustn’t die alone. If you’re going to die, I am going to die with you!’…
If I could have gotten up, I would have clung to my mother and wept… But at that time, both of us were so badly burned that we couldn’t move even a finger. We were delirious with fever and only half conscious.
What haunts Hisayo the most is that she wasn’t able to take care of her mother during her last days:
Though Mother and I were lying side-by-side in the same ward, I couldn’t even see her and, being almost unconscious, I lost my precious, precious mother, the only one I’ll ever have, without so much as a chance to look after her as a good daughter should.
She and the surviving members of her family were carried on stretchers to a nearby house.
Another Tragedy
Not long after they left the hospital, another tragedy struck. There was a landslide in Kirikushi, which demolished almost all the houses in the town.
The hospital ward that Hisayo had just left was completely buried in mud. All the remaining patients, and their caregivers, which included nurses, doctors, and the victim’s families, were killed. The mudslides also destroyed much of the medical equipment. This meant doctors couldn’t treat the few surviving patients.
It was the end of November before Hisayo’s burns had improved enough to enable her to walk again.
Pain and Despair
Years later, she describes the pain she and her family endured for over four months:
[W]e suffered pain that was pure pain and nothing else. I cannot remember how many times I cried for my arms and legs to be ripped off… It was truly so painful that I lost all desire to live any longer.
On January 10, Ken-chan’s father, died from injuries sustained in the bombing and from radiation.
Hisayo now lives in a new house built where her old one stood. Only one or two of her neighbors are still there, and only part of the city has been rebuilt.
She says that Hiroshima has become a “place of strangers and strange houses.”
Hisayo continues to mourn her lost loved ones.
She says, “There are seven urns standing in the alcove, my grandmother, mother, older brother, older sister, younger brother, uncle, and sister Sadako.”
Hisayo describes the despair and grief she has wrestled with in the years since the bombing:
When Father and I used to kneel before the Buddhist altar, my mind would become completely blank with the enormity of it all. Tears would come to my eyes when I thought of the hard life ahead and of my fate. I would begin to hate myself and be overcome by an urge to commit suicide.
I could think only of man’s meanness, his weakness and the hardships of life, and I could find no pleasure in living at all.
I feared that I would become a warped and twisted person… [T]here was no desire in me to lead a good and bright life.
Though still only a child, Hisayo had lost much of her desire to live and adopted a deeply pessimistic view of life — understandable, considering the tragedy she was exposed to.
Although she says that when she was writing this account, six years after the bombing, her mind had become “more settled,” she will never be the same.
This was just one of many stories from the Hiroshima survivors. Read more:
