LET'S OFFER LOVE AND INTELLIGENCE!
MY START FROM "HIROSHIMA"
By Hashizume Bun

I'm one of those who survived HIROSHIMA.

On August 6, 1945, I went to work as a temporary employee at the Hiroshima Post Office, one branch of the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications. I was then 14 years old and a high school student. In those days, young healthy males were all sent to the war front, and at home, many housewives and students were forced to work in factories or offices. I was standing near the window of my office on the third-floor of the reinforced concrete building around 8 o'clock in the morning. Suddenly, there was an extraordinary flash of light outside; thousands of bundles of rainbow colours sharply hit my eyes. «The sun has dropped in front of me!» I thought. After a moment of consideration, I lost consciousness. When I came to my senses, I found myself sitting down near a pillar in the centre of the room. Maybe I had been blown over there. During the war, we had been trained to protect ourselves against the bombing - so I put my index- finger and middle finger on my eyes to protect them from protruding out and covered my ears with my thumbs to keep my eardrums from breaking. I tried to lie down on my stomach to stop my bowels from breaking out but could not because I was in such a narrow space. Suddenly, I became anxious about my friends running around in the upstairs room that was filled with fire and smoke.

There was a strange silence. Something warm flowed through my hands from behind the right side of my head. During the final stage of World War II, United States attacked most big cities in Japan - Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, etc. with incendiary bombs so I thought that an incendiary bomb had dropped on the room upstairs and that oil was dripping down through the ceiling. The darkness caused by the dust began to clear. I took my hands off my eyes and ears and spread them out before me and saw that my palms where full of blood! I stood up in order to get the first-aid kit from my desk. To my surprise, all the desks, chairs and bookshelves were piled up and scattered everywhere. As I was reaching for the triangle bandage in my desk, someone cried, «Get out of the building!»

Slowly my colleagues walked towards the door - one after the other - from among the dusty, smoky darkness. Outside, a high-tension wire was cut and was dangling into my third-floor office. I began walking and found one of my colleagues dead in among a jungle of wires. He was a very nice fellow and everybody used to call him by his nickname. The sight of his pale face froze my whole body. After that, everything else I saw surpassed my experiences. My entire body was bathed in pieces of broken glass and I was bleeding so fiercely -especially from my head - that soon there was a pool of blood all around me. Miss Tomoyanagi, one of my colleagues, cried with surprise and carried me to the nearby Red Cross Hospital. All along the way, the ground was burning up with thick flames. The Red Cross Hospital was the crucible of disasters. There were people there with faces burned and swollen like pumpkins. There were people whose skin was tattered and dangling like rags; people who made every effort to stop their eyes from protruding out. There were those who pressed their hands on their stomach lest their intestines should come out as well as people who lost the energy to even press their hands. And, there were people burned to the point of not knowing whether they were male or female, and so on.

The city that had been decent up to that morning disappeared completely. «What on earth happened? Am I in an ominous dream?» Miss Tomayanagi called a doctor. »Fierce bleeding! She may die if sleeps» he said and went away. I lost my senses once more. Some sweet, indescribable sleep took me down into the deep, when suddenly I heard her voice from above loudly calling me back to earth. While I was in that state, a lot of time may have passed. Miss Tomoyanagi was relieved to see me saved from the brink of death and left the hospital to look for her parents. Then, I dimly remember a fierce shower pouring down and the air raid of the enemy forces were attacking us again. After that, the hospital was set on fire and again I was saved - this time by a boy named Iida Yoshiaki. He was at home with his sister that morning and was wounded. They were pinned under the collapsed house, from which he could barely escape. His sister cried but could not be rescued. Then the fire came and his sister screamed for help from under the rubble. «Pour water on me! It's too hot!» He threw water from the bucket. «Thank you, brother!» As the fire drew near at his foot, the voice of his dying sister was heard. »Run away, brother, run away!» she cried. Surrounded with fire, he had no choice but leave his sister. She was 14 years old. He may have put the image of his sister upon me because even after almost all the people left the hospital, he stayed and took care of my serious wounds.

All through the night, the whole city of Hiroshima was on fire.

From the windows of the Red Cross-Hospital, the fire belched and the flames roared. My hair was burning with the sparks of fire. Whoever could walk, ran away, and whoever could creep, crept away. Those lying on the ground were either the dead or the dying. That night, Iida Yoshiaki walked around giving spoonfuls of water to those longing for water. He was the only person left who could stand up and walk.

After the bombing, in my neighbourhood, about a dozen survivors lived under pieces of wooden roofing or under tin they had picked up. All of them were seriously wounded and all were very hungry - but they were in such awful condition as to not feel pain or hunger. They could get neither medical support nor rescue rations. The post-war information revealed that Hiroshima had been left alone in the vacuum for awhile owing to the following two reasons: First, the United States was afraid of the bitter reproach from the whole world regarding the disaster at Hiroshima and, at the same time, wanted to monopolize the research on the effects of the radioactivity. The second reason was that the Japanese government was afraid of the possible shock to the citizens if they realized the disaster caused by the atomic bomb and so followed an order issued by the Occupied Forces to conceal the disaster.

On August 15, with a thin thread of life, I was roaming along side a burned pile of rubbish, when glittering objects began dropping down from the mountain-shaped clouds above. I soon saw an airplane coming out from the clouds scattering paper. I picked one up and read the news that the War had ended. I felt nothing - I was too exhausted. I threw the paper away and continued to roam along the road. None of us, living by the rubbish waste ever spoke of that paper. We were all seriously wounded, hungry and thirsty and on the verge of death --- we were not sure if we would die tomorrow or in an hour --- and yet, none of us would complain about our pain, hunger or thirst. With no money and no home, we collected the embers from the waste and chatted over their light. A sort of detachment from any desire and a strangely frank sentiment pervaded.

When society began to resume its normal course, I came to know that Miss Tomoyanagi had passed away from the A-bomb disease and Mr Iida had been killed in a traffic accident. Every year, on August 6, for more than thirty years or forty years thereafter, I passed the day bending my head from the heavy burden, which I carried on my shoulders--The two friends that saved me from death passed away and yet I was alive! Is this fair? I could never overcome the shock of that day. Any glimpse of remembrance gives me a chill and I am sick from the agony.

About ten years ago, I was living in the city of Kamakura with my family. It was rumoured that an American submarine, equipped with nuclear arms, would enter Yokosuka harbour near Kamakura. My second son wanted to go there to protest its presence. He was then 16 years old - the same age that Mr Iida was on that day! I pondered for a while--- then I composed a poem about the A-bomb. It's strange to say, but the burden that I had carried on my shoulders for nearly forty years vanished with the writing of that poem!

Then, little by little, I could write and talk about the A-bomb. I could speak about my younger brother, a victim of the A-bomb. He was 7 years old at the time. On that day, while he was playing in the playground at a nearby elementary school, the atomic ray pierced his back. He ran all the way home with his shirt burning on his back.

My mother, who was also wounded, ran towards the river with her son on her back. My mother sat down on the bank with her son on her lap. My dying brother longed for water. A lot of people had already gathered at the riverbed to escape the heat. Those sitting near the water scoped up a handful of water and passed it on to the next person and so on and by the time it reached my mother, it was only dampness in her hand. However, she pressed her damp palm against my brother's tiny lips. That night, the high tide from the Inland Sea flowed up the river and returned to the sea with many swallowed bodies. My brother, scared by his nakedness, lay on the grass of the riverbed and cried, «Scared! Scared! Cover me with something». My brother's back was burned and the skin on his limbs had peeled off. All night, my father pulled grass off the riverbank and covered my brother's body with it. The next day, my family was ordered to seek refuge at the Hesaka Primary School, 4 kilometres north of Hiroshima. Those with heavy injuries were brought there by boat and those who could walk had to do so under the scorching sunshine.

On the day after of the bombing, I walked through the ruins of the city to get home. It was a ghost town--no sound and no life!

When we speak or write about the experience of the A-bomb, we are often criticized as voicing `victim sentiment'. On that day, I saw the starting point of human beings. On that day, at that point, there was only the question «What is life?» War is a crime.

War makes all of us crazy. In Hiroshima, there is a small stone monument on which is carved «We will never repeat our error». Stored in those words is an apology for the violence caused by dropping the A-bomb on fellow human beings and a sincere oath never to repeat that foolish error.

Some years ago, I went to Hawaii and visited Pearl Harbor. First we were shown a film about the brave Japanese soldiers and about the late Emperor Hirohito. Then we were taken in a small boat to a white building from which we could see the surface of a sunken vessel. The bodies of the sailors are still inside the rusted cabin. They have eroded, I thought. But why don't they return their bodies up to the land? Is it because they want to justify war and to heighten the morale? For me it seemed to be a symbol of their folly. I stood there addressing my thoughts to those unknown soldiers.

I want to write about the «ABCC».

After the War, Americans came to Hiroshima. On a hill commanding the city, they set up the ABCC--Atomic Bomb Casualties Commission - and began their study on the effects of radioactivity. In order to get their data, they took us - the survivors who could hardly afford to live on - and drew blood from us, took pictures of our injured skin, the growing state of our breasts or the pubic hair of adolescents; they picked out the intestines from the dead. We were treated as mere objects of research and not as human beings. No special treatment was given to us. Moreover, in order to monopolize the whole survey and recordings, the Americans prohibited anyone else from coming into Hiroshima or Nagasaki. They hindered any international support for the victims and they forbade any information about the A-bomb to be revealed. The Japanese government supported the whole procedure. Thus, we were left alone in this secluded state without any relief both from the inside and the outside. It is really true that after the War, we could only sustain ourselves with grass or rainwater. Natural healing was the only cure.

Fifty years have passed and the «ABCC» is now the Radioactivity Research Centre and is run by both Japan and the United States. We «hibakusha» are still the targets of follow-up studies.

In this way, the A-bomb became a living-body test - an outrage executed to secure the interest of the United States. However, their opinion was that dropping the A-bomb resulted in an earlier end to the War and consequently saved the lives of many people in both countries. I believe that it was this opinion that led to the subsequent error in judgement regarding nuclear arms.

Hiroshima was the starting-point of the nuclear age. It was the starting point for the United States to proceed with their precious resource in their hands. At the same time however, they must remember that they themselves have left a negative mark on their own history as being the only Super Power in the whole world to explode the A bomb on other human beings.

All of us living on this Earth must know how important it is to recognize the huge responsibility for the possession of nuclear arms, which are powerful enough to kill all life and destroy all environments.

Each «hibakusha» lives with this heavy experience held in their bosom, and rarely speaks of it. Our common ideal is that we should never have any new «hibakusha». A-bombs kill all living things on the Earth and residual radioactivity denies any future for our planet. This is a sacrilege to the Creator--a sin we must never commit.

Fifty years have passed since the United Nations Charter advocated the equality of human beings and yet, due to the discrimination or the ambition for hegemony wars and conflicts on the Earth never cease to be. Even after being aware of the dangers of nuclear arms, they are still being employed. How silly!

As I mentioned above, more than forty years of healing were needed before I could speak of my dreadful experiences and, even still, there are facts that I can hardly explain. Even now, I have some hesitation to speak or write about the A-bomb. Yet, thinking of those who died on or during the fifty years after that day and their severe pain and, thinking of the great threat to the Earth, I must accomplish my mission as one survivor to tell the story.

I would like to rely upon love and intelligence of all of humankind. If only I can transmit «the value of life» to the generations to come, I am happy to leave this evidence from one survivor of the A-bomb.