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The atomic bomb that appeared in the clear summer sky on August 6, 1945, destroyed the city of Hiroshima in an instant. The damage in bare figures was 13.2 square kilometers destroyed by fire, 200,000 people killed or missing (out of a population of 310,000), 31,000 people injured, 57,000 homes totally destroyed, and 15,000 homes partially destroyed.

When I rushed to Hiroshima that day as part of the rescue operation, I experienced directly the tragedy, atrocity, and inhumanity of the bomb. The experience was so appalling that it destroyed utterly the numbness to misery I had developed on numerous battlefields.

That spring I had been evacuated by submarine from the terrible front in eastern New Guinea to staff one of the skeleton units that were being formed to defend the Japanese islands in the expected Allied invasion. I was appointed a field officer with the 52nd Ship Construction Battalion based at Murotsu in Yamaguchi Prefecture, about forty-five miles from Hiroshima.

I was at the battalion headquarters in the early afternoon of August 6 when a telegram arrived from our commander informing us that a bomb of an unknown type had fallen on Hiroshima that morning and caused great destruction. I was ordered to the stricken city to provide emergency relief. Tormented by an ominous foreboding, I set out by a fast boat. Night had fallen by the time I reached the port of Ujina in Hiroshima.

I alighted at the pier, since I was under orders to report to our headquarters there. As I stepped onto the jetty, however, I involuntarily came to a halt. I could see nothing clearly in the darkness, but the air around me reeked of blood and death. Then moaning assaulted my ears and made them ring as if a vast number of scales were being played together. I realized to my horror that all around me were thousands of wounded people, lying on the cold concrete waiting for death. They had been placed there because there was nowhere for them to go, and none of them were receiving any medical attention. They were living corpses in a hell on earth, with only the peace of death to hope for. Though I wanted to do something for them, I realized bitterly that nothing could help them now.

The next morning the headquarters was shifted to the ruins of the mansion of Marquis Asano, near the hypocenter, and we moved upstream by boat. Most of the houses in Ujina had escaped total destruction, but virtually all were deserted. And Hiroshima itself . . . I could not believe what I saw. Was this the beautiful city that had preserved hundreds of years of tradition? In the streets not a tree or a blade of grass remained. Only a blackened desolation spread out before me.

Some modern buildings retained their shape, but their concrete walls had crumbled, and the steel girders, laid bare, were leaning away from the hypocenter. The roads were strewn with the fire-blackened corpses of people, horses, and dogs. Survivors were walking around stupefied.

Corpses filled not only the streets but also the many rivers and the nameless canals and creeks. Several hundred bodies had even floated as far as Hiroshima Bay. It was our battalion’s job to recover those bodies from the water.

We had to pull the charred bodies aboard with ropes and then take them ashore, where others were waiting to deal with them. There was no way of distinguishing the bodies by sex or age. Most had completely lost their clothes, and all were brown and swollen. Their skin had peeled off and hung dangling, like the peelings of a bruised, black loquat, and all their hair had fallen out. We would load five or six bodies aboard and then head back. In this weird landscape, the soldiers preserved a deep silence in the face of the brutality around them.

Ashore, the bodies were piled into heaps and set alight. Smoke rose from all points of the devastated land, like bridges carrying the souls of the dead to heaven. At night the flames from the pyres could be seen all about, making me think that the spirits had become will-o’-the-wisps.

The family of a lieutenant general with the army supply depot in Ujina had been living in the Asano mansion, where we were bivouacked. The beautiful garden had been completely burned; only the centuries-old pines remained, blown down and stripped of their leaves. This showed just how strong the blast had been.

The general had been on his way to work when the bomb fell. He had escaped with only light injuries, but his family had been trapped under the collapsed house. His wife was calling out to her two daughters, and the girls to their mother, when the cruel flames approached. There was nothing they could do. Unable to free themselves, they were burned alive.

‘‘She looked after the girls so well. I pray that she will take them by the hand and lead them across the river of death. Hail Aimida Buddha!” The next day the general, his face streaming with tears, gathered together the charred bones that were all that remained of his beloved wife and children. However exalted a person he was, however much a soldier, in the end he was an ordinary human being, a husband and father. We could say nothing, only stand with bowed heads.

On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The next day, Nagasaki was bombed.

The situation became ever more critical. It was announced that the Allied forces were about to land on the Japanese mainland. Our detachment was relieved from rescue operations in Hiroshima and sent back to our original base to continue the work we had been doing. We arrived back in Murotsu on August 10. This important, thriving port on the Inland Sea commanded a strategic position in terms of water traffic. Murotsu Bay was an excellent natural harbor, and eminently suitable as a fleet anchorage. Our detachment was posted in this strategic spot. Our orders were to build transportation facilities and a place of concealment for ships.

August 12 was a day of intense heat. The land sweltered under a sultry sun, and it seemed as if everything would evaporate. About two o’clock a woman’s cry, a sound like silk rending, suddenly reverberated above the piercing noise of the cicadas. I went outside to see what was the matter. There I found two women weeping in each other’s arms.

I saw two or three people from the neighborhood run up to them and, realizing that something out of the ordinary had happened, hurried over. One of the women was a widow who lived locally. Her son was in the army in the Pacific, and her daughter had married and gone to live in Hiroshima. I had heard that her daughter, who was spoken of highly as an excellent wife, was her pride and joy. When the bomb fell, it was as if the light had gone out of her life.

No news of the daughter came, and every day the mother prayed to the gods and buddhas for her safety. She had come asking us for information when we returned from Hiroshima, but all we could do was try to reassure her with conventional phrases that her daughter had surely fled to safety somewhere. This did not comfort her.

What I now saw was the homecoming of Sachiko, the daughter. Although she had arrived home safely, she was a pathetic sight. Her clothes were in rags, her long black hair had been burned so that now she was almost bald, her eyes were puffed up, and her face was burned. She was a sight pitiful beyond words.

Despite her injuries, she had found her way back to her mother’s house. It was like a miracle. Going as often as not without food, intent only on reaching her mother, she had joined a group of victims leaving the city. Kind people had helped her along the way. What will it must have taken for her to arrive safely in her mother’s arms!

What had happened to that smiling young wife? The mother looked at her child, now more an apparition than a woman, and wept, cursing the war and the atomic bomb.

“Mother, don’t cry so. I am a soldier’s wife, and I can face him now. I am ashamed, though, because his parents died and I am still alive,’’ she said, comforting her mother. I felt as if I were watching a living Buddha, so noble and exalted did she look.

I took her immediately to the army doctor for treatment. That was the greatest kindness I did at that time. Even the army was in short supply of medical goods. To the mother and daughter, it must have been like receiving help in hell. They brought the palms of their hands together in thanks. Sachiko was given an all-important injection of Ringer’s solution, as well as ointment for her burns, and as treatment continued, she began to regain her grip on life.

The years flowed by. In September 1955 I took a trip to Yamaguchi Prefecture and visited Murotsu again. The abandoned ships that had been left lying in the bay at the war’s end had been towed away and disposed of. The port had returned to prosperity as a fishing and transport center and was bustling with activity. The children who had helped entertain the battalion at the primary school were now adults, taking their places in society. It was truly a happy ending.

The light in the lighthouse on the cape was still burning as it always had, but otherwise the past seemed to have been obliterated. However, the tunnels that we had labored night and day to build to hide ships could still be seen, half-collapsed and overgrown, telling mutely of the past.

On the surface, the cruel wounds of war had disappeared, but in actual fact they could never be erased from the little fishing town, now in its tenth year of peace. Sachiko, the young woman who had escaped from the atomic bombing, had committed suicide by walking into the sea.

An old woman in the town told me, “Both the son and Sachiko’s husband died in the war, and the mother and daughter lived together alone. They must have found it hard going in the difficult times that followed the war. . . . Anyway, somehow or other Sachiko got well, and although she suffered because of the loss of her husband and brother, five years or so passed calmly enough. But both mother and daughter suffered because the keloids wouldn’t go away. In fact they seemed to grow deeper and more pronounced as the years passed.” (This was not a problem these two alone faced; all the victims of the atomic bombing experienced the same thing.) The old woman continued, “And what was even more pitiful was that incurable radiation sickness began to spread through Sachiko’s body. Finally she lost her will to live and just walked into the sea.”

Deeply moved, I prayed for Sachiko’s happiness in the next world and then left the town. The wild chrysanthemums in the fields outside Murotsu were quivering in the wind, the blue sea of the bay sparkling behind them.

When I think back, I realize that from the time of the China Incident in 1937, when I was conscripted at the age of twenty-one, until the end of the war in 1945, I was always at the command of my draft card, never off duty. I fought as a junior officer in China, on the fierce battlefields of the southern front, and in what were probably the grimmest battles of the war, in Guadalcanal and eastern New Guinea. Somehow or other I survived. It was with the experience of the Hiroshima bombing that I ended the decade of my twenties.

It must never happen again!

 

This essay first appeared in somewhat different form in the monthly magazine Dharma World in April 1984.