Until I was in the third grade of primary school I lived in Tokyo, but in March 1945 the family moved to the Ujina district of Hiroshima because of my father’s work. Shortly after that, all primary school children in the third grade and up were evacuated. Parting from my parents and my seven brothers and sisters, I went with my teachers and classmates to a temple in the countryside at Miyoshi. For food we had only potatoes and gruel made with rice and vegetables, and I felt hungry all the time.
On the morning of August 6, when I was cleaning the main hall of the temple, I felt a vibration, and happening to look up in the direction of the mountains behind which Hiroshima lay, I saw plumes of dense black smoke rising. It reminded me of a brush fire. The next day one of the older pupils, who had gone to help out on a nearby farm, heard that a massive bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. I was anxious about my family, but my teachers said nothing about the bomb.
About six days later the man who lived next door to our house in Hiroshima arrived to see me, having walked all night. He told me that my mother was very sick and that I should return with him. Early the next morning, carrying two potatoes for lunch and with two pairs of straw sandals I had made myself strapped to my back, I set out to return home with our neighbor as my guide. It was about one hundred kilometers to Hiroshima from the temple, and since there were no trains running, we had to walk the whole way. I plodded on, in a daze of happiness over returning home.
We arrived in Hiroshima after night had fallen. I will never forget what I saw in the streets of the city. There was no sound or light anywhere, and no life disturbed the dead streets. What was more frightening than anything else was the sight, in the moonlight, of the skeleton of a burned-out streetcar with its load of fire-blackened passengers. One corpse was still clinging to a strap. I could see trails of silvery phosphorus weaving all about, for all the world like the spirits of the dead in my storybooks. I closed my eyes to shut out the horror and, clinging to our neighbor’s hand, went on to Ujina and home.
Only three members of the family were there when I arrived. My oldest brother was lying down, unable to move, his entire body pierced with slivers of glass. The tip of a younger brother’s nose had been torn off, and a bandage covered his face. They told me that my mother had been taken to the aid station at Itsukaichi and that my father and older sister were there with her. My mother had been serving in the women’s volunteer labor corps, doing demolition work in front of the city office, when the bomb fell.
The next morning I set off again with an older brother. Arriving at the aid station, I searched the rooms one by one for my mother. In one room I saw dozens of people on the floor, moaning in pain. Eventually I found my father and sister and ran to them. My sister was covering my mother’s face with a square of white linen, and my father told me she had just died. If I had only walked a little faster, I would have been in time! I was distressed that I had not been able to see her alive and cried loudly. My mother’s face was covered in blisters and had swollen to twice its normal size, and her hair had fallen out. She was unrecognizable as the mother I had known so well.
One of my older brothers, who had been at morning parade at his school when the bomb fell, had suffered burns over his entire body and had died shortly before my mother.
We cremated my mother and returned to our home in Ujina. In front of our house, the dead bodies of people who had been fleeing from the hypocenter were lying where they had fallen. Since it was midsummer, the smell was horrible. My brother put the bodies into drawers from our clothes chests before taking them away for cremation.
My oldest brother died in October. After that my father began to act more and more strangely, and one day he went out somewhere and never came home again. His place was taken by another brother who had just been demobilized as disabled. He pushed his undernourished body to the limit, often working as a black marketeer to support us. The following January he died from overwork. My family now consisted of an older sister just turned twenty-one, a younger brother, and me.
Kiyoko Sato, mother of three children, lives in Tokyo with her husband.
It was a time of severe food shortages, when survival was difficult even for adults. We children subsisted by raiding deserted military food stores and selling the stolen items on the black market. I was supposed to be at primary school, but instead of going to school I tried to help my sister by steaming potatoes and selling them in front of Hiroshima Station. Somehow the three of us survived.
The ten years after the end of the war were the real war for me. As an orphan, I received no help from the government. Because my main concern was staying alive, I received hardly any education. But I survived.
This year I am the same age that my mother was when she died. I have a son and a daughter at university and a child in middle school. At last I think I understand how my mother must have felt, knowing that death was going to take her from us. I hope my children will never have to experience the sorrow I did.
This essay first appeared in somewhat different form in the monthly magazine Dharma World in April 1984.
