I am Junko Haga. I was in the 5th grade when the Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Today, I'd like to tell the story about my personal experience of this wartime bombing.
More than half of a century has passed since World War II (WW2) ended. Thanks to the strong convictions and efforts of "Never Repeat the Tragedy" by the people who lived through this wartime, Japanese have enjoyed years of peace without any war casualties for the first time since the beginning of the Meiji Era.
More than 80% of Japanese citizens alive today were born after WW2. Maybe for the people who were born after WW2 in modern, free, peaceful, and developed Japan, the stories of wars and the atomic bombs may sound like an old tale told by an ancient people. But it is a reality that 2,500,000 Japanese died for their country and 550,000 of them were killed in the fire bombings of the cities.
In Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone, 210,000 people were killed instantly by the first atomic bombs in human history. It is said that total casualties from the war eventually reached about 3,250,000. This number is about 1/36th of the total population of Japan today.
I became one of the children of single mothers who lost their husbands from the atomic bombs. Japanese people today live in peace without war for the first time since the Meiji Era. As a piece of Japanese history, I'd like to share my childhood wartime memories from more than half a century ago.
I was in the first grade at elementary school when the Great East Asian War started on December 8th, 1941. Japan surrendered on August 15th, 1945, when I was in the fifth grade. Those 3 years and 8 months were completely painted only in war colors.
I was living at that time in Higashi Kannon-cho , about two kilometers from Ground Zero, where the Peace Memorial Atomic Bomb Dome stands today. In the early Spring of 1945, the first American B29 squadrons started to pass over our house. We heard the radio announcement: "The enemy's bombers are approaching from Toyogosuido toward Kure Army Port.” A siren warning air alert sounded. Then, the silver-colored B29 bombers passed through the sky reflecting the sunlight.
Blackish colored carrier-based aircraft flew low over our house. There was a metallic sound, queen-queen. Our house seemed to be located right on the flight route. The house and bomb shelter kept shaking all night until dawn. As many as 150 aircraft were said to have passed over during that night.
At the beginning of April, suddenly school students and their families started moving away from the city to escape the bombings. I moved with my family to Kannon Mura, Saeki-gun, one station before Miyajima. The house we moved into had a yard with red and white Oleanders like our house in the city. Rice paddies were green and frogs sang at night. It was a quiet, peaceful place so different from the city.
My father and my siblings who were in high school came back to the countryside house on Saturdays and went back to our city house early Monday mornings. Two months had passed since we had moved to the countryside. It was August 6th, a hot day with blue skies from early morning. I was walking with some schoolmates in formation towards the school. We heard small blasting sounds, bruun-bruun, coming from somewhere. We saw a lone B29 bomber flying over us unbelievably high up in the sky. The B29 looked so small like a toy plane, very different from the ones we saw when they passed over our city house in squadron formation. The lone B29 flew over shining and glittering. But we didn't pay any special attention to it and hurried on to school.
All the students were forming in the school yard preparing for the 8:15 a.m. morning gratitude ceremony. Everybody was looking up towards the sky, watching the small B29's circling flight.
I heard some voices saying: "That is a spy plane....""They are spying on us..." The gong of the morning ceremony went off. Suddenly everything turned bright! I thought a huge lightning bolt had struck me. It was an eye-blinding flash as if several suns exploded all at once.
Before we could tell if it was real or just an illusion, the blast sound of the explosion came and the ground began shaking up and down, right and left - as if a huge bomb had dropped and exploded just next to me. I fell down. I thought, "I am dying now!!"
"Get in the bomb shelter!!" It was the voice of the vice-principal.
I forced my eyes open. Everything was covered by thick gray sand and dust. I felt like I was standing alone in an opaque part of a deep ocean floor. At the time, I sensed somebody was running. I came to myself, and started running desperately towards the bomb shelter in the hill behind the school building. At the very moment I finally got in the shelter there was a huge sound. The people at the entrance crumbled from the blast pressure of the explosion. Clay from the ceiling and walls fell out like hail stones.
"Cover your ears and eyes!!" It was the voice of my homeroom teacher, Mr. Fujita, who drew me into the shelter pulling my hand at the entrance.
None of us had said anything until then. At that time we started to utter some strange and meaningless words. I, too, felt like saying something and clinched the back of a person in front of me. I felt his back shivering. ”Don't speak!!”, the teacher said. All voices ceased at once. Everybody was breathing quietly. I don’t know how long this lasted.... Then the words: "Go outside. Get in your group formation!" We left the shelter at the teacher's order.
The air was opaque with debris. Everybody was covered with sand dust from tip to toe, as if we were all wearing sand dust-colored uniforms.
This is the memory of my experience of the moment of the first atomic bomb explosion on the earth. The solo B29 which was flying circles over us dropped an Area Weapon A-bomb from 8500 meters above Hiroshima.
Everybody wandered, "Even though we were at war what could cause such devastation beyond our imagination?" It was the result of the Area Weapon A-bomb explosion in the sky 580 meters over Hiroshima city 43 seconds after it was released from 8500 meters by the tiny B29 which was circling over us that morning.
There was the tragic sudden death of humans within 500 meters from the Ground Zero, where the Peace Memorial Atomic Bomb Dome is now located. The buildings within two kilometers of Ground Zero were completely disintegrated. Our house in the city was destroyed, almost completely annihilated.
Later our teacher, Mr. Fujita, told us it was very fortunate that all of his students survived even though the school was located in the Gulf of Hiroshima district where the blast and blast pressure from Ground Zero traveled over water without any barrier to prevent direct damage. Even today I think we were saved by our teacher’s proper judgment, leadership, and our daily training.
At day, only one member of my family, my older brother who was a second year high school student, was missing. All of us, school personnel, school friends, our family, and all of our relatives, searched for him. But now more than a half century later, he is still missing .
On August 15th, 1945, my father who was listening to the termination of the war broadcast by the Emperor suddenly started to cry shaking his shoulders. "If only this had come 10 days, just 10 days earlier!!" Until then I had believed that fathers never cried. But I saw tears of grief shed by a father who lost his son by the A-bomb only ten days before the war officially ended. That was the moment I as a child thought, "Nothing in the universe can replace my father's loss of my brother."
"No matter what condition he is in, I want to find him and take him home". It was the end of summer. My father kept looking for information about my brother even half a year later. My father passed away quietly a short time after he moved back to his birth place because of declining health. My mother who did not know until her death if her son was alive or had died must have been very sad.
One year later, we received a notice, "Your son is presumed dead from the A-bomb explosion." His name was erased from the family register of our hometown. But my mother never erased him from her heart.
"Why? He did not even have time to flower... He may have lost his memory.... He may have become completely disabled.....He may have been institutionalized...He may be waiting for me to come looking for him....I want to take care of him just only one day...Did he die without suffering?"
Often during the rest of her life my mother mentioned these words to me, a tomboy and her youngest daughter. I lived with my mother after my older sisters married and left home. It was 32 years ago this Fall that my mother joined my father in heaven. She lived long enough to watch her children reach adulthood.
By chance I happened to see a documentary film, "Drawings by the Victims of the War" on NHK Television on Atomic Bomb Memorial Day a year before last. The film brought back memories of that utmost tragic time, of scenes in a city devastated by the bomb and fear that there could be another bomb attack.
I remembered my oldest sister and I starting to walk along the railway tracks toward our house, hoping my brother might get there somehow. We crossed over Fukushima bridge and arrived Tennmann Bridge.
They were scenes of the numerous rows of skeletons, identities unknown, laid between street train rails. There were hundreds of bodies on both sides of the river banks of those who crawled on the ground to reach the river. After drinking the river water they passed away along the banks. The river was filled with hundreds of floating bodies. Those unforgettable horrific memories came right back to me. I almost shut off the television because my body was stiffening up. But I made myself keep watching.
The memories I had were from the experiences of a small child viewed through a child eyes while walking through the city in the hand of an older sister who suffered and tried to forget that experience. I felt a strong renewed impact after viewing those drawings and listening to their explanations. These people saw and experienced far more sad, tragic, cruel and hellish scenes than I.
Even though thinking "I will never see him again", still more than half a century later, I couldn't accept my older brother's death as a reality. But after watching this telecast, I finally was able to believe that my parents and my brother met together in heaven at last.
Suddenly all at once, something came out from my whole body. Tears flowed down my cheeks and ran onto my chest as if I had a fountain in my body. It was the first time I have felt "peace of mind" since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. After more than 50 years those tears were a prayer for the peaceful repose of my brother’s soul.
When summer approaches every year, the time when white and scarlet oleander flowers start to bloom and kikyo bell flowers start to bear small light-blue buds, somehow deep inside, my heart gets a heavy feeling, influenced by the souls of those who perished in the war.
I believe that we the people of this generation have to make efforts through future peace activities to carry on that peace born from the lives of the Hiroshima victims.
Thank you very much for your attention in listening to my story of childhood memories of a half century ago. I deeply appreciate it.
November 1, 2007
Junko Haga
Suginami, Tokyo
Profile:
Born 1934, Housewife
Area being bombed: Hiroshima
Graduated from college in 1957, worked as a public high school teacher
Married, 3 children, 4 grandchildren (all in healthy condition)
Lives with husband
Older brother: He was a second year student at Hiroshima High School when he disappeared at the time of the Hiroshima A-Bomb detonation. His body was never found and he was later presumed dead from the initial blast.
Father: A year after the bombing he died from illnesses caused by atomic bomb radiation
All family members received secondhand atomic bomb radiation exposure when they went into Hiroshima after the A-bomb explosion to search for my brother
Translated by Aiko & Paul Damrow
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