Figure 1.--This increadibly powerful image is the work of famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. It is a A haunting photograph of a mother and and baby sitting in the rubble of and charred trees of Hiroshima 4 months after the atomic bomb destroyed the city.

The Hiroshima atomic explosion instnatly killed some 80,000 people. Tens of thousands more would later die of injuries from the blast and radiation exposure--somethinG not entirely undrerstood at the time. The human tragedies are heart rending. There are many factual accounts. Many fiction writers have also addressed the cataclysm. One particularly moving account was about Emikio Amai age 6. "One morning toward the end of the summer they burned away by face. My little brother and I were playing on the bank of the river." [Bock] Emiko Okada writes, "I was eight when the bomb dropped. My older sister was 12. She left early that morning to work on a tatemono sokai (building demolition) site and never came home. My parents searched for her for months and months. They never found her remains. My parents refused to send an obituary notice until the day that they died, in hopes that she was healthy and alive somewhere, somehow. I too was affected by the radiation and vomited profusely after the bomb attack. My hair fell out, my gums bled, and I was too ill to attend school. My grandmother lamented the suffering of her children and grandchildren and prayed. “How cruel, how so very cruel, if only it weren’t for the pika-don (phonetic name for the atomic bomb)…” This was a stock phrase of hers until the day that she died." Fujio Torikoshi weites, "I saw a black dot in the sky. Suddenly, it ‘burst’ into a ball of blinding light that filled my surroundings. A gust of hot wind hit my face; I instantly closed my eyes and knelt down to the ground. As I tried to gain footing, another gust of wind lifted me up and I hit something hard. I do not remember what happened after that. When I finally came to, I was passed out in front of a bouka suisou (stone water container used to extinguish fires back then). Suddenly, I felt an intense burning sensation on my face and arms, and tried to dunk my body into the bouka suisou. The water made it worse. I heard my mother’s voice in the distance. ‘Fujio! Fujio!’ I clung to her desperately as she scooped me up in her arms. ‘It burns, mama! It burns!’ I drifted in and out of consciousness for the next few days. My face swelled up so badly that I could not open my eyes. I was treated briefly at an air raid shelter and later at a hospital in Hatsukaichi, and was eventually brought home wrapped in bandages all over my body. I was unconscious for the next few days, fighting a high fever. I finally woke up to a stream of light filtering in through the bandages over my eyes and my mother sitting beside me, playing a lullaby on her harmonica." [Rothman] These tragic accounts are horrendous. But too often they bare not put uhto context. The only aspects destinctive vabout Hiroshima andf Nagasaki are 1) the instantaneous death and distruction and 2) the loingring radiation. Both attacks are only atuny fraction of the 15-20 million people killed by the Jaoanes begin with theseizue of Manchurai from China (1931). And every one of thise deaths was just as heartrending and terrible as thse who died anf Hiroshina and Nagasaki. What is tragic is that the Japanese want to forget the mostly Asian civilians they killed and only remember the rekatively small numbr of Japanese people that perished in the War.

Sources

Bock, Dennis. The Ash Garden (Knopf, 2001), 281p.

Rothman, Lily. Ed. "After The Bomb: Survivors of the Atomic Blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki share their stories". Time Magazine.

Created: 3:47 AM 10/1/2013
Last updated: 12:44 AM 4/5/2022