Remembering the Bomb

For three voices (It is suggested that reader 1 is female and reader 2 is male.)

* = congregational singing of Kyrie (Hymnal: A Worship Book, #152)

1: Looking from the front of our house, I saw a single airplane come flying in over the mountain to the left. Very strange for a plane to be flying in like that. When I looked carefully, I saw it was an enemy B29. Even stranger. Why no anti-aircraft firing from Hijiyama Hill? The plane disappeared from view. Another plane came in. Very strange. Just as I was wondering, "What's going on?" an incredible flash. Tremendous heat, as if it were attacking me. So hot! I hit the dirt, forgetting even about my child. Then a huge roar. The paper doors came flying. What happened? As I looked at my house, half of the ceiling was hanging there. The other half was down completely. My child and my sister's child were trapped underneath. When I saw that, I knew Hiroshima had been destroyed. I called to my sister, "Hurry and fix me a lunch. I'm going to town to help out." ¹

2: Ah, that instant! I felt as though I had been struck on the back with something like a big hammer, and thrown into boiling oil. For some time I was unconscious. When I abruptly came to again, everything around me was smothered in black smoke. My chest hurt, I could barely breathe, and I thought "This is the end!" I pressed my chest tightly and lay face down on the ground, and ever so many times I called for help: "Mother! Mother! Father!" There was no answer from Mother, no answer from Father.

Through darkness like the bottom of Hell I could hear the voices of the other students calling for their mothers. I could barely sense the fact that the students seemed to be running away from that place. I immediately got up, and without any definite idea of escaping I just frantically ran in the direction they were all taking. ²

*

3: August 6 and August 9 marked the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The material that destroyed Hiroshima was uranium-235. Some sixty kilograms were used in the bomb. As a cube, sixty kilograms would be slightly less than six inches on a side.

Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, killed nearly a hundred thousand people-a fact later filed under the heading "weapons effects."

The placement of an explosion-where it happens-is what matters most, and that depends on purpose. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were exploded eighteen hundred and fifty feet in the air, because the guess was that from that height the bombs would accomplish the most damage through shock, fire, and radiation effects. ³

*

2: Fires were blazing high on both sides of us, and my back was painfully hot. From inside the wreckage of the houses we would hear screaming voices calling "Help!" and then the flames would swallow up everything. A child of about six, all covered with blood, holding a kitchen pot in his arms, was facing a burning house, stamping his feet and screaming. I was in such a state that I didn't even know what to do about myself, so I could hardly attempt to be much help to him. ⁴

1: I was running as fast as I could when I encountered a man who was entirely naked. He was carrying a piece of tin roofing on his head to hide his face as he ran. I thought I shouldn't look at a naked man, so I turned my back. The man had passed me and I could have kept on running, but for some reason I called to him. "Wait a minute. What part of Hiroshima got hit?" The man removed the tin from his head and came right over and looked me in the eye. He said, "Hey, Toshiko?"

His face was so swollen. I couldn't tell if his eyes were opened or closed. Then he said, "It's me. Don't you know me?" Finally, I recognized him. It was my brother. ⁵

*

1: The area around Koi was crowded with people fleeing toward the elementary school. When I got to the school, the corridors were full of people groaning, crying, screaming. The healthy people weren't even treating anyone, they were too busy carrying out the dead. I couldn't tell my own family just looking at the faces, so I went around looking at people's clothes, what was left from being burned. I couldn't find anyone. I went out into the playground and found four big piles of corpses. Standing in front of one of the piles, I thought, "What'll I do if I find someone I love in this mound?" ⁶

2: At the base of the bridge, inside a big cistern that had been dug out there, was a mother weeping and holding above her head a naked baby that was burned bright red all over its body, and another mother was crying and sobbing as she gave her burned breast to her baby. In the cistern the students stood with only their heads above the water and their two hands, which they clasped as they imploringly cried and screamed, calling their parents. But every single person who passed was wounded, all of them, and there was no one to turn to for help. The singed hair on people's heads was frizzled up and whitish, and covered with dust-from their appearance you couldn't believe that they were human creatures of this world. ⁷

1: It wasn't just human beings. I saw birds, cats, and dogs. Everything was half burned, just like the humans. Even the horses were all swollen up. Everything was utterly transformed. ⁸

*

3: Then what shall be spoken in a generation when thousands went by dogs and by fire, when over a million innocent children were savagely killed? No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children. Any easy affirmation of God would appear to mock the burning children. Any easy denial of God would appear to turn the children's deaths into a gigantic travesty. A simple denial of God would appear to deny the reality of redemption in our time. ⁹

*

2: I was in the Red Cross barracks when the first night came to an end. From earliest morning voices calling "Water. Water." came from every side. I too was so thirsty I could hardly bear it. Inside the barracks there was a sink with water in it. Even though I knew that all sorts of things drained into it, I scooped up some of that milk-coffee-colored water with my shoe and drank it. I knew there was a stream running right behind the barracks, so I got up and took that shoe and went and drank and drank. And after that any number of times brought water and gave it to the people who were lying near me and to the soldiers who were wounded.

My pants got soaking wet every time but they soon dried in the blazing hot sun. I had only had my burns painted once with mercurochrome, and they had turned black and were all wet. I was trying to get them dried by the sun so they would harden up. My friends, and the other people too, could not move after they once lay down. Their backs and arms and legs were all slippery where the skin had peeled off, and even if I wanted to raise them up, there was no place I could take hold of them. My whole face was burned and I couldn't open my mouth very well. By the third day I too was all swollen up, even around my eyes, and I had to lie there beside my friends unable to move at all. ¹⁰

1: About the end of August my hair fell out. I began throwing up blood and some of my teeth fell out. There is nothing glorious about war.

I looked for my mother for a long time, but I never found anything. Finally I found out what happened to her when my brother-in-law went into Hiroshima on September 6. He came back saying, "Let's gather all of mother's children," We went to his place and saw a cloth wrapped around something on the dinner table. I unwrapped the cloth. I expected to find her ashes or a few bones, but what came falling out was her half-burned skull. No eyes. No nose. Only a little flesh left on it, plus some hair. The right side of her glasses was melted onto her head.

After seeing my mother's half-burned head, my brother started saying strange things [like] "I've become huge. Open a hole in the ceiling." He couldn't even stand up. That horrible bomb tore my brother's mind to shreds. ¹¹

*

3: The most densely populated sector of the world is the part of Manhattan Island known as Wall Street. In a third of a square mile, the workaday population is half a million people. If all the people were to try to go outdoors at the same time, they could not do so, because they are too many for the streets. A crude bomb with a yield of one kiloton - a thirteenth the size of the Hiroshima bomb - could kill a couple of hundred thousand people there.

A one-fiftieth-kiloton yield coming out of a car on Pennsylvania Avenue would include enough radiation to kill anyone above the basement level in the White House. ¹²

The production and use of nuclear weapons may well be the greatest un-repented sin of the 20th century. Surely the church must be clear that it is a sin to build a nuclear weapon. To make this statement once a year as we mark the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be a small but significant step towards necessary repentance which could lead to healing. ¹³

*

2: Even now the scars of those wounds remain on my head, my face, my arms, my legs, and my chest. As I stroke these blackish-red raised scars on my arms, and every time I look in a mirror at this face of mine which is not like my face, and think that never again will I be able to see my former face and that I have to live my life forever in this condition, it becomes too sad to bear. ¹⁴

1: Being an A-bomb survivor meant living with emptiness and anger. Being a survivor meant living with the anxiety of never knowing what radiation was doing in our bodies. Many times I thought I would be better off dead. But then I thought, "No I have to live for the ones who did die." I don't want anyone to forget. Everything we had believed was turned upside down. We couldn't believe anything anymore. We didn't even know who to be angry at. We could only be angry at ourselves. We just ran around in that living hell that was Hiroshima, everyone crying, screaming. As I listened to silenced voices, I learned that this absolutely must not be allowed to happen again. ¹⁵