Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [126]
Kimura Yoshihiro heard and saw the American plane. He was in the third grade and had just arrived at school, though, because the teacher had not yet shown up, he and his friends were chatting. There was bright yellow light, then ‘a big sound’, and Yoshihiro was knocked out. He came to when wood falling on his back stunned him with pain. He found his sister and they hurried home. They discovered rubble, then their father pulling at it frantically. Their mother, he told them dully, was dead, killed instantly when a nail had penetrated her skull. They must leave the city. They sheltered that night under a railway bridge, warming themselves when the rain and wind sprang up by the fires of burning houses. ‘There were almost no ordinary-looking people there. They had swollen faces and black lips.’ Yoshihiro got thirsty and went to the river to drink. There were so many corpses there that he had to keep pushing them aside to find room to dip into the water. The next day they reached a relative’s home in the countryside. Yoshihiro kept crying for his mother. On the 15th his sister died—‘a hard death’, he remembered, ‘for her eyes were open... staring at me’. Eventually Yoshihiro’s father remarried, and the family moved back to Hiroshima. ‘I hate war now from the bottom of my heart,’ Yoshihiro told interviewers six years later. ‘I don’t hate anybody because Mother is dead, but I hate war.’32
A footnote: given the scope of the calamity for the Japanese and Koreans in Hiroshima, it can be nothing more. There were about two dozen American prisoners of war being held at three locations in central Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Most of them were killed by the bomb or by furious Japanese after the bomb had been dropped. Two—a Navy pilot named Norman Roland Brisset, and an Air Force sergeant named Ralph Neal— survived briefly, and were united with a B-29 crew that had earlier been pulled from the water by a Japanese fishing boat and brought to Hiroshima on the 17th. Nearly beheaded by their captors and abused by Japanese still homeless at the East Drill Ground, the Americans were saved by their interpreter, Nobuichi Fukui, from the Dartmouth class of 1928. Fukui put the men on a truck and drove them out of harm’s way, but when they reached the train station he removed the prisoners’ blindfolds and ordered them to look. ‘One bomb!’ he kept repeating. Along the way they stopped to pick up Brisset and Neal. They were in bad shape. They had heard the blast and felt the fire and survived by jumping into a cesspool. That night, they worsened and began screaming in agony. The B-29 crewmen gave them morphine and asked their captors for additional help. ‘Do something?’ asked the Japanese doctor in charge. ‘You tell me what to do. You caused this. I don’t know what to do.’ The two men succumbed at dawn. They knew no more about the atomic bomb than the thousands of others it killed.33
7. Patterns of response
Each survivor of the atomic bombing remembered it somewhat differently; there is no ‘standard account’ of that day in Hiroshima. But the subjects of the bombing did share certain responses to it, used some of the same language and images to describe their experience of it. Many, for instance, were made naked by the bomb: unclothed, and—worse—stripped of skin, and thus left not only in terrible pain but also in some cases wracked with shame. Many who survived, including Dr Hachiya, commented on their own nakedness and their initial shock on seeing so many others naked too. A male employee of a war factory saw in the rain a woman of about 18 or 19, naked ‘except [for] half her panties, which did not cover her’. She pleaded for help, and when she supplicated with outstretched hands he saw that her ‘skin was burned off as if she was wearing gloves’, and ‘her breast was red from