76 years ago, on August 6, 1945, the world saw an unthinkable and unimaginable event. On this day in 1945, the United States, with consultation from Britain and Canada, dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima killing about 80,000 people in a flash. Not many people close to the ground zero of the bombing survived. Those who survived developed hellish diseases caused by radiation.
Here are five eyewitness accounts of the Hiroshima bombings that describe how the bomb, before making global damage, made many personal ones:
1) Fujio Tarikoshi, who was 86 years old when he shared his account for a documentary project 1945 in 2017, recounted that he was having breakfast with his mother when he heard a deep rumble of engines in the sky. When 14-year-old Tarikoshi stepped out, he saw no planes. Bewildered when he looked at the northeast, he saw a black dot in the sky.
Suddenly, the dot burst into a ball of blinding light instantly filling Tarikoshi’s surroundings. A gust of hot wind hit his face. He closed his 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,” Tarikoshi told the 1945 project.
2) Emiko Okada was eight years old when the bomb dropped. Her 12-year-old sister left early to work on building demolition and never returned. Being 2.8 kilometres from the hypocentre of the bombing did not help Okada. When the radiation touched her, she started vomiting profusely. “My hair fell out, my gums bled, and I was too ill to attend school,” Okada told the documentary project.
3) Ryoga Suwa, 84 at the time of his testimony in 2017, considered himself as an atomic bomb orphan. His sister died in the bombing and his parents remained missing. However, on the day of the bombing, Suwa was not in the area and was evacuated to a city some 50 kilometres away from Hiroshima. When he returned one month and 10 days later, “what remained of the property was a cluster of overturned tombstones from the temple cemetery. Hiroshima was a flat wasteland,” Suwa told the project.
4) Taeko Teramae was a 16-year-old student labourer and a third-year high school student. Waiting in the hallway of the workplace that morning, when she looked outside the window, she noticed a shiny object falling in the clear blue sky. When she turned to her friend to ask what that was, “we were engulfed by a powerful flash that turned our surroundings bright white,” she told the project. Teramae recalls that a giant cloud of dust wafted into her mouth and eyes and everything went pitch dark. Teramae began to choke on the poisonous smoke and vomited uncontrollably.
5) Jongkeun Lee, 13, was on his way to work that day when the bomb exploded. He suffered debilitating burns. Lee’s parents had no idea where he used to work and it took them a year to find him. Lee’s sister, who also had left for work, remained missing.
A human shadow, probably formed when a human was evaporated by the bomb flash, is etched in a stone in Hiroshima and stored in the city’s museum. The destruction in Hiroshima was not enough for America and it dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, another Japanese city, instantaneously killing around 40,000 people. Total casualties of both the man-made horrors reach up to more than two lakh people, most of them killed by a monstrous flare which annihilated them even before they could perceive what it was.
Link for Testimonies: https://www.1945project.com/portfolio-item/fujio-torikoshi/#1498206302968-41dc96a7-7877
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