Overcoming a sense of guilt as a Survivor

　　　　　　　Overcoming the feel of Guilt as a Survivor

　　　August 06, 2005; the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima A-bomb is a couple of months ahead.
　　At the end of July 1945, I started living with my father in Hiroshima City. My pregnant mother with my younger siblings were evacuated to a village called Heramura, near Hatsukaichi after the city of Kure had received several air raids from the U. S. Air Force.
　　　On August 5th of 1945, my father was out on a fire drill of his brigade while I went fishing with my hand-made fishing rod after digging the river shore in my neighborhood to get some lugworms. Those days, we could catch a lot of gobies at the mouth of the Kyobashi River in Minami Senda. I was going to get some for dinner that day.
　　　I caught eleven gobies and threw them into our refrigerator although I noticed then no ice in it. I was not able to buy ice because I had no money and my father was out of my home. When I opened the refrigerator, I saw a cake of bean curd called Tofu in Japanese. Being hungry, I devoured the tofu without checking if it was all right to eat it. Unfortunately, it was rotten, and I started suffering from a terrible stomach ache and severe diarrhea that night, which forced me to go to the bathroom many times at short intervals.
　　　The next day, on August 6th, we had a good weather. My school named Hiroshima City Junior High School in the pre-war educational system, which was located in Hirose-Cho, offered no classes to the students. Most of them would go to Dobashi every day to clean up the wreckage of the terraced geisha houses torn down for the fire-evacuation project. During the World War II, the Japanese government had designated some zones of big cities as “Sokai Kaoku,” where they demolished all the buildings so that they could prevent fire from spreading out when the American Air Force made air raids to the cities.
　　　My father and I lived in an area called Miyukibashi Nishizume, a place which had a bay-shaped river bank used for stacking lumbers. Many horses and carts passed on the bunk, and it was my task to clean up the dung. Masayuki Ueda, one of my classmates, was a son of a rice store owner who lived in a busy area where street-cars passed frequently. Because my house was located farther from our school, I would drop in at Masayuki’s house every morning to go to school together. On August 6th also, I was supposed to take the regular route for the morning, but due to the incessant diarrhea and the terrible stomach ache I asked Masayuki, who stopped by my house, to go to school alone. I was absent from school for the first time since I had entered it. I never thought that it would be the last time for me to see him.
　　　On that day my father went out for another fire drill although he was worried about my condition. Being left alone and lying down in my futon laid close to my desk, I felt a strong stomach ache in a room of our one-story house. Forty minutes after saying “Good-bye” to Masayuki, I saw a flash that I cannot express in words and heard a sharp sound that almost torn my eardrums. Then, my house collapsed with pieces of glass and wood. As a reflective action, I covered myself with my kakebuton, the upper quilt of a Japanese futon set, just before my father’s book shelf, books and roof-tiles came down on me.
　　　I was not able to move in my futon though I tried to put my face out of it. I finally pushed away the debris with all my strength just to see darkness with dust around. For a while, I could not understand what had happened. In spite of the fact that the alert for B-29 had been all clear on that day, I figured out from the extraordinarily loud sound that a big bomb had been dropped nearby my house. While praying for my father’s safety in my heart, I tried to get up to escape to a secure place. However, I was not able to move quickly because a big timber and the ceiling board had pushed me down over my futon.
　　　After waiting for the dust to settle down, I found that my desk had blocked the timber from falling down on me and that it had made a fifty-square-centimeters space between the timber and me. If the desk had not been there… the timber would have crushed me and I would have been killed instantly. I appreciated this lucky situation and made an effort to find out how to get out of my house. Although I tried to find a way, no method of escape was available to me. I was not able to push up the roof and ceiling piled up over me. As a result, I could not move myself. Feeling that I had to wait for my father to come back, I stretched my left arm to open a drawer of my desk. Fortunately, I could reach my knife in it.
　　　All right! I started cutting the ceiling board into pieces with the knife, hoping that I would be able to get out of the wreck. However, I could use only my left hand because the ceiling board pushed down my right arm. The more pieces I cut from the board, the more roof tiles fell down over my face. I told myself not to give up and made an effort to continue cutting the board into small pieces. Finally, I completed taking the ceiling out of my sight to move my right arm. I was happy when I saw the sky. Nevertheless, I was shocked to realize that it was as dark as that in the evening. The sky was supposed to be right and clear since it was early in the morning. I heard people groaning and asking for help on the street in front of my house. I got out of the house wreck, believing that a big bomb had been dropped in my neighborhood. I wondered how many people had got injured by this air attack. It took me more than one hour to be free.
　　　Astonishingly, the central area of Hiroshima was already blazing. Guessing that we must have received many fire bombs together with a specially-made big one, I decided to escape from the city to Hatsukaichi, where my mother and little brothers and sisters lived together then. In order not to be burnt to death I needed to go out of the city although I did not know what had happened to my father. I wanted to leave a message for my father. I, however, wrote nothing for him since no paper and pen were available to me. I started walking ahead with nothing but my underclothes on me. I even had no shoes on my feet.
　　　After that time, I saw a hell!
　　　What a miserable sight it was! I ran away without knowing which route was safe enough for me to escape to Hatsukaichi. I believed that the US Air Force had given a tremendous amount of bomb-attacks to the whole city, instead of a big one to my neighborhood, which I had previously thought. To take a shortcut, I went to the Minami-Ohashi Bridge, which was not damaged by the fire. On the street that was only 200 meters in length, I saw some people squatting or walking with their skins heavily burnt. A person, who seemed to have lost his sight, asked me to get some water for him. There were dead people with their clothing and hair burnt. I also saw a person walking silently. His arm and face skin was hanging down from his bloody flesh. A woman burnt from her head to toes was sitting with her baby crying in her arms. In addition to these people, a person who must have immediately died was under a crushed earthen wall and a man was sitting still because he had got severely burnt. When another person wandering around with his bloody body came into my view, I wondered whether or not he was looking for his relatives. Finally, I saw a hand of a man under a collapsed house. Judging from its color, he must have been already dead.
　　　Many people asked for some water while I was walking ahead to Hatsukaichi. I, however, could do nothing for them because it was difficult to go to the rivers to get some water. I did not even have a cup to scoop it in. I, as a twelve-year-old boy, was helpless in a panic although it was possible for me to physically assist them. I got a minor injury on my wrist when I escaped from my collapsed house. Nevertheless, I could have helped the people since it did not bleed much.
　　　The whole city was a blaze, looking as if it had sunk under a sea of flame. I told myself not to go back home and escape from the place. Since I was afraid of crossing the bridge, I decided to go down to the Motoyasu River after passing a fish-market in Yoshijima. I saw many human bodies floating in it. With nothing but my underclothes on, I walked to the middle point of the river and then swam to the other side of it. The water seemed to have washed my underwear, which had got dirty due to my severe diarrhea. I do not remember clearly how I found a safe route to escape from the west of Eba since the fire was blazing up all around the area. My psychological state had reached the extremity of fear. I really do not remember how I escaped from this disaster or whether or not the black rain fell down over me. I crept ahead on the street-car bridge over the Temma River. When I reached the Miyajima Kaido (Road) after passing through the former Koi Station, I just realized that I had survived somehow. I continued walking towards the west. Although I felt like asking someone to give me a ride since my feet were bare and hot, the situation where most of the transportations were full of dead or injured people did not allow me to do so.
　　　No more hell of this kind! I would like to strongly send this message to the world even though I am unable to describe well a lot of terrible scenes that I saw that day.
　　　After five o’clock I arrived in Hatsukaichi where my mother was evacuated. I did not know how my father was doing at that time. It was in the evening my father came to us. I was taking a rest after receiving treatment for my injury. According to my father, he looked for me frantically in Hiroshima. He was worried much about me because none of our neighbors knew where I was or where I had gone. We thanked that we had been saved. However, soon, we learned from my aunt that her husband, who as well as Masayuki had been sent to clean up the Sokai Kaoku area, was stuck there because he had got burnt all over his body. My father and I immediately went to the place to pick him up. It was August 8th. The city was still smoldering. My uncle’s body was burnt so badly that we could not recognize him first. Because our landlord at Hatsukaichi did not allow him to live together with us, we asked a neighbor to rent us his barn where he had placed his farm machines and implements. Since no doctor was available, we laid my uncle on the futon over the rice straws and treated his burn with the ointment called Chinkuyu. Unfortunately, we made vain efforts to save my uncle, who finally passed away on August 10th after saying, “Even the USSR troops have raided our country!”
　　　I worried about my friend, Masayuki. Since my uncle’s burn was so severe, he must have gotten burnt similarly at the place they were cleaning up the house debris. In spite of my concern, I was not able to receive any news about him because I could not go to school and because I was still taking care of my uncle in Hatsukaichi. After a few days I learned that all the teachers and students participating in the cleaning up activity had lost their lives. I also learned that Masayuki had passed away after reaching his parents, which gave me a little relief.
　　　The war was finally ended leaving a tremendous number of victims. This was, however, the beginning of my agony.
　　　My father told me that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had been specially created and that I should not go there because people and animals would not be able to live there at least for two hundred years. My family was not, however, supposed to stay in Hatsukaichi for a long time.
　　　Not being burnt at all, the debris of our house miraculously remained. The fire that had spread out all over the city ceased twenty meters away from our residence. If it had not ceased, my family would have lost our house completely. Of course, it collapsed by the strength of the bomb, but I was lucky enough to be able to get out of it. We could not, however, use the materials of our house at all because we had rented it from a person, who we were unable to locate and receive his permission to fix his property. Walking around blocks and blocks, we even failed in finding a person who knew how to contact our landlord. Our family finally decided to rent from one of my father’s friends, a room of his cottage on the top of the mountain in Motoujina.
　　　Any of my family members did not complain about this situation because most of the people in Hiroshima lived in similar conditions. We rather appreciated that we had survived from this disaster with no serious injuries and that we were able to live in a place with a roof, which protected us from the hot sunshine and rain.
　　　The saddest moment, nevertheless, came to me soon when I met Masayuki’s parents. They shouted at me as soon as they saw me alive. “Why are you here?” Masayuki’s parents did not stop crying for a while. Then, a sense of guilt as a survivor immediately caught my mind, and I have lived with the feeling since then. “Mrs. and Mr.Ueda, I am sorry; I was absent from school on that day because I had a severe diarrhea.” I barely said this and was not able to continue further. My classmates and I experienced this terrible disaster just after entering our junior high school. Therefore, I could not remember well each face and name of theirs. I was just shocked to hear that all the teachers and students who were at school that day had been killed by the bomb. I asked to myself why I was alive and why I had not died with them. It was painful for me to see Masayuki’s parents and to be seen by them. I then conjectured that I would have been happier to be with them in the other world if I had been killed with my classmates on that day.
　　　The sense of guilt as a survivor has been torturing me since I saw Masayuki’s parents. I, however, decided to quit my junior high school in the pre-war educational system and spent days with my father looking for a house and our daily bread. When my father started a lumber business again in the following year, I entered a junior high school in the post-war system. Then, I asked to myself again about how I could recompense the deaths of my previous classmates who had been killed by the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, I was not even able to manage my life well for the following decade. I suffered from several illnesses caused by atomic-bomb radiation, such as frequent diarrheas and loss of hair for ten years. I also suffered from pleurisy at age of twenty-four. Although I never forgot my classmates who had been killed by the atomic bomb, I was not able to do anything for them during this period.
　　　I have never forgotten Masayuki in my life although I left Hiroshima later when I got a job in Onoda in Yamaguchi Prefecture.
Msayuki’s khaki school uniform with his name-tag on it is displayed in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The tag made of white fabric shows his last name “Ueda.” Whenever I take my acquaintances, some of whom are those from abroad, to this museum, I explain to them in front of his uniform how Masayuki passed away. I believe that this is the best thing that I can currently do for my classmates who were killed by the atomic bomb.
The cruel scenes on that day still stay in my mind. I can never remove them from my mind. While suffering from the sense of guilt as a survivor, I have kept telling to myself that it is my responsibility to appeal to the world how terrible it is to use this kind of bomb. It will be sixty years on August 06th since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. A boy at the age of twelve then, now has become seventy-two year old. I strongly feel that I should explain to the world the cruelty of the atomic bomb.
　　　I am currently involved in several activities seeking for the world peace. I work for the improvement of literacy and the preservation of water. Due to their illiteracy many people have become victims of trafficking in persons. Thousands of children in the world are dying because they cannot get good water. Of course, it is the most important responsibility for me to work for the peaceful world with no atomic bombs. We, as Hibakusha (the A-bomb victims) must continue talking about the disaster of Hiroshima and appeal to the world how terrible results this weapon created.