“These were the circumstances under which we forsook our father’s body”
Some 190,000 survivors of the World War II nuclear attacks — the ‘hibakusha’ — still carry with them memories of death and destruction, radiation-induced diseases and social stigma. Three of them accepted to recount their story: Masao Tomonaga, Sadao Yamamoto and Yoshiro Yamawaki dig into the darkest reminiscences of their past in the hope that today’s world becomes free of the nuclear threat.
Mr Yamawaki’s testimony is the desperate search of a child for the remains of his father in the scorched ruins of Nagasaki, August 1945. Warning: what follows might be disturbing to some readers.
Yoshiro Yamawaki was just 11 years old when the atomic bomb was dropped in Nagasaki. He and his twin brother were about 2.2 km from the hypocentre. He has since become an advocate for the elimination of nuclear weapons and hopes that in sharing his experience he can prevent others from having to suffer the effects of nuclear weapons. In 2010 he was appointed as a Special Communicator for a World without Nuclear Weapons by the Japanese government.
Mr Yamawaki’s full testimony was originally published in the International Review of the Red Cross edition on The human cost of nuclear weapons.
Until just before 11 o’clock, [my twin brother and I] were out on the veranda. Then we got hungry and went into the sitting room in the back of the house. While we were sitting there at the table, a whitish-blue light shot across the room. Then came a roar that seemed to shake the whole house.
The roof had been blown off, and we could see the sky. The pillars and walls were embedded with large numbers of sharp-edged fragments of broken glass. The other houses in the neighbourhood were in the same state of destruction. Across the harbour, the central part of the city was covered in clouds of dust.
My twin brother and I evacuated to the bomb shelter in our yard, where we waited for our father and our older brother to come home. About an hour had passed when our oldest brother arrived home from his factory. He told us that it was too dangerous to stay in that small bomb shelter and that we should move to a larger one nearby.
The bigger bomb shelter, which was like a tunnel carved into the cliff-side, was filled with mothers and their children. Children who were outside when the bomb detonated had been showered with heat rays and had suffered burns on any exposed skin. Other children were crying because they had been injured by shards of glass and other fragments that had been thrown by the blast.
We spent that entire night waiting anxiously for our father to come back. By the next morning, however, he still hadn’t returned. At that point, the three of us went to find him.
There were many dead bodies amongst the debris littering the roads. The faces, arms and legs of the dead had become swollen and discoloured, causing them to look like black rubber dolls. As we stepped on the bodies with our shoes, the skin would come peeling off like that of an over-ripe peach, exposing the white fat underneath.
There were many dead bodies floating in the river as well. We were drawn to one that belonged to a young woman of about 18 or 19, from which a long white belt was dragging behind. When we got closer, we saw that this white belt was really her intestines, which were protruding from the side of her abdomen. Feeling nauseous, we turned our eyes away and hurried off in the direction of our father’s workplace.
Our father’s factory had been reduced to nothing but scorched metal framing. Through the demolished walls we saw three men working with shovels. We called out, “Our name is Yamawaki. Where is our father?” One of the men glanced over and said, “Your father is over there.” He pointed in the direction of the demolished office building.
The three of us dashed off in the direction he had pointed to. What we found there was our father’s corpse, swollen and scorched like all of the others. As we stood there stunned, the men with the shovels told us that if we wanted to take our father back home, it was better to cremate him there first. The crematories had also been destroyed in the bombing and could not be used.
Not knowing what else to do, we went around the scorched ruins of the factory and gathered up smouldering pieces of wood so we could perform the cremation. We put our father’s body on top of a bed of burned posts and then piled up the pieces of wood on top of him. When we lit it on fire, the flames rose high in the air. We put our hands together to say prayers for him.
Please lend us your strength to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth and make sure that Nagasaki is the last place on the Earth to suffer an atomic bomb.
When we looked up again after finishing our prayers, we saw both of our father’s feet were sticking out from the fire. That was an absolutely unbearable thing to see. Our feelings must have showed because the man from the factory told us we had better go home for the day and come back the next day to collect the remains.
The next morning we looked around the kitchen area of our demolished house for a pot to put our father’s remains in. When we arrived at the place where we had cremated our father’s body, however, a shock awaited us. The body still remained as it had been the day before, in a half-cremated state and covered over with ash. There was no one from the company around. We three brothers only wanted to collect our father’s cremated bones, but his half-burned body was lying exposed. The only parts of his body that had been cremated were the tips of his hands and feet and part of his stomach. We could only pick out a few of his bones.
This body, which was like a skeleton covered in ash, was far more gruesome than the corpse of someone just deceased. It was even more unpleasant when we thought about how this body belonged to the same father we had always talked to and eaten meals with. It got so that I could no longer bear to look at our father’s body and I said to my brother, “Let’s go home now and leave his body here.”
Thinking back on that, I know that it was not the right thing to do. My brother looked at our father’s body for a while longer and then said that there was nothing more we could do except to take his skull home. My brother had brought tongs, but when the tongs touched our father’s skull it crumbled apart like a plaster model and the half-burned brains came flowing out. Letting out a scream, my brother threw down the tongs and darted away. The other two of us ran after him. These were the circumstances under which we forsook our father’s body.
I think that all people who lost family members and others close to them in the atomic bombing went through experiences similar to this. There were approximately 74,000 people who were killed in an instant by that one, single atomic bomb.
These are scenes from the atomic bomb that will never leave my mind.
As long as they exist, nuclear weapons will inevitably lead to disaster. Please lend us your strength to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth and make sure that Nagasaki is the last place on the Earth to suffer an atomic bomb. Let us all work together, all of us, to build a peaceful world, a world free of war. The atomic bomb is not an ordinary weapon, so it should not be used in any war. As you know, even war has limits.
