I was in the part of town now called Nishikita-machi when I experienced the atomic bombing.
 
An air-raid alert sounded in the morning of August 9, but my sister still left home at the same time as usual, heading over to Shiroyama Elementary School where she worked as a mobilized student. At a couple of minutes after 11 o’clock, there was a lightening-bright flash of light. I don’t remember any sound. When I lifted up my head up I saw that all the furniture in the house had been knocked over and the radio was hanging by its cord. I dashed outside and looked over at the old thatched-roof home next to ours, the one being used as a barn. Now it was on fire. Looking up above the house, I saw that all the foliage on the hillside had caught fire and wondered what kind of bomb this could have been. Of the ten-or-so farmhouses that dotted the area around our home, all except two of them burned down. Two cows darted jerkily through the fires as they fled up into the mountains. In the late afternoon, after the houses had stopped burning, they came back down. The people and cows then took cover together in the mountainside. That was at around 3 or 4 o’clock.  Next my mother set off in search of my little sister.
 
At that time, my sister was a fourth grade student at girls’ commercial school. She had been mobilized and was working on the third floor of Shiroyama Elementary School, where the payroll division of the General Affairs Department of Mitsubishi Weapons had been relocated to. I am not sure how many people were in the third-floor office with her. There must have been some survivors, but from what my sister told us, most of the people in that classroom died instantly. A man, I guess it was one of her superiors, said that anyone who could jump out of the building should do so. My sister jumped down and then crawled away barefoot. It is amazing that someone as small as she was didn’t die from a jump from the third floor. Nearby was a bushy area that is now the site of Urakami Streetcar Depot. Luckily, my mother found her in the bushes there and was able to bring her home. If my sister had been somewhere else, she probably would have ended up on a relief train that would have taken her to Omura or Isahaya for treatment. If she had died in one of those places we most likely would never have found out what happened to her. In that way, we were really fortunate.
 
My mother brought our sister “home”, but actually our house had already burned to the ground by then. We spent the next two nights in a little air-raid shelter at the bottom of the mountain in front of our house. My sister’s face and head were riddled with bits of shattered window glass, but nothing could be done to treat her. A few days later, we sought help at one of the houses in the neighbourhood that hadn’t burned down. The man there worked at the medical clinic of the national railway, and he treated her for the first time, removing the pieces of glass from her face and head one by one. Some of the fragments had shattered, however, and could not be cleanly removed. Despite that, my sister didn’t seem to be feeling any pain. Nevertheless, exactly ten days after the atomic bombing she departed from this world for good. The atomic bomb is a hateful thing. There is no end to the hate I feel for it.
 
Excuse me for dwelling on my own troubles, but the misfortunes of my family were many. Two months before the atomic bombing the sister just under me passed away. She had gone to the girls’ commercial school as well, and after graduating she went to work in the savings department. A short time later she caught a cold and died from excess fluid build-up in her pleura. At least she had already graduated from school however, and her name will always be on the list of graduates.
 
The sister who died in the bombing was still in fourth grade at the time, however, and her name is not on any graduation list. I feel so sorry for her. To this day, I get chills when I look at Shiroyama Elementary School and think about my sister jumping out of that building in her severely wounded state. But so many bodies were never even identified, so in that respect my sister and our family were fortunate. We were able to spend ten days together, and, even though we weren’t able to help her, we at least built her a coffin and gave her a proper send-off. And yet I still hate the atomic bomb.
 
All living creatures and even the largest of trees were knocked over and burned to ashes. I can never erase those tragic images from my memory.
 
The face of the little sister of mine who passed away two months before the bombing was clean and beautiful. My other younger sister, however, had a blackened face when she took her last breaths, probably as a result of the blast winds. Even now I cannot forget the image of her darkened face.