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TERASAWA Shigeru(TERASAWA Shigeru) 
Gender Male  Age at time of bombing 18 
Recorded on 2006.10.9  Age at time of recording 79 
Location at time of bombing Hiroshima(Exposed upon entering city) 
Location when exposed to the bombing  
Status at time of bombing Armed Forces member or military personnel 
Occupational status at time of bombing  
Hall site Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims 
Dubbed in English/
With English subtitles
With English subtitles 

TERASAWA Shigeru (18 years old at the time) He belonged to a squadron of naval kamikaze and was training on Etajima Island. After an intense light and explosion, he threw himself on the ground but was hit in the back by a flying wooden door. He went to the harbor in Hiroshima for relief and saw the appalling sight of terribly burned people lying there. After that, he cremated the victims who died day after day.
 
【Sent to Etajima Island in May 1945】
September 1944, I entered a troop as a special cadet in army ship's soldiers in Shodoshima Island of the Seto inland sea. The next year, in January 1945, I was transferred to Taibi, Hiroshima. In May 1945, I applied to the naval kamikaze squadron and moved to Etajima Island. In Konoura on Etajima Island, there was a training base for naval kamikaze. That's where I was on August 6th.
 
I had experienced training only once or twice; we trainees practiced ramming boats, which were to be loaded with 250 kilograms of dynamite, into a target buoy at a speed of 23 knots. There were few training ships left. Our seniors were dispatched to Okinawa and the Philippines, and about 100 of them died there. The war ended, and I had only undergone training at the base.
 
【August 6th】
In the center of our troop's barracks was an earthen floor. Straw sleeping mats were lying on both sides of the earthen floor. I was preparing to go out for training near my own mattress. At that time, there was a flash of intense light. I wondered what it was and tried to run outside. On my way out, I heard a big explosion and quickly fell face down on the dirt floor. Then a wooden panel from the doorway was blown into the barracks by the blast, and it hit me in the back. I got a slight bruise.  
 
I ran outside cautiously after the intense flash of light, thinking that something terrible had happened, and saw the sight of the mushroom cloud rising up in the sky. I don't have any words to describe it except for "strange." I don't remember very well if it was brownish red or black. Strangely colored smoke was rising up in the air. We talked about what it was for a while. Ninoshima Island was just in front of us, and a rumor spread that an ammunition depot on the edge of the cape had exploded. As the mushroom cloud was rising up, however, fires began burning in Hiroshima city. No, I thought, Hiroshima has been attacked.
  
Soon afterwards, we were ordered to go to Hiroshima and take part in relief operations. We prepared rice, rice cookers, shovels, tents, and other equipment. We called the large motorized ships "Daihatsu." We boarded a ship, which was about 15 tons, and arrived at Ujina at just past 11 o'clock. We shouldered our heavy packs and set out on our relief mission. On the wharf we saw an appalling sight. 
 
There was a floating pier where small boats docked at Ujina then. It was floating and swaying with the tide. The pier was dirty with dust and oil. On the dirty pier, many seriously injured people were lined up. They were in a pitiful condition, and we couldn't distinguish if hanging from them was their burnt clothes or their own skin. Some people were sitting, and others were lying down. They were waiting to be sent to Ninoshima Island. About half of the people there were already dead. Since childhood I have liked history. I thought that this is what hell is like. It was a hideous sight.      
 
People uttered the name, Koto Kogyo (Hiroshima Engineering Vocational School). Now it's the department of engineering of Hiroshima University. We started our relief operation for seriously wounded people around the vocational school. In pairs we carried the seriously injured people on stretchers which had been brought from Etajima Island. The condition of the severely injured people who had run away from the hypocenter and now were unable to move on their own was especially terrible.           
 
I still remember some things very clearly; when we placed the badly wounded people on stretchers, a pair of us would pick them up. If we picked them up by their ankles or shoulders, our hands easily reached to their bones because their burns were so terrible. They had been burnt to their bones and I thought it was hideous.
 
Another thing I recall are their cries, "Soldier, water, water." Even now I still hear their grievous cries of "Soldier, water, water," when August comes. When our unit was mobilized, we were told that we must not give the seriously burnt people water, even if they asked for water, because if we gave them water, they would die. So we didn't give them water.
 
We saw the wounded people whom we tried to help die one after another. We had the task of putting the seriously wounded on stretchers and carrying them to places where trucks could come and go. However the people we helped died one after another in the trucks way to Ninoshima Island. I should have given them water; that thought comes back to my mind even now.
 
【His difficult mission continuing under terrible conditions】
We were ordered to go to the area near Josen (Hiroshima Jogakuin Vocational School)、the present-day Hiroshima Jogakuin University,1 and we set off, shouldering our heavy packs and led by a person from Hiroshima. Many A-bomb victims had run away from the hypocenter to the south, and dead bodies were all around us as we marched. The second and third-grade students of Josen had been ordered to the suburbs to work for the war effort. Only students in the first grade had remained in the city and had been doing light work.            
 
Josen was a Christian school, and the one hundred or so first-graders had a morning assembly in the wooden church meeting hall before they went out to work. On August 6th at 8:15, the church meeting hall collapsed. Except for several people who left soon after the assembly, the remaining one hundred people were crushed and killed when the building collapsed.
 
We dug out the dead from under the building and cremated their bodies at the school. We dug trenches at the site, made a crematory, and placed the bodies on timbers which had not been burned. At first we cremated the bodies respectfully one by one, but we gradually came to regard the bodies as being not quite human and cremated them in a rougher way. When I recall it now, I don't know exactly whose bones they were, but I do know they were the victims of Josen because we cremated them at the school. We did this work of cremating bodies.
 
It's a cruel story, but the bodies did not completely become bones because of our rough way of cremating them. When we saw them the next morning, some parts of their hands and feet remained, and their internal organs or hair remained uncremated. We dug holes just beside them, shovelled in the corpses, and buried them temporarily. In those days, people were required to sew on the front of an outer garment a piece of cloth on which their address, name, and blood type were written. When we could find some identification, we took notes of their names and then cremated them. One hundred or so people died, and I don't remember how many I cremated.
 
The next place we went was an area southwest of the hypocenter, but I knew that only afterwards from looking at a map. The Hiroshima Prefectural Hospital and a police training center were located there then. The name of the prefectural hospital has stayed in my mind. We started the work of cremating bodies near there.
 
It was very hard work and could not be compared with what we did at Josen, because there were so many corpses. Until the day before we went back to Etajima Island, we piled up dead bodies in the rough way I described before and burned them by pouring over them oil which we had brought from our base. Because it was near the hypocenter there wasn't any unburnt wood. In pairs we picked up the corpses which were gathered around us and threw them onto the fire with a shout. It's a cruel story. We shovelled the incompletely burnt bodies into holes we had dug and buried them there. Corpses, corpses, and more corpses, and there wasn't anything left to identify them.
 
A river ran near the prefectural hospital, and many dead bodies floated in the river. Inmates of Hiroshima Prison collected the bodies floating in the river by boat, and we pulled them up and cremated them. At first, I viewed them as the bodies of humans, the same as us, and I did the work respectfully, but finally I came to think they were not human bodies. There was a strong stench of death from the many people who had died around there. Initially, I covered my mouth and nose with a towel and wore work gloves, which were used for the maintenance of boats, because it was unpleasant to touch the burnt bodies. But I took off the towel and gloves because they got in the way of the work. After a while, I didn't care at all about the stench of death and touching the burnt bodies.
 
In pairs we continued picking up the bodies and throwing them onto the fire with a shout. Even now I regret that I did such cruel cts. We had brought tents from our base thinking we would pitch the tents and sleep in them at night. But from August 6th to 14th we never pitched the tents. A tent in those days was divided into four sections for ease of carrying, and I slept using one of them as a pillow. We slept in the open. Fortunately in the area where we worked, we didn't have the black rain which later became a problem.
 
【What I would like to say】
It is never good if stories from one's childhood are used to promote militaristic education or are misused by mass media. I think our world won't have peace until we abolish these. And nuclear bombs are several hundreds or thousands of times more atrocious than other eapons. We must never explode them on the earth again. I will talk about the terror of wars and A-bombs and stress the importance of peace. I'm already 79 years old, but am going to talk about them as long as I'm healthy.
 
Translation: Task-Based Learning Class in Kyoto Junior College of Foreign Languages in 2015
Supervisors: SHONAKA Takayuki and Mark WILLIS
Translation Coordinator: NET-GTAS (Network of Translators for the Globalization of the Tesitimonies of Atomic Bomb Survivors)           
 

*Many more memoirs can be viewed at both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Memorial Halls.
*These contents are updated periodically.
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