1. Shiro Kawamoto was exposed to the bombing 2.3 kilometers from the hypocenter, at Nishi Kaniya-cho. He was 8.
2. With his own hand-made A-bomb map, he talks about the devastation and how his mother once thought of taking her 5 children and committing suicide. Since then, he has struggled to stay alive.
3. [my family before the bombing]
4. I'm from a family of seven. Six of us were directly exposed and one of my brothers came into the city later, around August 19th, I believe, after he was released from the army.
5. [school life in those days]
6. I was still a child so I was in third grade at the national school. The Kojin-machi Elementary School.
7. Every morning just after 8 or so, there would be an alert. When the sirens began, we didn't have to go to school. We'd go straight home. We didn't study much in those days.
8. [Hiroshima in those days]
9. The water was beautiful. Being small, it wasn't like I had been to very many places, but from our house, we could see the forest on Hijiyama.
10. Behind us, there was a very big mountain called Futabanosato. I used to go and play there quite a lot.
11. [the morning of that day]
12. Yes well, we had just finished breakfast and the sun was shining brightly. I think it was around 8 o'clock. An alert siren went off once and I think I remember seeing an airplane.
13. Well that plane flew over and went away so the alert was called off. We figured it was the usual surveillance plane.
14. So we left the air raid shelter. My second eldest brother and I started playing in the river below the Ujina railway line.
15. Here, in the Enko River. And the third and fifth were playing near the school in Kojin-machi.
16. My mother was at the army factory, where they made snacks. And my father,
17. He was standing here, at the Hiroshima City Hall. All the large buildings had to be broken down and they were tidying after breaking part of the city hall. He had left the house shortly after 7.
18. [moment of the explosion]
19. I was going back and forth across that iron bridge. My brother and his friends were swimming. As I was backing up toward the riverbank on this side, I saw a flash of light in the west.
20. It was blue and red and I'm not sure. I saw the flash from this side of Hijiyama. I was standing here, and it was towards the west, just off of the hill, here.
21. As soon as we were struck by that flash, I took cover, just as we were told to do back then. We were taught that in school. So I was laying low, on the train tracks, like this.
22. I hit the ground just as soon as I saw that light so I don't know exactly what went on around me, but when I opened my eyes it was dark. Not like night. I couldn't see a thing. Nothing.
23. Then a few seconds or maybe a few minutes later I looked up and the clouds were starting to clear and I could see the blue sky in bits and pieces.
24. As it started to get light again, I backed up along the railroad bridge to the riverbank, or rather, this street.
25. The left side of my face was burnt and stinging. I was just wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts.
26. The exposed areas had blistered. Big water blisters like this. Way down my legs, from my thighs to my feet.
27. The hair on my head well, it was cropped real short but still it was burnt to a frizzle. I felt hot so I just kept shouting about how hot I was until I reached the street.
28. My brother and his friends had come up from the river. My brother's back was one huge water blister and it was like; ""Hey, your head is on fire.""
29. All along the bank, buildings had collapsed and there was some water trickling from a water pipe, so well we got his head wet and put the fire out. That's what it was like.
30. [tragedy after the bombing]
31. There was a two-storey school in Yaga. We were all assembled there, on the second floor.
32. While we were there, well it got to be evening but there was no sign of my father, so my mother and my uninjured brother who was in fifth grade went to get him.
33. It was evening, near Kyobashi or was it the East Police Station? They found my father there.
34. He was all ragged. His skin and everything was sagging and he was staggering. Well they got him to the school, where he stayed on his side.
35. [father's death and the sadness]
36. On the 19th, it must have been around six. I was told that my father was dead.
37. Well that day… I had been sleeping with my head lined up with my father's, often looking into his face.
38. When I was told that he was dead, it didn't click because he was still the same. Lying on his side.
39. He was cremated the next day and it was my job to carry the ashes. I held onto them all the while we were on the train.
40. [Hiroshima, changed beyond recognition]
41. When we got back to Hiroshima and got off the train, it was an entirely burned out field, for as far as you could see.
42. And I remember seeing a streetcar on the streetcar street. It was sitting there, burnt completely black.
43. From the station the city was completely… there was nothing in this direction except for a couple of concrete buildings. Chugoku Shimbun and some others.
44. We got home and the upstairs, well there was no roof. We'd be in trouble if it rained, so we took the tatami mats up and made a roof with them.
45. [struggling to stay alive]
46. We did a lot of trading with others for rice and so on. But there was only a handful of rice available, so we put it in a pot with chopped vegetable leaves and made a kind of soupy porridge.
47. At school, other kids brought their lunch boxes full of rice from their rice field or their neighbor's rice field.
48. But we didn't have that, so my lunchbox was full of this soupy rice porridge. I used to go out behind the school and eat it secretly.
49. By winter, such rations had hit rock bottom and people were digging green stuff out of the snow and eating that.
50. One day mother said, ""Stay home from school today because there's nothing to eat.""
51. And that's the way it was indeed.
52. On another day though, she said she'd take us to the countryside for a feast.
53. The three of us --- my younger brother, mother and I --- went and ate bowlfuls of rice. When we got back she took us to a bridge.
54. She said we're going to jump from this suspension bridge. When I grew up she told me she had thought of suicide.
55. [prejudice against the hibakusha]
56. There was certainly bullying at school. I was called ""Pikadon kid,"" ""A-bomb child,"" and what have you. You see, the skin all over my body was burnt black from the radiation.
57. I don't know if it was dust or dirt, but my entire body had been stained by it, even under my clothes. So yes, my face was very dark.
58. As the years went by, maybe after 10 years of this, it started to wear off with age, little by little.
59. Oh and also, I caught colds a lot. The slightest rain would give me a cold.
60. [health anxieties as a hibakusha]
61. Oh yes, I was anxious. You can't very well go to a girl's house and say, ""I'm a hibakusha."" Of course when I became older, after some time passed, I told my wife that actually I was in that bombing.
62. When it was time to have children, I was very worried. But the brothers are very … they have children of their own, so it was okay. Otherwise, people from Hiroshima wouldn't be able to have children.
63. [anger at dropping the bomb]
64. The hardest thing about that bomb is that our family lost our mainstay. The A-bomb took our father away.
65. We are about the only ones left, who have memories of the tragedies and horror of the atomic bomb - the only ones who can tell the World about it first hand.
66. Younger people can talk about it and say, ""yes it happened,"" but they didn't experience it.
67. So this 60th anniversary is the end of us. There won't be… from now on… we might not make it to the 70th.
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