1. Hisako Kubo was at home in Nagasaki City when she was exposed. Not able to handle the stench at the first aid center, she ran out without any treatment. She was 13.
2. Memories of seeing the tragic state people were in while escaping, will never go away. Later, she married and moved to Shiga.
3. There was a flash of light. I wondered what it was, but I held my eyes and ears and took cover on the tatami flooring. Then I heard a big bang.
4. When it became quiet, I slowly opened my eyes and it was pitch dark. I couldn't see anything so I took cover again. After a while, I slowly opened my eyes and it was bright again and I could see.
5. The wall in the house was an old clay wall and it was bent. The ceiling panel was hanging down and the doors had all fallen down. We had glass doors too, which had also fallen.
6. There were pieces of glass everywhere, stuck in the tatami, stuck in the floor and stuck in the walls. I couldn't understand what had been dropped.
7. There was a shrine next door, so I was convinced that a one-ton bomb had been dropped on the shrine. One-ton bombs were big bombs that the Americans had and we were afraid of them.
8. I decided to go outside and went for my shoes. We had our shoes lined up in order of age, so that we could run away even in the night, but they were gone. Our shoes had been blown into the yard.
9. There was a lane between the front door and the gate. A church was on this side, and the clergy residence on the other. All of the roof tiles had fallen off of the buildings and filled the lane.
10. So I ran outside and found that all of the houses in the neighborhood were left without any doors and you could see right through them.
11. I had cut myself with some glass, so I decided to go to the Nakamura Clinic, a private hospital two doors down, to get some medication for it.
12. But the hospital was a big mess and the doctor himself was all wrapped up in bandages. He told me he couldn't see me because the place was a mess.
13. So I went to the Shinkozen Elementary School which was near our house. The school had been designated an evacuation building and I had been told to go there.
14. When I got there, it was full of people with burns. They were everywhere. In the teachers' room, in the hallways, in the classrooms, everywhere. And they were all burned.
15. Then it was very strange. All these people were burned. Sure there were fires here and there, but I couldn't understand why so many people were burned.
16. The smell of people burning was horrid. I went to get some medicine put on my wound, but I couldn't handle that smell. I figured my injury was very small, considering. After all, it was just a cut.
17. It was bleeding, but I figured it wasn't enough to get medication for, so I left. I saw my mother on my way home.
18. [reuniting with father]
19. There was a mountain called Suwa, with a park high up on the hill called Suwa Park. My mother told me that she had told my brothers and sisters to go on there ahead.
20. She said that she was headed there herself, so we decided to go together. When we got there, the park was filled with evacuees and my brothers and sisters were nowhere in sight.
21. The older one of my younger brothers is Kenichi. I called and called his name, looking into every air raid shelter, in vain. We didn't know what to do, but my mother had an idea.
22. There was a designated temple as well, for people in our neighborhood to evacuate to if there was an air raid, but my mother couldn't remember the name of that temple
23. But she thought that if we ran into a neighbor, they might be able to take us there. It was starting to get dark and the Suwa Shrine, a shrine at the end of the park, had a long stone stairway.
24. Below the steps was the streetcar line, so we went down those steps and walked toward Hotaru-jaya. Just then, we heard someone say, ""Hisako."" It was my father.
25. [reuniting with siblings]
26. He had been observing the fires that were starting up, through a telescope. There's a ferry that goes across the bay and it leaves from Uma-machi, below Suwa Shrine.
27. A member of the congregation, of the church, lived there so he was going to ask if they would put him up for the night. When he stepped out, he found us. So really, it was a coincidence.
28. So my father, my mother and I left Hotaru-jaya at the end of the streetcar line and walked way up the hill to a national route.
29. Part way up, my youngest sister Kazuko spotted us and cried ""mother!"" I thought it must be Kazuko and looked. There she was.
30. My two brothers and other sister were in the air raid shelter right nearby, at the cliff. Finding them was a coincidence, too. If all four had been in the shelter, we wouldn't have found them.
31. Fires were breaking out everywhere, getting bigger. The house we were headed for was downwind, so we decided to go the other way.
32. Another member of the congregation lived at Higashi-yamate, so we went there and asked them to put us up because our place had burned down, so they did.
33. The next day, my father invited me to go and see what happened in the fire. We went to look, but on the way, there was an air raid alert and we heard voices saying that an enemy plane was approaching.
34. We ran into an air raid shelter and saw a man lying there, with burns all over. There was no more skin on his stomach area, so you could see inside.
35. And it was crawling with maggots. Maggots and lots of flies. He was still alive and his wife, I think, was sitting next to him.
36. She just sat there, silently shooing the flies with a fan. I was shocked, when I saw those maggots, though.
37. My father worked at a place called Mitsubishi Electric, but it was away from the hypocenter, so it hadn't burned.
38. The company had arranged for employees who had lost their families and homes to stay in the dormitory.
39. So on the third day, we went there. My father was appointed dorm master and my mother dorm matron and we were all allowed to live there.
40. [tragedy in the city]
41. I went to the hypocenter one week later. Some of the congregation had lived there, so I went to look for their bones. I took a bamboo rake.
42. Normally, well there was a streetcar stop called Matsuyama-cho, but when I was there one week after the bomb, there were no landmarks so I couldn't tell where it was.
43. I figured where it likely was, but you see, there was a river and the concrete bridges were intact, and the air raid shelters on the cliffs, they were still there, so I somehow found it.
44. And we raked through the burned ashes, looking for bones. An elderly couple had lived there, but we could only find enough bones for one of them.
45. They lived right at the hypocenter, and the bones I found were completely white, as though they had been properly cremated.
46. One week had gone by when we finally went into town, so the bodies had all been cleared away, although we could still see the remains of horses and dogs.
47. And well, I got sick later on, because of radiation disease. I got sick and needed to go to the bathroom right away.
48. I had the urge to go, but I hadn't eaten anything, besides I wasn't hungry, so nothing would come out. Nothing except for some white mucus.
49. I really got the urge though. I would sit over the toilet for a while, then go back to my room, then back to the toilet again, and so on.
50. My stomach was empty, so of course nothing would come out. It was this way for my entire family. We all were sick in bed because of stomach problems.
51. Actually, most of the people living in the dorm were that way. Some were better in a week, some took a month to recover. There was no medicine so it had to heal naturally.
52. Then my mother, who had seemed healthy at first, she got ill in 1950. Three doctors cared for her, but none of them could tell what the problem was. Not until the end.
53. Then after being bedridden for three weeks, she got better. Then in 1953, she got ill again. This was her third time.
54. This time two doctors examined her, but they too, were unable to determine the illness. She would be in a good mood and talkative during the day, but at night she would suffer.
55. I suppose she was in bed for about two weeks before her condition suddenly got worse and she died. Even then, nobody knew the cause.
56. My mother died in March 1953, and in August of that same year, my younger sister Yasuko was hospitalized.
57. The hospital she went into was a very big hospital where they were able to do a number of tests. It was then that we found out she was quickly losing white blood cells because of radiation.
58. So I realized for the first time, that it must have been radiation that caused my mother's death. After all, I had never expected her to die.
59. When my mother's condition suddenly worsened, well she used to call my youngest brother ""Bonchi,"" but the last thing she said was, ""good-bye, Bonchi.""
60. We never expected her to die, so of course we were surprised. We couldn't understand why she died. The doctor had only said that she had a mild valvular disease. What a shock that was.
61. [sisters' marriage]
62. I never thought I needed to hide the fact that we were hibakusha, but my sisters, I suppose it was around 1955. Maybe 1958. They were both in love.
63. They both were planning to get married. But then the parents of both of these men profusely opposed marrying my sisters because they were hibakusha.
64. They cried when it fell apart. It was hard for me. My husband never really seemed to think about it, so I got married just like that. But it wasn't that way for my sisters. I felt bad.
65. [my message]
66. Even the atomic bomb of that day left so much destruction. I don't know about today's nuclear weapons, but I understand that they are hundreds of times deadly.
67. If a nuclear bomb is ever used again, that's the end of us, the world. So we must do everything we can, to avoid war, so that a nuclear bomb is never used again.
68. I was personally against the US going into Iraq. It is very important that people's lives are treasured and that war is never started again.
69. I truly believe that we must protect peace. Having experienced war myself, and the atomic bomb and post war, I truly know the value of peace.
70. So I ask the people of today, never to allow a war to break out, ever again.
71. Yes. And I would like to see the constitution protected. Article 9. Someone is trying to change it, but it mustn't be changed. Ever.
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