1. Shouo Michigami was 16 years old at the time. He became an A-bomb victim in Ueno-machi located 2km from the hypocenter.
2. Both his parents, his younger brothers and his younger sister, five in all, died as victims of the bombing.
3. Subsequently, he suffered daily from the pain of the after-effects, even after he got married; his children died one after the other, so he has lived with a strong anger against the atomic bomb.
4. My father was a stonecutter, so he went all over Japan for his work. I was also born in Gunma Prefecture. So we moved to Ibaraki, Tochigi, Okayama, and then to Nagasaki.
5. When we moved to Nagasaki, our family was my parents, 1 older brother, myself, 3 younger brothers, a total of 5 siblings. In Nagasaki, a younger sister was born. In total, we were 7 siblings.
6. We lived just below the Urakami Cathedral. The explosion was up above, so that is why I don't know where the explosion took place.
7. Later, I saw a map of where the bomb was dropped. The hypocenter was in Matsuyama-machi, exactly 500 meters from the hypocenter. And I knew then that my father had been in a place 300 meters away.
8. During the day, I helped my father with his work and I went to junior high school at night. It is the present part-time school. It was called a night junior high, and that was where I attended school.
9. My mother was pinned under our house. Both my mother and my youngest sibling, my little sister who was born only 5 months before were pinned under the house. They had died in the house.
10. My father's workplace at the time was located 300 meters from the hypocenter. It was there that he died without leaving a single trace. He is still a missing person.
11. Whenever I ask other atomic bomb victims, ""Did you hear that sort of sound when the bomb dropped?"" They all say, ""I didn't hear that sort of sound."" I'm the only one who heard it.
12. And when I heard that sound, I jumped off my bicycle and dropped to the ground on my face. Well, if I hadn't heard that sound, I would have been blown away.
13. I dropped face down to the ground, and at the same instant, I was bathed in light beams, and I also felt the bomb blast. And the silence after that was a very special type of silence.
14. After that, I thought it was strange, so I stood up, and everything around was in almost total blackness due to the clouds of dust in the air.
15. In front of me was a sea of fire, impossible to pass through. I thought that if I went to the mountains, I would be able to get back home. I went to the foot of Mt. Kotohira. There was a single road.
16. But as soon as I entered that road, it was really like I was in hell.
17. A whole lot of almost naked people came walking down that road from the opposite direction. Their bodies were burned and charred to a crisp. They had almost no hair.
18. Later I noticed that there was a munitions factory near there. Those people were junior high school students and girl students who were mobilized to the factory.
19. They looked like sleepwalkers. They felt no shame nor anything else. Even when passing by them, they went on completely expressionless.
20. Before I'd gone 100m, there was a huge fire that I couldn't get through. I turned back and climbed to the top of the mountain. When I got to the top, I saw the surrounding area was a sea of fire.
21. After all, less than an hour had passed since the bomb was dropped, but by the time I had climbed to the top of the mountain, the entire city had truly been burned to the ground.
22. Where our house had been, I called out to my mother and siblings, but there was no answer at all. I looked all around, and in a field that was about 10m away, I saw something pitch black moving.
23. And at that instant I suddenly knew it was my youngest brother. I ran over to him, he was about 4 years and 8 months old, and he was moving. His body was completely black and he was totally naked.
24. His entire body was charred to a crisp. I took off my jacket, wrapped it around him and took him in my arms. I took him to a little stream nearby and he said that he wanted some water.
25. I felt that he could not be saved, so I said to him, ""Bear up just a little longer."" Then I took him to the stream bank and laid him down. He looked so horrible that I couldn't keep my eyes on him.
26. I told him ""I will go look for Mom, so wait here for a little bit"" and I left. After 20 or 30 minutes, I went back down to the stream, but by that time, my brother was dead.
27. The neighborhood around the house seemed to have been the hypocenter. All of the houses had burned and there were no survivors. Everything was completely destroyed.
28. I thought that it was amazing that a four or five year old child had been able to live for two or two and a half hours after the bomb was dropped.
29. I started straightening up the house the next morning. Then I discovered my mother. She was in a position as though to protect the newborn baby by covering her with her own body, and she was dead.
30. I put my mom and sister with my brother who died the day before on a mattress in the garden. The next morning I cremated them, about noon I told my little brother ""I'll be back soon"" and went to town.
31. This was the first time that I had gone away from our house, and by the time I reached the hypocenter, I found that there were blackened bodies lying all over the place.
32. I suddenly realized that father had not come home. So I began running with all my might and went to the place my father was. But when I got there, there was not a single trace of the building left.
33. While sleeping in the air raid shelter I waited for my father to return, and I also needed to go look for my younger brother. I walked all around but, after all, my efforts were in vain.
34. But since I had not seen them, it was totally impossible for me to go away from there.
35. For about ten years after being hit by the bomb, my body felt listless and heavy. I went to a doctor but he couldn't determine the cause. I also did not tell him I had been hit by the atomic bomb.
36. So I went from one hospital to another, but they still could not grasp the cause.
37. The Osaka University Hospital told me I have only half of the white blood cells of the average person. As the white blood cell making function has been destroyed, they will likely no longer increase.
38. When I heard that, unexpectedly, I felt relieved, and went on to work assiduously thinking that whatever happened would happen anyway. But whether that was a good thing to do or not, I don't know.
39. My first child was a miscarriage. And that made me think at that instant, that after all, it was the fault of the atomic bomb. My second child somehow survived, but my third child was also no good.
40. So thinking that there was something strange happening, I got worried the most. Even though I didn't feel that my own body was in such bad shape, I felt that something was happening inside my body.
41. My youngest son had horrible eczema. I was completely convinced that this was the fault of the atomic bomb. That child had eczema here and there until after he reached the age of twenty.
42. No matter how angry I was, I felt that there was nothing that I could do on my own power alone, but I felt that I really could not forgive the atomic bomb over everything else.
43. After all, the losing of my family was the greatest reason, I think. If all of my family had been healthy, I don't think that I would have gone that far.
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