1. Shichiro Minami was 21 at the time. He was in Yokogawa-cho, 1.4 kilometers from the hypocenter, at the time of the bombing.
2. He immediately went to work providing relief to victims and conducting investigations as a military police, and experienced hell.
3. After the war he has been troubled by after-effects, and his child died at age 4 of microcephaly. He has had no children since then.
4. I was on a boat. At the time, a company called Yamashita Steamship Company sometimes offered their ships for military use. They were used as transport ships.
5. Transporting things to battlefields, and bringing back iron ore from China, from around what's now Shanghai and Nanking. That's the kind of things we did.
6. I received a draft card on October 20. And during this work, I was ordered to go to the military police school, so at the end of December I took the exam for the military police school.
7. I think it was the morning of July 30 or the evening of July 29 when I went to Hiroshima. About one week before.
8. We were on the boats, so we'd often go to Ujina for shopping and such and I'm familiar with that area, but I'd never ever been all the way inside Hiroshima City.
9. Everyone had to report orally, saying for example, ""I'm so-and-so from such-and-such, and as of today's date I am assigned to serve in the Hiroshima Military Police.""
10. The military police squad was in Motomachi, just to the right of where the former baseball stadium was. Going in from the main road of Hiroshima Stadium, about 50 or 100 meters, I think.
11. At the time there were evacuations in Hiroshima City. And so from the morning, using hand carts, two-wheeled carts, and wagons and such-we were receiving the evacuation materials.
12. And there were so many people who wanted to do evacuation work while it was cool in the morning. It was crowded and confused. There were hand carts and horse-drawn coaches.
13. We were headed into the mountains of Koi. They were about 200 meters ahead on the streetcar tracks. The path was narrow. Just as we entered, the so-called flash came. My vision turned yellow.
14. I myself dropped down. It was because of my experience that I knew to instantly drop down. I felt a house would come down on me.
15. And then, well at that time I didn't really think it was an air raid or anything at all. When the house crashed down, I think I got a sense that it had been a bombing.
16. I needed to search for the coworker who was with me. The other side of Hiroshima's Tenmagawa River was already a sea of flames.
17. There was an old woman saying, ""Mister Soldier, Mister Soldier,"" and so I went to see, and there was a child of about 8, or maybe 10 or 11 who was under a girder and couldn't move.
18. The roof has fallen in like this, and the child was under the girder, and the old woman was trying her best by herself. So I went too. But still it wouldn't move.
19. Then I thought there would be strong people if I went back to the streetcar track. I saw that the streetcar which I had been riding just earlier hadn't departed and was burnt.
20. I turned back, and that too was a sea of flames. The old lady was calling out desperately the child's name. When I think of that time... Actually even now I feel pain.
21. After retirement, I come to Hiroshima every year. And I always visit around the place where there is now Ujina Branch temple to pay my respects.
22. At the banks of Ōtagawa River, when I finally turned and looked back, from the west to the east, it was just all a sea of flames. You couldn't see any buildings at all.
23. About 30 or 40 minutes later, black rain began falling. This incredible rain continued for about 30 minutes I think, and during that time there was little I could do, so I stayed there.
24. The flames seemed to have gone down, maybe because of the rain. I thought I should do some inspecting and I inspected the surrounding area.
25. And I went all the way up the river, up to the Yokogawa Bridge, to the intersection with Tenma Bridge.
26. As it was the full tide, the river was full of floating people, dead bodies. And there were some still alive, and some people who had died.
27. When I tried to pull someone's hand, the skin here-and they themselves might feel pain, I think-but the skin, the burned skin would peel off. And then they'd just keep floating down.
28. I walked upstream a bit toward Ōtagawa River, and next there was a temporary relief station where they only spread straw mats.
29. The fences of Teramachi had all fallen over. Fallen in toward the road. And you could see the tombstones, and telephone polls had fallen over from this side.
30. People said to me ""Mister Soldier, please give me water,"" Also there was a soldier told me what squad he was from, and then he died. I think this is what they call a living hell.
31. People who were wearing black were almost all burnt and people wearing white only had this white part left, and the rest were burned.
32. I saw my military police squad about two or three hundred meters in front of me and I felt happy and went to look, but all of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd floors were all damaged with smashed glasses.
33. When I went to the Motomachi headquarters, the base of Aioi Bridge support touching the road was peeled upward like this, and the handrail on the side of the road was bent from the front.
34. Unfortunately, as for children, we experienced two miscarriages, and then we thought the third time might be okay, and tried, but the third child suffered serious birth defects.
35. I was introduced to a number of hospitals and took the child there, but 4 years later the child died. I never got a real chance to hear the child's voice.
36. That was the hardest thing, and when I got married, I didn't talk very much to my wife about having been exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.
37. As for the issue of radioactivity, they didn't really say much about it in the countryside, but it was the most, I'd say the toughest thing.
38. The child suffered from microcephaly. I don't really know for sure, but apparently at the time of the bombing the child was in the womb, so he was exposed to the radiation.
39. The people who were just walking along unaware of anything at that time, they had also just suddenly been wiped out. I realized what the idea of living hell on this earth meant. Such misery.
40. Absolutely no matter what kind of things happen, we have to get rid of atomic bombs, while we are still alive during our lifetimes.
41. I feel like it's our duty to live until the end, and pass on the horrors of that atomic bomb while we're alive.
42. Anyway we'll do what we can while we're alive. Now the average age in Niigata Prefecture is 77, and in Hiroshima it's 72 or 73.
43. I want to tell students that whatever it takes, we want to make sure that such horrors will not happen to them again, and we also want to leave behind a green earth for them.
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