My Experience as a Victim of the Atomic Bombing (by harto )

　
The following is a reprint of my article contributed to Volume 22 of the miscellany of experiences of atomic bombing entitled Burned by flash of bomb. It describes all the terrible things that happed on that day---the things I feel so painful to just remember or talk about. As an old saying goes, I have escaped death by a hairbreadth in a number of occasions and the atomic bombing was certainly one of such occasion.

I was born in Tabusa-mura? (now Souryou-cho) in Hiroshima Prefecture. As my farther died when I was a young child, my mother and I moved to the city of Hiroshima where her relatives lived. We then moved to Kure when my mother got married again. When I was 6 years old, I was adopted as a son of my uncle who had four daughters and wanted a boy in his family. My uncles family consisted of 7 members; his wife (my aunt), an elder cousin, two younger cousins (one died just after I was adopted) myself and a boy who was born 3 years after I joined the family. The family lived in Minami-Sanjou-cho (now Hosuiro?) in Hiroshima City. The uncle was running an old-clothes shop and other businesses and was living a relatively wealthy life.

When the atomic bomb dropped, I was 12 years old and in the sixth grade of Sanjo National School. An air raid warning was put out at 0:25 a.m. (cancelled at 2:10 a.m.) on that fateful day of August 6. When I woke up with sleepy eyes in the morning, it was very fine with fleckless sky and extremely hot. An air raid siren wailed again throughout the town when I was about to leave for school. Just as I was hesitating to leave home, Mr. Aritomo Nishie (?), a friend of mine living next door, came to visit me and so both of us went to school together. As we arrived late for school, the morning assembly had already started and we got in our class room through a rear gate and were just sitting there. In the hallway a senior student on weekly duty was walking with an arm band so we sat and kept low to make sure we will not be detected. Mr. Nishie (BaejaeMun) was in the rear seat as he was taller and I was somewhat in the front on the window side. All of a sudden, a fierce and blinding flash went off, followed by ominous booming roar which generated tremors running into the ground. Instantaneously, I knew by instinct it was some kind of bomb and I threw myself under the desk with my eyes and ears covered by hands and with my mouth open. After a few moments, which was seemingly only a couple of minutes, I lifted my head realizing that I should not stay like that any longer. I saw, amid the darkness outside, a house in front of the school engulfed in flames just like a fire in the nighttime.

(To be continued)

(A Newspaper Article on the day of the A-Bomb dropped on Hiroshima from Asahi Newpaper Co. on August 8th, 1945)