The last tomato - Hiroshima told in his own words: (2)

　
(2) Hiroshima, an important military city since Meiji Era.

On August 6, in the Hiroshima district it was very fine and a truly blue sky was seen from the morning. Our class was due to be mobilized and to act as workers of collapsed houses on that day. In order to gather in the Hiroshima city office at 7:50 a.m., I had lunch and came out of my house. I wore a white short-sleeve undershirt , khaki-color trousers, a coat, and gaiters (they were wound around my legs). I could not get shoes, so my footwear were straw slippers.

My left leg was bandaged since I stepped on the nail accidentally and my leg was injured last evening, I went out in order to collect scrap woods of a collapsed house for heating our bath, with pulling Daihachi-Kuruma (the large two-wheeled hand-drawn cart) together with my elder sister and I carelessly trampled the nail.

Although it was not a great injury, I was afraid that a bacillus might came into my leg, and I bandaged in front of my house when I went out. My middle school was of the old system and then of a five-year system.

Although under the school rule I was permitted to go to school by taking train from the station near my house to the station called Koi, we walked from the Koi station to our school for 45 minutes of one-way in a group, together with from first to fifth graders.

During the war, we walked for training our body. On that day, one class of five classes of our grade had a plan to dig holes in the mountain and another class had a plan to study at school. The rest three class, total 150 pupils, were mobilized to work as collapse workers.

A collapse work means the evacuation of houses. The house evacuation was to destroy houses with width of 80m in a fixed zone of a town, to carry out woods, and to make a vacant lot. If there are many houses when we receive the attack by a firebomb, we have danger that fire may spread one after another. We made a firebreak, a vacant lot where nothing to burn exists, and then even if any fire broke out, we had no fear of spreading of it. In this way, some fire prevention divisions were made in the east, west, north and south areas of the town.

It was not only we that were mobilized. The pupils of other middle schools or a girls' high school, the elderly men, the mothers whose children were in their belly, grandmothers, etc., that is to say, all the people that could not perform heavy works but could do light ones were mobilized to work.

Some person came here in one hour or more of trip from a distant place, and the city was more crowded in people than usual. Besides, there were persons who came out in daily work as usual and persons who finished breakfast and were relaxing at home, etc. Therefore it is guessed that there would have been probably 270,000 to 280,000 persons in Hiroshima as of 8:15.

(To be continued)