by Paul Ham
The Pacific War broke out a short time after my younger sister was born. More timid than most children her age, she would always don an air-raid hood, grab her first-aid bag and take cover immediately at the sound of an air-raid siren. During wartime blackouts, she was petrified that lamplight from inside the house would shine outside, and she would cry out in a shrill voice that was close to a scream, ‘Quick! Turn out the lights!’ Terrified of air raids and always exceedingly cautious during one, my younger sister didn’t stand a chance in the atomic bomb attack.
Even though her body had been found, it took a very long time for me to accept the fact that my younger sister had died. For years I waited for her to return, half expecting that she would suddenly reappear one day, laughing and calling out, ‘Smile!’ Even today, I clearly remember the innocent, cheerful expression on her face when we parted for the last time.
Medical Treatment of the Hibakusha
Immediately after the end of the war, the hibakusha – or survivors of the bomb – received little medical treatment. The reason is because the medical teams arriving with the occupying Americans were instructed to study the effects of radiation on the human body, not help the survivors.
Caring for the wounded was the job of the city’s own doctors and nurses. But many of these had been killed in the bombing, so Hiroshima had to rely on help from other cities. However, those doctors had to care for their own sick, and the medical teams that did come were unable to meet the huge demand for help anyway. The occupying forces also refused to supply much medicine. They claimed it was not their responsibility.
Some American doctors were shocked by their orders, but most decided that experimentation on the victims would be of great value to medical science. That was true, and we certainly learned much about radiation poisoning from the Japanese victims of the bomb. Still, the medical teams failed to help thousands of people desperately in need.
As the years passed, American doctors did try to help the victims, offering plastic surgery and other services for free in several cases. And visiting foreign doctors often did their best to assist the survivors.
– Paul Ham
It is cruelly ironic that my father’s mother and my younger sister evacuated to Hiroshima only to be killed by the atomic bomb. Even today my heart aches when I think about my small sister’s tragic death.
Every year on the night of 6 August, rows of lanterns resembling a multitude of red sashes float down the Motoyasu River, where the A-Bomb Dome casts its reflection. Flowing silently among the sashes, which represent the memories of so many people, are Morinaga milk caramel candies – an old Japanese favourite – packaged in their traditional yellow box.
The A-Bomb Dome, left as a memorial to the Hiroshima bombing, by the Motoyasu River. (Kohji Hosokawa)
My husband’s and my own younger sisters both died without ever eating candies. These sweets are a small prayer-filled offering to all of the small children who perished that day.
Even though fifty years have passed since the end of that insane war, time has not healed Hiroshima’s grief and suffering.
I am now older than my grandmother was, and my grandchildren are the same age as my younger sister. For their sake, I must do my part to help preserve peace.
Back at Kenjo
For the short time she was a Kenjo student, Yoko would travel to school from Miyajima with Kazuko Fujita, who was one year above Yoko, and with Shizuko Oka, who was in the same year. Kazuko remembers that time here.
Memories of that time
Back then, most people in Hiroshima called First Hiroshima Prefectural Girls’ High School ‘Kenjo’, and the school had an image that was steeped in rich history and tradition.
Yoko Moriwaki was a new student in 1945, which marked the forty-fifth year since the school’s foundation. Both Yoko and Shizuko Oka, who had attended the same national [primary] school in Miyajima as Yoko, passed the tough entrance examination and arrived at Kenjo full of excitement about attending such a prestigious school. By that time, all of the senior students had been mobilised to work in factories, so there were only three of us travelling to school each day from the small island of Miyajima. But then in mid-July, the Year 8 students, of which I was one, were also given a mobilisation order and so the three of us travelled to school together for only a brief period – just over three months.
Miyajima
Yoko lived on the beautiful, green island of Miyajima, one of Japan’s most sacred sites, about 20 kilometres from Hiroshima by ferry and train. Miyajima means ‘shrine island’, after the great religious shrine that has stood there for centuries. It is mountainous and covered in maple trees; in autumn they fade and turn the whole island bright crimson.
Since 1168 – for almost 1000 years – a huge torii gate has stood on the sand in the bay. According to the Japanese faith called Shinto, a torii gate marks the visitors’ entrance to a sacred space. It announces the worshippers’ arrival at the shrine. The torii gate typically comprises two giant posts with a cross bar. The magnificent gate at Yoko’s home island is a giant orange structure standing 16 metres tall. The present gate was erected in 1875, and seems to rise out of the sea at high tide. It would have been the most striking thing that Yoko saw as she set off for school each morning on the ten-minute ferry ride she took to the mainland.
– Paul Ham
Together we would take a ferry to the port of Miyajimaguchi, where we would change to a suburban train bound for the city. From there, we walked forty minutes to school. We must have been a strange sight, a group of students clattering along the street in our wooden geta sandals, dressed in baggy trousers made from old clothes or our mothers’ kimonos, en route to school. Students from other schools often called ours ‘the rag school’, and I suppose they were right. At that time, our school had been partially converted into a school factory, which served as a military clothing depot. There was a teacher shortage, and we frequently had to take cover in bomb shelters on the way to school due to air raids.
Perhaps out of concern for the students’ safety, school attendance was divided into two blocks – the morning group and the afternoon group; there were few formal classes. We students worked at the school’s agricultural plot, dug bomb shelters and carried stones from the upper reaches of the Ota River on a mocco – a piece of cloth with handle hooks on the corners – which was carried between several people like a stretcher. The stones were placed inside the bomb shelters to fortify them.
In classes, we would often prepare ‘comfort parcels’ containing daily necessities, food and confectionery, or handmade fans, with accompanying letters for our soldiers serving at the front.
Lunchtime was our respite from the daily grind, a time when worries were forgotten. Yoko, Shizuko and I would often return to Miyajimaguchi and eat lunch together from our bento boxes, sitting on the jetty with our legs dangling over the edge, gazing out across Hiroshima Bay at Miyajima Island. One such time, a single green pea rolled out of my bento box and sank into the clear ocean below, as the three of us watched it intently. ‘Shall I drop another?’ A second pea disappeared into the beautiful water and we followed it with our eyes, like people observing a strange spectacle. For some reason, that unremarkable moment, the green colour of those peas, remains vividly etched in my memory.
I don’t remember having much to do with those two girls while we were at national school. I was one year older than they were and did not live near them. But I remember Yoko as being a cute girl – humorous, plump and fair-skinned, while Shizuko was a slender beauty with a narrow face. Although each was the only child in her household, both seemed confident in front of people and I believe they studied hard. I was very surprised a few years ago by a photograph my younger sister sent me of the three of us. At one time, we were all shrine maidens of the Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima. Because of the manpower shortage, national school students were sent to stand in for regular shrine maidens at festivals, under the instruction of their schools. I’m not sure how
we would have looked, dancing in our red pleated skirts and waving bells, but we all did our best. I had forgotten all about it, but the three of us shared such an experience.
My younger sister says that she really respected and admired Yoko. As the war raged on, national school students would go to the jetty to welcome the souls of departed war heroes back to the island. Everyone would sing a song called ‘Mugon no Gaisen’ (Silent Triumph) about the soul of a dead soldier returning home. We practised that song every day. It began with Yoko singing solo, but then the choir would join in.
This picture was taken in 1944 when Yoko and her friends were shrine maidens of the Itsukushima Shrine; Kazuko Fujita is in the centre and Yoko at the far right.
Shrine Maidens
Shrine maidens, known in Japan as miko, are young women who perform the services of junior priestesses, or shamans, in Shinto ceremonies. They have appeared in Shinto religious rites since ancient times, often in ecstatic trances to amaze the nobility. Their more modern tasks include sacred dancing (the kagura), ritual cleansing, chanting and driving out evil spirits with various implements, such as a bow, a supernatural box (which traditionally contained animal and human skulls) and sakaki tree branches.
The shrine maidens then and now typically wear long red trousers or pleated skirts, a white jacket and red hair ribbons – white and red being the traditional Shinto colours (and colours of the Japanese flag). Some miko were entitled to speak on behalf of the spirits of the dead, and were characterised in popular Japanese culture as witches. But these days most are young women who perform the rituals of the Shinto faith, like an altar boy in a Christian service.
– Paul Ham
Soaring in the clouds and mountains over the horizon
A man who defeated the enemy
Returned home today in silence
My younger sister told me that Yoko’s beautiful voice and commanding presence would send her into a reverie. Later, not long after Yoko entered Kenjo, she apparently surprised my sister by saying, ‘Fujita-san, do come to Kenjo next year!’ Yoko absolutely loved Kenjo, and these words are testament to her kindness, her pride as a student of that school, and her self-confidence. The following year, my sister managed to be admitted to Kenjo, but Yoko would never know of her delight at this achievement, nor hear her words of gratitude.
On 6 August, the day of the atomic bomb, I was at Hiroshima Air Base where I had been mobilised to work. The signs of Japan’s imminent defeat were becoming more apparent by the day, and we were no longer charged with the task of making propellers from duralumin. All we did each day was to practise honing cutting tools. At 8.15 that morning, a great flash illuminated the eastern sky, and the windows of our building glowed red. A moment later, we heard a deafening roar. With no idea what had happened, we escaped by crawling on our hands and knees to a low hill that everyone called Biwayama (Loquat Hill) because it was covered in loquat trees. At first, we all thought that the factory had been hit by a bomb or an incendiary weapon. Meanwhile, downtown Hiroshima was in the grip of a catastrophic disaster. No reliable information reached us at Biwayama for quite some time. Full of foreboding, we simply watched the eastern sky as it went through weird changes.
‘Whatever has become of the Year 7 students who waved to us from outside the train this morning?’ These words escaping our teacher Kimura Sensei’s lips were like a cry of distress.
After a while, black rain began to fall from the sky over the mountain.
Yoko’s body was brought home by her mother the next day. Hearing what had happened, I rushed to her home, but there was nothing I could do. I did remove my Kenjo school badge and pin it to Yoko’s chest, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at her face or touch her.
Fifty years have passed since that day; time moves inexorably forward. But in my heart, Yoko will always be the kind, sincere, smiling young girl that I remember.
– Kazuko Kojima (nee Fujita), former student of First Hiroshima Prefectural Girls’ High School (Kenjo)
On 6 August, Masako Nakamoto did not go to do labouring in Dobashi because she was recovering from an operation. She is one of the very few girls in Yoko’s year at Kenjo who narrowly avoided being victims of the atomic bomb.
My friends etched in stone
We entered Kenjo in the spring of 1945, aged twelve years old. At that time we had no way of knowing that the atomic bomb would be dropped a few months later and the war would come to an end.
Unlike the Year 7 students, who wore a mismatched combination of ragged attire due to the harsh wartime conditions, the senior students wore the navy blue sailor-suit summer uniform – the collar of which was edged with a double white line. They stood in rows at the entrance ceremony without so much as a hair out of place, welcoming us. We were all so proud to be admitted to Kenjo, so we made sure we sang the school song, ‘Spring Hills’, as beautifully as we could.
Kenjo was located in the centre of Hiroshima. Here and there, places along the route to school were plastered with posters proclaiming the ‘The Final Battle for the Homeland’. Before long, news of the Battle of Okinawa reached us, and one after another Japanese cities were burned to the ground in incendiary bomb attacks launched by B-29s. Then in July, the Year 8 students were mobilised and sent to work in factories, so the Year 7 students, who were the only students left at the school, had a lot of labour service to do cultivating land at the East Drill Ground, planting potatoes at Yoshijima airport and clearing away demolished houses.
One such day, I was diagnosed with acute appendicitis and hospitalised at the Shima Hospital, which stood right at the hypocentre, very close to the Hiroshima Prefectural Industry Promotion Hall (the present A-bomb Dome). The air raid on nearby Kure occurred on the second day of my hospitalisation, on 2 July, and I remember gripping the hand of my mother, who was beside herself with fear, in the darkness of a wartime blackout while the sirens clamoured around us. The fateful day of 6 August came in the days after I left the hospital, while I was still not feeling one hundred per cent. On that day I stayed at home and studied instead of labouring in Dobashi.
That day my classmates were burned to death (most of them died instantly) in the intense wave of heat that radiated from the atomic explosion while they were working in Dobashi, a place devoid of any shelter whatsoever. By the next day, the few students who had managed to escape through the burning city by heading towards Koi and were picked up by trucks and taken to relief centres had all passed away.
Meanwhile everyone who was at Kenjo that day, including Headmaster Oka and one class of senior students (a nursing class), perished.
Today, tucked away in a small pocket of the downtown high-rise area on one side of leafy Heiwa-Dori Street stands the Kenjo School Monument. Until the morning of 6 August, our school had occupied the same site. A Japanese wisteria tree stood at the southern end of the gymnasium in the school yard. Only a few months earlier, its purple flowers had fluttered in the May breezes. Even now, I can hear my friends’ murmuring voices as they stood under that wisteria tree in a circle around the water taps, where we would enjoy a cool drink after doing labouring work.
The names of Yoko Moriwaki, who left us the diary, and the classmates with whom she joyfully sang ‘Summer is Coming’ are all engraved on that monument. All of those children will remain just twelve or thirteen years old forever.
The names of places such as Heiwa Koen (Peace Park) and Heiwa Ohashi (Peace Bridge) resonate with the underlying sadness inherent in the Japanese word heiwa (‘peace’).
Once again this year, the Kenjo School Monument, which bears the names of Headmaster Oka and the twenty teachers and 277 students who were victims of the atomic bomb, is soaked by the early summer rain. The outstretched branches of a large Japanese wax tree that towers over the monument tell the story of the years that have passed since that day.
Half a century on, Japanese schoolchildren visit Hiroshima on school excursions. As I stand beside the monument and talk to them about ‘that day’, I hear t
he schoolgirls whispering and see my classmates, whose lives were suddenly extinguished.
I will never stop coming here to pray about that day.
My life and the diary of a girl who died on 6 August overlap.
With my finger I trace the place where my name should be among those etched here in rows
the names of those whose remains were never found.
Friends killed by the atomic bomb sleep forever in this monument made from star dust.
Yoko Moriwaki sang ‘Summer is Coming’ but was killed shortly after by the atomic bomb;
here she sleeps, her memory etched in stone.
– Taken from the anthology Hanadokei (The Flower Clock) by Masako Kajiyama (nee Nakamoto), a former student of First Hiroshima Prefectural Girls’ High School (Kenjo)
The Kenjo School Monument. (Kohji Hosokawa)
The diary of Yoko Moriwaki
Map of Japan in the Pacific
Map of Hiroshima, circa 1945
Yoko’s diary entry for 6 April, the day of the Kenjo school entrance ceremony. (Kohji Hosokawa)
April
6 April (Fri) Weather: fine
School
The 1945 school entrance ceremony was held today. At last! I am now one of those girls I have long admired – a Kenjo student. I am going to be mindful of how I lead my daily life and work really hard so that I won’t shame myself as a Japanese schoolgirl.
