Atomic

Toshiko slipped out of her shoes at the door, placing them neatly with those already stacked there. She felt the familiar sensation of straw matting beneath her feet and savored the homely aroma of her mother’s cooking. Smoothing the skirt of her school uniform, she smiled to herself: father was home.

Her father, Tsutomu, worked long hours in a drawing office and was rarely home before the children. She felt a pang of concern: perhaps he was sick? She hoped not, he had promised to continue with his story from the evening before. She had heard it many times, but perhaps father would remember a new detail today, for her to store away like treasure.

Toshiko greeted her father and seated herself next to him. She regarded the bald crown of his head with a twinge of sadness. Last summer, when she was twelve, her father’s hair had started to fall out in handfuls, the thick dark thatch now reduced to a few thin wisps.

“Will you continue Father?”

Tsutomu inclined his good ear towards his daughter and adjusted his spectacles with a deft movement of his index finger. He was pleased that Toshiko was now hungry for details of his past. For some time he had sensed that she was a little wary of him. This of course was due to the swathes of bandages he had always worn. For the first twelve years of her life, Toshiko had never seen him uncovered, but now, thankfully, they were gone.

“Where did I get to child?”

“At 8.15 the clocks stopped,” Toshiko responded.

“Yes daughter. One moment the city was all bustle and life: children walking to school, workers riding on the street cars, and then…”

“Pika-don!”

“Indeed Toshiko – flash-bang!”
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On 6th August 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a draftsman for Mitsubishi, had been visiting Hiroshima on business. That morning he was due to visit the shipyard, but he realised that he had forgotten something and went back to fetch it. This uncharacteristic act of forgetfulness possibly saved his life, for the company’s building at the shipyard was devastated by the blast, as “Little Boy” detonated above the city.

The atomic bomb was released from the American B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, its fall slowed by a parachute. If it had exploded in contact with the ground, the blast would have been absorbed by the earth, but the detonation was deliberately timed to cause maximum destruction.

The buildings of Hiroshima, many constructed from wood and paper, were blown away by the blast, completely flattened by the force. Roof tiles peeled off, the intense heat fusing them together in strange twisted forms. The landscape became a sea of disintegrated and shattered buildings, contorted skeletons of metal, melted and buckled glass and the charred carcasses of trees.

The sky, which had been blue and cloudless, had sealed the city’s fate: had it been overcast that morning, the Enola Gay would not have visited Hiroshima. After the intense white flash, the sky turned black and the sun shone blood red. Fires raged like storms for three days: the city was an inferno. Many of those not killed outright were badly burned and scorched. They headed for the river, calling desperately for water, it became clogged with their livid, bloated corpses.
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“What about you Father? Is that when you were burned?”

“Yes child. I was burned over my left side, blinded for a while and deaf too.”

“But you made it home to Nagasaki?” his daughter asked, still amazed.

“Miraculous, I know,” her father replied, “I returned to Nagasaki the next day and went back to work. I was in the office when the second bomb came on 9th August, telling my supervisor about Hiroshima. He didn’t believe me.”

“Then pika-don!” exclaimed Toshiko.

“Yes. When the bright light flashed, I huddled under a desk.”
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In Hiroshima, an estimated 70,000 people were killed in a moment. However there were many tens of thousands who survived the initial explosion. Some wandered like ghosts, arms outstretched to ease the pain of their burns. The citizens of Hiroshima had instinctively placed their hands over their eyes, to shield them from the searing white flash. One man said that he saw the bones of his fingers through closed eyelids, as though viewing an x-ray. The consequence of this protective action, was skin so badly damaged, that it peeled off and hung in shredded tatters from their fingers.

White light white heat, hotter than the surface of the sun, destroyed all it touched. Investigators from the occupying US army, later found that Hiroshima was littered with ‘Atomic Shadows’: the stain-like impressions of human beings who had been vaporised instantly.

These scientists also discovered that it is beneficial to wear white to reflect the visible and infrared light from an ‘A’ Bomb. Some survivors had the pattern of the fabric of their kimonos permanently branded onto their skin by thermal radiation, which had penetrated the darker areas of their clothing. The health benefits are minimal though, in light of the lingering effects of radiation.
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“Mother says that she remembers nothing of the aftermath.”

“It is probably too painful for her, Toshiko. There was no help. She had a baby to take care of.”

“She remembers the rain though Father: a black rain, slimy and dirty, which coated her skin.”

“Your mother worked hard helping to clear the city. She got soaked many times. She thinks it was the black rain that made her sick.”

“Where were you then, Father?”

“I fled to the mountains. I was very ill with a fever. There was no medicine or dressings for my burns. The explosion did not kill the flies and my wounds were crawling with maggots.”

“…and a hen pecked at them!” Toshiko interjected, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
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Incredibly, Tsutomu Yamaguchi lived into his nineties, becoming only one of 165 Japanese people to survive the blasts and radiation of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki (although he was the only survivor officially recognised by the Japanese government to have lived through both bombs). The survivors, known as “Hibakusha”, were shunned for many years after the war: their suffering ignored by their fellow countrymen.

Tsutomu became a peace campaigner in his later life, seeing it as his duty to share the true effects of atomic weapons with as many people as possible, in the hope that they would never be used again. His daughter, Toshiko, now continues this work.