Satoru Konishi, professor emeritus

Assistant Secretary General, Nihon Hidankyo (Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations) - 2003

[edited by Joseph Gerson}

I am an A-Bomb survivor of Hiroshima.

I wonder how I can make you understand the horror of atomic bombs. I myself witnessed and experienced it but I suffered an enormous shock the next day and now retain only a few fragments of my memory. Most if it has been lost.

When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on the morning of August 6, 1945, I was in the city, 4.5 km or 2.8 miles away from the ground zero, the center of the blast. I was 16 years old. I was in a military shipyard at the southern tip of the city. We were mobilized as substitutes of workers. But we had no more materials to build ships. Therefore we were in a shack without a floor and ceiling, a so-called "classroom", to learn by ourselves.

The sky was very clear. As we sat at our desks, a flash of lightening ran in front of our eyes, so bright as if a large number of flashbulbs set off at once. I felt strong heat on my head. We all hid ourselves under the desks. A little later, a huge blast came with a roaring sound, and window panes fell all over the desks and were smashed into pieces.

After the blast passed, we crawled out. I found a few meters away one of my schoolmates standing absentmindedly. On his cheek hung down a drop of blood. About 500 meters in front of us, we saw a big pillar of white cloud rising fiercely into the sky; it looked like a huge dragon or a tornado-monster.

Here my memory fades. I don't know how I came home. On my way home - and this is only fragmentary memory on my way home - I met a student talking of his experiences in the city. His face was so dark and swollen as a big round watermelon, but I cannot remember what he talked of.

What I remember most vividly on that day is the scene of the city of Hiroshima in conflagration, which I saw in the evening from the porch of my house located 6km or 3 and a half miles to the west of the city center. The flames looked like tongues of a huge monster licking up in the air. Under the flames, tens of thousands of mothers and children must have been crying for help.

On the next day morning, Aug. 7, I went to the city with two of my schoolmates. When I stood at the west end of the city, oh, the city was totally disappeared. "Shall it be true?" "Nothing!" "No city? No houses?" "Why?" I could not realize the fact that no marks of the city were left to see. It was as if I were in a dream. I went after my friends, but I cannot remember where I walked or what I saw. All of a sudden, I heard a voice saying, "Give me water!" I looked and saw it, it was a face like a lump of tofu, so white swollen and soft, with its eyes, nose and mouth getting out of shape. It looked totally different from a human face. I cannot remember what I did and saw after that. One thing is sure, that I went away without giving him some water.

Several decades later, one of my two friends who had been with me answered my question: We walked on that day all around the ruined city of Hiroshima that day. There were corpses lying here and there; bodies floating up and down on the rivers; scattering bones and debris . . .

I must have seen all these cruel sights, but I cannot remember any of them. The only thing I remembered was that face like tofu. Often I tried in vain to get back the lost memory.

Then decades have gone, and last year in August, 2002, I met a man who was at the moment of the blast very close to me in the same shipyard, a distance that was probably less than 50 meters from our "classroom". Through his witness I confirmed for the first time what I saw on the day and the day after.

I may quote from the witness of Mr. Ryuma Miyanaga (then age 15, worker of drafting, Mitsubishi Industry).

"Flash . . . I was engulfed in an intense ray of light and felt an incredible heat. In an instant, everything around me became red, as if I had been thrust inside a fiery blaze. In the same instant, I was knocked over by a blast of hot air containing a tremendous amount of pressure. When I came to, I was sprawled on the floor and the drawing easel I had just moments before been working on was on top of me. With a rush of noise the ceiling opened up and the roof totally collapsed in, sagging down near the window. Previously solid pillars.

From outside, I could hear thousands of employees yelling and screaming. Workers covered in blood gathered in the open grounds near the side of the building. Among this horrendous scene was a steady stream of people pouring through the front gate who looked like they came from some horrible other world. They were people fleeing from the city center. An unending line of people came walking through, eyeballs protruding out of their sockets, hair clinging to their head, their skin burnt and dripping, still smoldering, with blisters beginning to form. Unable to distinguish between men and women, they no longer looked human. The cries and moans of "I'm so hot! It hurts! Water, water!" began to fade away and people started dying like flies in front of me. I was so stunned by this scene that I didn't even notice my own injuries.

"On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am, I was exposed to the atomic bomb dropped by America. I was fifteen years old at the time and I was inside the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Hiroshima Shipyard for kilometers away from the hypocenter.

"When day broke the following morning, the shipyard had become an even more hellish field of corpses. I entered the city to help in the rescue efforts of survivors about 1 kilometer to 1.5 kilometers away from the hypocenter. Fires were breaking out all over the city. Thousands of people had jumped into the river to find relief from their burns, and the river had become choked with floating corpses. All the bridges and roads were covered with burnt, blackened bodies. There was no place to walk without stepping on arms, legs, heads or bodies stuck to the surface of the road. Bodies hung from the railing like rags hung out to dry.

"All that was left of a train stopped in its tracks was its frame. All of the people inside had been collapsed houses remained intact while their legs had been completely burned away. I couldn't rescue them. I felt like I was losing my mind amid this unspeakably horrifying scene. Dead bodies and those people barely alive were left outside in the intense heat and began to rot. The stench from the city's crematoriums drifted as far away as the shipyard four kilometers from town, making it difficult to breath."

Unconsciously, I have tried to escape from the experiences of the atomic bombing. But in reality, I was firmly caught by the atomic bomb. Seven years after the bombing, I fell to an unknown disease. I felt my body very heavy without doing anything and even a little move made me exhausted. I was prone easily to catch cold and I got scratches on my skin even by simply hitting against something a little, edges or furniture or so. Bleeding from slight scratches did not stop all day long.

My backbone was unable to sustain the weight of my head. I couldn't read any books, I was not able to catch and keep the senses of books which I had "read." Actually I only saw. I felt, I was in the grip of Death. I tried every way to regain my health, moxa cauteries and taking herbs and vitamin tablets. My physical condition got slowly, very slowly better.

Now I have become much healthier, but still I cannot work half so much as other people of the same age.

Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 instantly turned two cities into hell. Numerous people were crushed or burned to death in conflagration. Most of those who were killed without rescue were children, elderly people and women.

The hellish sight of Hiroshima is well described in "The Day Hiroshima Disappeared" by Dr. Shuntaro Hida (cf. Hiroshimas Shadow, ed. By Kai Bird & Lawrence Lifschultz, The Pamphleteer's Press, 1009 p. 415f.)

Not only the dead but those who barely survived were sometimes treated as a lumps of meat or things, human dignity being deprived. Rotten bodies were mounted up here and there, which were later put on trucks with a fire hook. Then after a while, they were dumped in holes to be burned, and their ashes were buried without funeral there just as they were.

The Atomic bomb put people in an extreme situation and made them unable to act as humans. It gave a serious shock to people's psyches and caused ceaseless physical and mental sufferings from the moment of explosion to the end of their lives. Every day I hear the call from the tofu- faced, sitting on my neck: "What have you done in the half a century, what have you done for peace?" Urged by the call. I have been working for 26 years in the center of Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) organization, although as a German scholar, I would like to put more energy for my study of German literature, but I could scarcely do it. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the worst crime against humanity. Nuclear arms are not only WMD but also weapons of annihilation. They cannot compare with other weapons. They are by nature inhuman.

Nuclear arms are the very height of violence and cruelty. We condemn the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however we have never demanded "retaliation." But from the beginning we have been asking the U.S. government to make an apology and to sow its sincerity through an act: to realize its "unequivocal undertaking" to abolish its nuclear arsenals. Our answer to the atomic bombing, the greatest war terrorism, was and is "Never More Hibakusha, "elimination of nuclear arms.

We condemn all sorts of terrorism. We condemn any wars and violence, especially the war against the innocent people of Iraq under the fake pretext of getting rid of WMD. We condemn the Bush administration as well as Koizumi's, which is now going the same way as the US, violating the Japanese constitution. We demand restoration of peace and justice, human rights and humanism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and all over the world.

Friends, let us work together, to make the world free from nuclear arms, free from war, free from violence, threat, every shortage and fear!

Contact: Nihon Hidankyo (Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization) Phone: +81-3-3438-1897 Fax: +81-3-3431-2113 Email: [email protected] Web site: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/hidankyo/nihon/

Or

American Friends Service Committee 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, Ma. 2140 Phone: 617-661-6130 Fax: 617-354-2832 E-mail: [email protected] Web site: www.afsc.org/pes.htm