A Five-Year-Old in Hiroshima

by Sarah Terzo

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On August 6, 1945, the United States became the only country ever to use nuclear weapons against another nation when our military dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The death toll of the Hiroshima bombing

The bomb killed 247,000 people. Nearly all were civilians, and many were women and children, as most of the men were away fighting the war.

Some victims of the Hiroshima bombing died in the initial blast, some died later because of injuries and burns received, and some died weeks or months afterward from radiation poisoning—a slow, painful death.

A professor collects Hiroshima survivors’ stories

In 1951, six years after the Hiroshima bombing, a Japanese professor named Arata Osada sought children and teenagers who experienced the bombing of Hiroshima firsthand and asked them to write out detailed accounts of what they remembered.

He then collected these accounts into a book and published it in Japan. In 1980, the book was translated into English and published in the United States under the title Children of Hiroshima.

One testimony in the book was that of Ikuko Wakasa.

The story of the Hiroshima bombing through the eyes of a child

Ikuko Wakasa was five years old when the atomic bomb was dropped. Six years later, when she was in fifth grade, she wrote an account of what she and her family experienced.

On the morning of August 6, her brother, who was in second grade, was just leaving with his friends to go to school. She was playing house in the family’s garden with her two-year-old sister.

Her father had not yet left for work. He’d decided to go to his job later than usual. He was sitting at his desk practicing calligraphy. Her mother was in the kitchen, clearing off the breakfast table. Ikuko could hear cups and bowls clinking as she put them down.

Ikuko describes what happened next:

Suddenly, the humming sound of an airplane echoed by above in the sky. Taking it for a Japanese plane, I cried out loudly, ‘An airplane!’The moment I looked up into the sky, a white light flashed, and the green trees in the garden looked brown like dead trees. I rushed into the house, shouting, ‘Daddy!’At the same moment, there was a terrific boom… Broken pieces of windowpane went flying over my head.I ran back to the garden, Mother called, ‘Come here, Ikuko!’ Automatically, I ran toward my mother’s voice and jumped into the air-raid shelter.

Bleeding ears

Thankfully, Ikuko’s brother and little sister were not severely injured.

But in the air raid shelter, Ikuko’s ears started bleeding. She says:

There was a lot of blood, and even when I pressed cotton on them, the blood still kept oozing between my fingers. Daddy and Mummy were worried about my bleeding and put a bandage over my ears.

Her parents were also hurt. One of her father’s fingers was nearly severed, and blood was streaming down his face from a terrible cut below his eye.

Her mother was covered with blood from the waist down. She’d been cut by flying glass. Ikuko remembers her mother crying out in pain while her father removed a large piece of glass from a six-inch-long cut in her back.

Ikuko’s ears continued to bleed:

After they bandaged me, my ears began to throb, so I lay down. When I woke up, I was lying in a funny shack. I tried to lift my head but couldn’t, because the blood had soaked through the bandages and my head was stuck to the sheet.

A hospital full of people in agony

Her worried father carried her to a nearby Army hospital.

However, the hospital was packed with critically injured people. Ikuko recalls:

Some were almost naked, and others were groaning with pain. I was so frightened that I asked Daddy to take me back home.

Five-year-old Ikuko was terrified of the horribly burned people, many of whom were crying, moaning, and screaming. For the little girl, it must have seemed like a scene out of her worst nightmares.

Ikuku’s father told her that there were so many people that the wait for medical care would be extremely long, and most people there were far worse off than Ikuko.

So, he brought her home.

Walking through a burning city

She looked around as he carried her through the city, and recalls:

From the fields, I could see that not only the part of town where we lived but the whole city of Hiroshima was burning. There were clouds of black smoke and big explosions. The north wind blew the fire closer and closer… I was trembling, but didn’t know what to do.

Later, she and her family left the shack. They were worried about Ikuko’s uncle, her mother’s brother, and went looking for him. Ikuko remembers:

It was scary outside. The city was burning and there was a nasty smell. Blue balls of fire were floating in the air here and there. We were scared and lonely.

She was deeply traumatized and said, “Since then, I hate going out of doors.”

Her uncle died in the bombing. He was trapped under his fallen home and unable to escape the flames.

Ikuko says, “We tell ourselves that my uncle was smashed flat and killed instantly. We can’t stand to think that he was trapped under a timber and burned alive.”

Trying to help an injured stranger

The family went to Ikuko’s grandfather’s house. There was a man lying on the ground in front of the house, severely injured. Ikuko says, “He was burned so badly you couldn’t tell whether he was young or old.”

Even though the man was a stranger, the family tried to care for him. They laid him on a blanket, with a pillow under his head, on the veranda.

The house they were living in was badly damaged.

Caring for a man in horrific condition

Because the adults in the family and her brother were trying to clean up the damaged house and make it as secure as possible, and her sister was only two, the care of the man fell on Ikuko, even though she was five.

She says:

In just a little while, he got about three times as big as he was. He got yellow and bloated. There were flies all over him. He made weak groans and smelled bad.He kept crying for water. Even though my father, mother, and grandfather were also hurt, they were busy fixing the house and picking up broken glass … So they couldn’t take care of the sick man, and I often gave him water.

The man looked so horrible that Ikuko was terrified of him. Even though she gave him water, she says, “[W]hen I passed him, I ran with my eyes closed and held my breath.”

Eventually, some soldiers showed up at the house and took the man away. Ikuko doesn’t know if he survived.

The aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing

Years later, Ikuko still sees people injured by the bomb:

An aunt of mine was crippled. She always reminds me of August 6, and I feel sad. Once in the streetcar, I saw a man whose ears had been burned into hard lumps about an inch across. My friend Sarada’s father also lost his ears.

A child dies from radiation sickness six years later

And the bomb had not finished killing people. Even six years later, people in the city were dying. Ikuko mentions one tragic case:

Only six months ago [January 1951], a ten-year-old girl lost all her hair from radiation sickness. The Red Cross Hospital doctors did their best to help her, but she vomited blood and died in twenty days.I was shocked to hear such a sad story of death after six years, and it reminded me of that day again.

Most people exposed to high doses of radiation become sick quickly and die within weeks or months. The ten-year-old child may have been exposed to residual radiation by going to part of the city that was still toxic or encountering an object that was irradiated.

The bomb continued to cause casualties in Japan, even years later. Some, like the girl, died from residual radiation exposure. Others, sometimes decades later, died of cancer caused by the radiation from the Hiroshima bombing.

Therefore, the 247,000 statistic of people killed in Hiroshima doesn’t capture the true death toll.

Conventional weapons vs. nuclear ones

Had the United States dropped a conventional bomb or bombs on Hiroshima, the death toll still might have been considerable.

However, if the US had used conventional weapons rather than the atomic bomb, radiation poisoning wouldn’t have been a factor. People who survived their injuries from the bombing would not suffer and die later. The bombing of Hiroshima wouldn’t continue to take casualties for many years after World War II.

The 10-year-old girl in this story wouldn’t have died.

The reality of radiation poisoning makes nuclear weapons unspeakably cruel, and in this way, more horrific than conventional ones.

Source: Arata Osada, Ph.D., translated by Yoichi Fukushima Children of Hiroshima (London: Taylor & French Ltd., 1980) 10, 11-12, 13-14