The War Orphans of Hiroshima: Part I

by Sarah Terzo

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The Bombing of Hiroshima

This month is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, which took place on August 6, 1945.

Some children from Hiroshima became orphans. This article tells the stories of three of them.

The accounts are from Arata Osada, PhD, Children of Hiroshima, originally published in 1951. Osada interviewed children who survived the bombing. The book was translated into English by Yoichi Fukushima. All quotes are from the 1980 edition.

The threat of nuclear war is still very much with us. It would do us all well to remember what it was like when the atomic bomb was used against a civilian population, killing innocent men, women, children, and babies.

Also, I think it’s important to remember the victims and honor their memory, as well as let their stories increase our resolve to advocate against war and against the use, creation, and stockpiling of nuclear weapons.

Yaeko’s Story

Yaeko Sasaki was only five years old when she survived the bombing of Hiroshima. When she was interviewed by Osada, she was in the fifth grade.

A few days before the bombing, Yaeko’s brother went to the hospital because of a serious illness. In 1940s Japan, family members of those in hospitals provided food and bedding and helped care for them.

Her mother got some blankets together but didn’t have time to prepare any food. As she was about to leave, she said to Yaeko’s father, “Be sure to bring us lunch tomorrow and then something every day.” 

Yaeko said, “I never imagined that these were the last words I would ever hear her say.” 

On the morning of August 6, Yaeko ate breakfast with her father. Then he prepared to take some food for her brother and mother, who were staying at the hospital.

Yaeko wanted to come with him:

I asked him to take me with him, but he said, “I’m busy today. Please be a good girl and stay at home. If there is an air raid warning on the radio, put on your air raid hood and hide in the shelter… When the all-clear is sounded, you may go out and play.” 

Shortly after he left, the air raid siren went off. Yaeko scrambled into the bomb shelter, but she really wanted to play with her friends. So as soon as she heard the all-clear on the radio, she ran outside and over to her friend’s house.

The air raid siren went off when the American plane, the Enola Gay, arrived over Hiroshima, but the all-clear was sounded right before the explosion. Because of this, many people had left their bomb shelters and were caught out in the open when the bomb exploded.

Yaeko was playing hide-and-seek with her friend when the explosion occurred. She said it seemed like “a big ball of fire” had fallen from the sky.

She had been hiding under a deck, waiting to see if her friend would find her. After the explosion, she crawled out from under it and saw that “every house around was on fire. Before long, big drops of rain came down in torrents. I was frightened.”

Sheltered by the deck, and not too close to the epicenter of the bomb, Yaeko wasn’t hurt. But she was very scared. She ran back to her house, looking for her parents, but they weren’t there. She sat alone by the roadside, crying.

Soon, Yaeko saw the first of the many badly injured and burned people she would see over the next few days. She said, “I saw a man with burned skin hanging from his hands and feet. He was crying, ‘Water! Water!’” 

Yaeko didn’t know what to do. Crying and terrified, she stayed in the damaged house until a woman she knew came and took her to the countryside. The woman put her to bed, and Yaeko remembers crying all night, missing her mother.

In the morning, she asked the woman if her mother had returned to the house. The woman took her back to her home to see if her mother was there.

Yaeko says:

The house had fallen down on one side. I ran into the house and shouted, “Father! Mother! Where are you?” There was no answer. I shouted again and again. Just then I saw a man who looked like my father walking with a baby in his arms.

“Daddy! It’s me!” I shouted at the top of my voice.

The woman was standing beside me. She looked at the man and said, “That’s not your father. It’s a stranger.” I was so disappointed.

The same thing happened again and again, but I never found my mother or father. 

After several days, Yaeko realized her mother, father, and brother had all died at the hospital.

She says:

Every evening in bed, I would think of my father when he left for the hospital. If he hadn’t told me to stay at home when I asked him to let me go with him, all four of us would have died together. 

Yaeko had two older sisters who survived the bombing, but one was very badly burned. This sister, Toshiko, recovered in the hospital, and it fell to Yaeko to take care of her, even though she was only five. She had to tend to her bedridden sister and change the bandages on her burns.

Yaeko said, “It was no fun washing bandages covered with pus, but I was ready to do anything for my sister.” 

Her sister took a long time to recover and was left scarred and disabled. Because Yaeko had stayed home from school to care for her, she went into first grade a year late.

Toshiko’s leg became too stiff for her to bend, but she wanted Yaeko to have a good education, so she took a job sewing, working all day and late into the night, running the sewing machine with her one good leg.

A year later, Yaeko entered an orphanage. She came to call the woman who ran it her “second mother,” and said, “[S]he smiled at me just like my real mother used to.” 

Despite having lost her brother and both her parents, Yaeko isn’t bitter or consumed with thoughts of revenge. She told Arata Osada, “I have made up my mind that when I grow up, I am going to be honest and kind.” 

Keiko’s Story

At the start of World War II, some parents in Japanese cities, including Hiroshima, sent their children to stay with relatives living in the countryside, hoping to protect them from enemy bombs. Many parents in London and other European cities did the same.

Some of these children, safe on the outskirts of Hiroshima, never saw their parents and/or siblings again. Other children stayed in Hiroshima and survived the explosion, although their parents did not. (Of course, many children also died in the bombing.)

Keiko Sasaki and her sister were staying with her grandmother in the country. Keiko’s father was a soldier who died in Osaka when she was seven. Later that year, the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, where Keiko’s mother lived.

In the days after the bombing, survivors from the city started arriving in the little town where Keiko and her sister were staying. A man told Keiko’s grandmother that Hiroshima had been completely destroyed. Her grandmother immediately set out for the city, trying to find Keiko’s mother.

She was gone for a week. When she returned, Keiko asked her, “Where is my mother?”

Her grandmother responded, “I brought her on my back.”

Keiko says:

I was very happy and shouted, “Mummy!” But when I looked closely, I saw she was only carrying a rucksack. My sister and our neighbors began to cry. I couldn’t understand why.

Then my grandma put the rucksack down and took some bones out of it.

I still didn’t understand. A year passed, and then another year, but my mother didn’t come home…Three years later, I was a second grader. Then I understood that my mother had died. 

Keiko’s mother had died from radiation poisoning nine days after the Americans dropped the bomb.

Six years later, she told Osada that she still mourned her mother and visited her grave every day. She said, “All the other kids have fathers or mothers. I wonder why I had to lose both, and I start crying.” 

The anniversary of her mother’s death is very hard for Keiko. Every August 15, she said, “I remember so many things and tears come to my eyes.” 

Having lost both her parents, Keiko was very protective of her grandmother and wanted to help her as much as possible. Thinking about the future, Keiko told Osada:

I will take good care of my grandma so she can live for a long time. I often think that if Mother were with us, my grandma might not have to work so hard. I have decided that whatever happens I will try to be strong enough to tackle any troubles in the future. 

Yuriko’s Story

Yuriko Sakurai was eleven when the United States bombed Hiroshima. She too was staying with relatives in a little town outside the city. Her mother and older brother were still in Hiroshima. Two days after the bombing, she and her grandfather went to Hiroshima.

Still a young child, Yuriko didn’t fully grasp what had happened in Hiroshima before she arrived there. She expected to see her mother and brother and was looking forward to being reunited with them. An independent and somewhat rebellious child, she tried to hide how much she was looking forward to seeing her mother and brother again.

What Yuriko saw (and smelled) in Hiroshima horrified her:

[W]hat did I see in Hiroshima? Bloated bodies were floating in its seven once beautiful rivers. The air … was thick with the stench of burned bodies.

But even worse was to see the terrible change in my mother. 

Her mother’s face was so badly burned that she was unrecognizable.

Makeshift bandages covered her face. Her eyes were filled with so much pain, trauma, and desperation that Keiko couldn’t look into them:

She was wrapped up in rough cloth from the neck up, with only her eyes, nose and mouth showing. I was frightened to death. Her eyes seemed to be pleading with me, but I avoided them, and by her I saw my big brother lying there…

I wondered what my grandfather, who was in his seventies, must be thinking as he watched his daughter and grandson lying there unable to speak or move. 

Yuriko said that as the youngest, she had always been “spoiled and pampered.” Now, she had to work “ceaselessly from morning to night” caring for her injured relatives. She did all the cooking and tended to their wounds. She was only eleven years old.

It was decided that Yuriko should go back to her grandfather’s house in the little village along with her brother.

Many people from the village had been in Hiroshima on the day of the bombing. Since so many cities in Japan were being bombed, officials in Hiroshima had decided to demolish some houses to prevent fires from spreading in case of Allied attacks. People from the village were in Hiroshima working on this demolition project.

Some of them returned with burns. Others initially seemed to have escaped serious injury, only to suffer and die from radiation poisoning in the days and weeks after the bombing.

Relatives and friends who hadn’t been in Hiroshima could do little for them. Even today, there’s no way to save people who are exposed to large doses of radiation. According to the Mayo Clinic:

A person who has absorbed very large doses of radiation has little chance of recovery. Depending on the severity of illness, death can occur within two days or two weeks. People with a lethal radiation dose receive medicine to control pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. They also may benefit from psychological or pastoral care. 

Yuriko said:

There were no longer smiles on the faces of the people [in the village]. They had suffered, too…

People who had gone to Hiroshima to work in the house clearance program, returned only to die, one after the other. A deep air of gloom settled over the entire community. 

Yuriko’s brother survived his injuries. But her mother died. She describes how she felt after finding out about her mother’s death:

[M]y whole world came crashing down. My mind was a dry, whirling emptiness, my emotions were paralyzed, my reason stopped working…

I could not believe it. I did not want to believe it … Tears poured down my cheeks. The days of despair and unrest went on, regardless of me. Every night I would think of my mother, of her touch, her love, and the thought that she would never return tormented me…

I became melancholy and gloomy, unlike other girls my age. 

Yuriko’s family worried about her. Her uncle and older sister had her go to a private school where, she says, she threw herself into her studies, trying to forget her grief.

Before her interview with Osada, her grandfather had passed away. Yuriko said, “[T]he three of us left, my brother and sister and I, have been praying for our mother and the thousands of other people who lost their lives for peace.” 

Mass Killing for Peace?

But did Yuriko’s mother and the tens of thousands of others who died really give their lives for peace? While the use of atomic weapons led to Japan’s surrender, there is evidence that Japan might have surrendered without the bombing if the United States had been willing to make certain concessions and accept a conditional surrender, rather than the unconditional one President Truman demanded. 

In fact, before the bombing, Japan’s leaders had reached out to the Soviet Union, asking it to help broker a truce between the two nations. Truman was aware of this.

The tragedy of Hiroshima may not have been “needed” to end the war with Japan.

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Children of Hiroshima is available in e-book format under a slightly different title on Amazon (Kindle) or Barnes & Noble (Nook) for $4.99. Both versions can be read in an app on your smartphone, tablet, or computer.

For more of Sarah Terzo’s writings, see Sarah Terzo’s Secular Seamless Garment.