Living with Hiroshima

My grandfather took my brother and me to his place in Yamagata-gun, where he was living as a specialist of shrine carpentry. Therefore, he had only a small farmland, and the farmers nearby couldn’t afford to share food with others, as they themselves had accepted other victims to take care of.

On August 15, Japan surrendered. Adults seemed to be at a loss at what they had believed in, but as a child I was happy, because we had no more enemy planes flying over and no more dashing into the air-raid shelter.

In October I had a high fever and began to suffer from bloody urine and stools. No information on the A-bombing had reached the local doctors in the rural area, so I was diagnosed as some bad infectious disease, and isolated in the shed. My brother banged on the door crying, “Sister, sister!” but I could do nothing. Since medicine was scarce in those days, I just stayed in bed. In about a month, those symptoms subsided, but smelly pus began to ooze from my ears. It came down to my throat overflowing my mouth. Again, there was no way to treat it, but only wipe it off.

In November, my family managed to rent a half-broken, survived house in Minami-machi, south of the city and started to live together. I began to see the doctor at the Red Cross Hospital, but medicine was in short supply at the hospital. A nurse murmured, “How I wish we had penicillin!” I told what I overheard to my father. A few days later, my father got three ampoules of penicillin on the black market. I remember I began to recover thanks to them.

After my brother and I left for Yamagata-gun, my parents and baby sister moved to the Relief Center for the A-bomb victims set up in the Fukuromachi National Elementary School. My mother had the pieces of glass removed by a doctor, who found out that her left eyeball was intact. It was fortunate that she was operated on by a specialist eye doctor and regained her eyesight. However, she had to stay mostly in bed as she was suffering from the malfunction of her internal organs as well as many injuries by glass fragments. All the house chores were on my shoulders, and I went to school with my sister on my back