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JD: So beyond that, of course, we escaped. I myself got into the bomb shelter and waited for instruction what to do. Then we came out the bomb shelter by curiosity, to the doorway, and looked out and saw first a victim walking like a ghost, a young lady walking with arms extended. Her clothes were hanging from her body, her hair just burned off, and was just staring straight ahead. It wasn't her clothes hanging; it was the skin hanging. I realized, oh my gosh, what happened. So we backed into the cave and started the discussion, what happened here? Why, what caused this? Said, well, imagination flies, maybe a bomb fell on a giant gasoline storage tank to do this kind of injury. We had no idea what kind of bomb it was. Then about twelve we came out again to see what's, what's going on. We saw a single aircraft, a P-31 flying around, and so another bombing raid, so we just head back into the cave. But that turned out to be a, probably a photography reconnaissance aircraft. Nothing happened. And then about three o'clock our instructor finally came to us and said, "If you're not injured, capable of walking and able to get home away from the city, you can leave," so that's when, the first time we start to leave the shelter. I got on the highway. A drove of people start to come out, and you could see them in all phases of injury and, now, statistic goes there's, as I mentioned, Hiroshima is the tenth largest city in Japan, so they had about fifty-five hospitals available for the citizens of Hiroshima, and they had two hundred doctors and about two thousand nurses available, but when the explosion happened, fifty-three hospitals disappeared. Only two hospitals survived. And out of the two hundred doctors, twenty doctors survived, and out of two thousand, only maybe fifteen out of, no, only two dozen or so nurses survived. It was that much of a damage done to the city, so enormous amount of injury done to the city. And the fire developed everywhere. They said there was about twelve forest fires all over the city, around the surrounding area, and it was, the city was in flame for two weeks or so. My father, when I left the house I mentioned we might, might be going to the city like my aunt did to help the, in the firebreak, so my father knew of my direction. But that morning my father received a friend from Osaka, came to visit him, so he played hooky and stayed home to visit his friend. That's what saved him. Otherwise he would've been in the city working like anybody else. But when he saw the flash, he saw the bomb, he came on, I don't know if I got on the bike or what, but he came to the factory, went to the gate to inquire, "Where's the students?" There was just a turmoil of panic there and nobody could say anything, so he assumed that I went to the city and he walked down the highway against the fleeing victims coming out of the city, got to the bridge and got stopped by the MPs and nobody's to enter the city because the city was ablaze, fire So then he saw another relative doing the same thing and then he walked down, downstream and then waited 'til the tide subsided and waded across the river to the city and start looking for any sign of me. And clothes were burned off, faces were burned, the nametag was burned off, so there was no way of telling who the person is, so he was going one person and, "Are you Jack? Are you Jack?" If they didn't answer he just kept on going. So he, doing so he finally returned home about, about nine o'clock at night.

For me, I went to the highway, I saw the ghost train coming out, so I ran, hopped on the train and tried to look inside. It was just shambled, injured people trying to get, escape from the city and burned, injured asking for help, water, medicine, and I didn't have anything to give them, so I'm gonna walk home, so I jumped off the train, walked home. The windows are blown out. The side that faced the bomb, all blistered, paint peeled off the train, so it just, truly a ghost train. So I walked home from there and finally reached home about six p.m., and my grandmother looking for me outside the house and saw me coming, "I'm so happy to see you. Oh, you're alive, you're safe." And then eventually I asked, where's Father?" "He went looking for you. Didn't you see him?" I said no. So then surveyed the house, all the doors in the house were down on the ground, no glass was broken, the ceiling was intact. With, with a blast of wind usually the ceiling would blow up in the air. Even the, and the heavy storage, storage door was down on the ground, but a miracle there's no glass broken. So we waited. At nine p.m. my father came home. So we talked about each other's experience and said, I said, oh, it was just walking through hell. The tank of water in front of the house for, in case of fire they could use it, but people jumped into this to escape the fire and drowned. People jumped off the bridge to escape the fire and they just, it was terrible, terrible scenery.

And then next thing we noticed, Aunt went missing. Where is she? So next morning my father and grandfather got a buggy or a cart, small cart and went to the city, going to temples, schoolyard, any place where there's assembly looking for my aunt, again, asking each person, "Are you Shizuko? Are you Shizuko?" And they kept on going until the person answered, but somehow my aunt woke up and heard some noise and answered back, so she picked her up, "You must be Shizuko." They put her on the cart, brought her home. But no doctor, no hospital, no medication, so my grandmother baked a baked potato, mashed it and used that mashed potato as a bandage to put on the burn. So half of her body, because she was on a roof taking tile off when she heard the sound I did, looked up, poof. Exploded. She was about a mile from the hypocenter, so... I have a picture of her, how she recovered. And she's still alive. She's eighty-five now and she was doing the same thing I'm doing, talking to reporters and television stations, and she was nineteen years old, "This is what happened to me." And she came here in 1964, sponsored by the Quaker religious group. Went to San Francisco, went to, through United States, went to England and Germany to show her scars, how she was injured by the bomb. Her hand fused together, so she had to operate to separate her fingers. She could never use, stretch her fingers apart, always stretched, and her arm was always bent like this, and the keloid on her arm and the body, and she had a lot of surgery done, transplant surgery, and made her face look better, which her mouth is twisted and eyes are twisted. But she tried to commit suicide twice and we saved it, "Don't do it." And her husband finally came home from the service. He was officer in the Japanese army, taken as a prisoner in the South Pacific islands, and he finally came home and came to my, his wife and said, "I don't want you to die. I went to the war to end the war, to save people's lives." And so they lived together, they have three children. We always worry about the injury and the children that were born. So far the children's okay except one boy had an aneurism about five years ago and he's barely recovering now, and there's a daughter that married and she never bore any children, and I don't know if it's because of the radiation injury from the mother or not, so that's a big question mark always. And for myself, I married. I told my wife at the time that I'm a hibakusha and may never know what my outcome will be, but so far we don't have any children. My brother is a, in nuclear physics, worked in Livermore. He had one son and that's about all, he lived.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.