<Begin Segment 15>

MN: I want to ask you a little more about the day of the bombing. When, the instant the bomb went off you went down on the ground.

JD: Yes.

MN: But how did that feel like? Did you feel the blast?

JD: Well, I weighed about a hundred pounds then probably, but I felt, when the blast, the blast wind came I was floating in air. I felt that way. And as you, as I mentioned, all the factory window was blown out, so it was that strong of a blast. The building stood intact, so nothing will -- they said ten miles away some window cracked and broke, so that was that strong of a blast. They say people felt that intense blast ten miles away, and even fifteen miles away they thought they sensed the flash of the, in the air, you know the... even the blind person said they could, they felt the sensitivity of the, the brightness. Said ten times brighter than the sun, said of the flash, so it's a tremendous explosion. And I didn't feel that heat that much, by then probably dissipated quite low, but at the ground zero, the thirty thousand degree centigrade, they said a steel rod will melt at a thousand five hundred degrees, so it must've horrendously -- and there was a Shima building, Shima Hospital, right at the base, base point. It completely disappeared and anybody in the hospital just disintegrated. They couldn't find any trace of it, so it just, it was that intense of heat. Of course, you see photograph of the shadow image against the concrete walls and walkways and so forth, even a shadow of a horse, horse and wagon, it's still on the ground at the ground zero area, so it was that type of intensity.

MN: Now, you said before you went into the shelter you looked and you saw the mushroom cloud.

JD: Yes.

MN: Did you see the black rain?

JD: No. Black rain comes, it was, first the mushroom is created and then that starts to dissipate, becomes a cumulous cloud, and that's when the black rain starts and the thunder and rain starts. And then, depending on which direction, if you're down, downwind, that's where you, if you're upwind you're safe 'cause it's flowing that way, so it was moving away from me if anything. So, and even people who were injured, like my aunt, she, I don't know how she, well, she said was blown off the roof and said she probably crawled and ran to whatever, away from the center point, and she didn't get the radiation sickness that we experienced, but it's just the burn that she got very badly. So people without injury, when they were doused by the black rain they became ill. They start to, their hair start to fall, they start to bleed from the gum, and then they will die a few days later, so that black rain had an enormous amount of radiation in it that was harmful for the body.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.