Sadao Hirano

I had burns on my whole right arm and parts of my left arm, neck, back and legs.  My right arm was most seriously burned and gouged out so deeply that the bone could be seen.  My mother first applied tincture of iodine, but that was gone soon. Then, she applied cooking oil.  When that also was used up, she grated cucumbers to put on my burns.  Nevertheless, my burns festered.  The stinking pus from them soaked the futon and leaked to the tatami mat underneath.  I heard a neighbor speaking at the porch, “This child isn’t going to survive.”  We often hear A-bomb survivors say that their wounds were infested with maggots.  However, because we put a mosquito net in the room where I was lying, fortunately maggots didn’t infest my wounds.  I was groaning on the futon in pain for about 20 days.  My mother did everything to take care of me, and my brothers and sisters helped her.  I think that my mother hardly slept, even though she was pregnant with my younger brother at that time.

About two months later, my pain eased up, and I was able to walk.  The burns turned red and swollen, and the skin hardened into a keloid.  The keloid was tight, and I couldn’t stretch my right arm.  Even 80 years later, the keloid scar remains, and except while sleeping, I still feel pain in my stiffened muscle.

Our school restarted about two months after the A-bombing.  According to the Chugoku Shimbun Hiroshima Peace Media Center, our school lost three staff members, 33 fourth-year students, 21 third-year students, 64 second-year students and 17 first-year students in the A-bombing.

Most of my classmates suffered from heavy burns, though not as badly as mine.  Even though there were no buildings that could shade the school grounds, some had lighter burns.  Since entering school, we had used the school building of Hiroshima Prefectural Higher Normal School, but we could return to our original school in Eba, Naka-ku.

The restart of school didn’t mean that classes started.  The windowpanes of the school were shattered into fragments, and the windows were boarded up.  So, without lights, the classrooms were dark.  Most of the desks and the chairs were useless, so we had to take the desks and chairs we had used in Hiroshima Prefectural Higher Normal School there.  Along the way to our school, the Sumiyoshi Bridge had collapsed due to the A-bombing.  So, a few students got on a small ferry boat, floating the desks and the chairs in the river outside both sides of the boat.  In that way, we could carry them to the other side of the river.  The thin skin of my keloid broke and bled when I carried heavy the desks and chairs or something hit my wounds.  To protect my keloid, my mother sewed a sleeve that could cover my arm and hand completely.

We had no textbooks, so teachers handed out large rough papers on which eight pages of the textbooks were printed, which we cut and bound to use as a textbook.  We had no pencils or no erasers either, so we rubbed with our fingers to erase wrong parts.

Food was scarce.  As we couldn’t get enough rice, our bento lunch was rice cooked with finely chopped daikon radish.  Although we, children, had something to eat, my parents hardly ate anything because they gave their food to us. 

In my middle school years, I took various part-time jobs to help support the family.  Not only me, but all my other family members were working somewhere.  GHQ had seized the building of the Japan Steel Works near my house, and I worked there as a houseboy.  One day, as ordered by my boss, I was sweeping the corridor where shiny and polished guns were lined up.  Suddenly, a big soldier jumped out and yelled at me in English.  I didn’t understand what he said and thought that he would kill me.  Another job I had was fitting windows made of bamboo and oil paper in window frames as substitute glass.  I also peddled sports shoes.  My mother milked the goats we kept, boiled the milk and sold it.  She also sold eggs from our chickens.  Kinuko, my younger sister, helped her peddle stationery and household goods.  By the time I entered high school, my father could get a steady job, so we no longer had to take part-time jobs.

I took the train from JR Kaitaichi Station to Hiroshima Station to go to school.  Before arriving at Kaitaichi Station, the carriages were already packed by demobilized Japanese soldiers and Australian Occupation soldiers, with even the decks overflowing with people.  Those who wanted to enter the carriages could only do so through the windows.  At Kaitaichi Station, passengers like me could only hold onto the deck railing, ride in the coal car, or ride on the connection between carriages.  It was dangerous, and one day while he was riding on the deck clinging to the railing, my classmate, Mr. Morimoto, hit his head on a traffic light and died.

Hiroshima Station was in chaos.  Vagrants and demobilized soldiers crowded there, and there were constant fights over the scarcity of food.  It was not unusual to see yakuza gangs fighting with knives.  Thinking about what could happen, some upperclassmen went to school with a knife in their pockets.  We walked from the station to the school with a crunching sound, stomping on human bones on the road that had not been cleared.  On the riverbank, human bones were piled up here and there.  Such chaos continued for nearly two years after the end of the war. In 1947, the new 6-3-3 school system was introduced, and school districts were determined according to where you lived.  I was transferred to Hiroshima Prefectural Second Junior High School.  However, when I graduated from junior high school in 1948, the name was changed to the affiliated junior high school of Hiroshima Prefectural Geiyo High School, and I went on to Geiyo High School.  The year after, the name of that school was changed again to Kanon High School, and the location of the school I went to changed several times.