Chieko Kiriake

Waiting for Peace Doesn’t Make It Come

5. Students of the Hiroshima Prefectural Second Girls’ Secondary School and the Hiroshima Girls Professional Training College that was used as a temporary first-aid station

On that day, we fourth-year students from the West Class were mobilized to the tobacco factory (2.28km from the hypocenter).  Third-year students were mobilized to Kanawajima Island (a small island in the Seto Inland Sea, about 1km from Ujina Port), where the Army Transport Department had a shipbuilding plant and other facilities. All first-year students and half of the second-year students in the East Class were mobilized to the East Military Drill Grounds (about 2km from the hypocenter). The second-year students in the West Class were mobilized to help demolish buildings in Zakoba-cho (1.1km from the hypocenter, present Kokutaiji-cho, Naka-ku). Building demolition was done by tearing down buildings surrounding important buildings to make empty space to prevent the spread of fire to important buildings in the event of an air raid.  At the East Military Drill Grounds, which was a training ground for military horses, most of the land had been turned into sweet potato fields due the food shortage, and students were mobilized there to pull weeds and water the fields.

I think it was before noon when we arrived at the school from Ogozan Hill.  Some fourth-year students had already returned to school.  All of them, as well as the ten of us, were injured.  After noon, seriously injured people came to the school one after another.  All of them had their hands stretched out in front of them, like ghosts.  Something that was black and kelp-like hung from the tips of their fingers, and a similar thing hung from their feet, which they dragged as they walked into the school.  At first, the teacher was tearing them off with her hands, but since the injured kept coming one after another, she had us bring scissors and told us to cut the skin off.  It was truly horrible to think that the injured had walked for many kilometers through the fire-burning rubble with their skin hanging down. 

Among the injured were girls from the second-year West Class.  Since my sister was in the second year, I knew most of their faces and names.  However, the faces of all the students who came back were swollen up to one and a half times their original size, their hair stood up in a burnt frizz, and their clothes were so burnt that they looked naked.  I had no idea who was who.

Lower Grade Students with Burns All Over Their Bodies Returning to School, by Yuri Okada (Collection of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum)

Five students from the West Class returned to the school on the 6th, but other people who were injured or burnt came to find shelter one after another.  The school had a Japanese-style room of about 20 tatami mats where etiquette and tea ceremony were taught, so after cleaning up the shattered shards of glass, fallen fusuma (sliding doors) and shoji (screens) from the blast, the returning students and evacuees were taken there.  However, the room soon filled up.  Then, the teacher from the Hiroshima Girls Professional Training College said, “The laboratory table in the physical chemistry room is just the size of a bed, so lay them there.  And while they can still talk, ask their names and stick their name tags in the corner of the table with a pushpin.”  So, we cleaned the room, which was littered with shattered windows, test tubes, beakers and other glass fragments, and laid people with severe burns and injuries on the tables, asked their names and made name tags for them.  But still the injured kept coming one after another, and we ran out of places to lay them down, so in the end we laid them out on thin goza mats in the hallway.

Female Students Exposed to the A-bomb Treated in the Physical Chemistry Room, by Yu Nishioka (Collection of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum)

The teacher said, “These people have been badly burned, and it probably hurts when they come in contact with air.  Go to the home economics room and get some oil.”  We looked for cooking oil amidst the mess of broken dishes and utensils, but there were only four or five bottles (1.8 liters) of old, black oil, probably because there hadn’t been any home economics lessons for years.  We came back and applied the black oil to the students, but the oil soon ran out because everyone had burns all over their bodies.  Eventually, a medic from the Japanese Imperial Army’s Shipping Command brought us an 18-liter can of oil and zinc oxide starch powder.  We mixed the starch and oil and applied it all over their bodies, which made them look like plaster sculptures laid in a row.

Maggots were also unbearable.  Flies would settle on the burns, lay eggs, and maggots would fester.  The maggots sucked blood and grew plump.  They would say, “Please get rid of the maggots!”  I tried my best by picking them up with chopsticks, but it was impossible to catch up with how fast they multiplied.  They hatched so fast that the walls were black covered with flies.  It was the first time I had ever seen maggots on a living person.  Even when they died, the maggots were still lively crawling on the corpses.

In the meantime, people died one by one.  Before they died, they were in agony saying, “Mother, it hurts!” and “It’s hot!”  But when they died, their faces turned peaceful.  It was like hell.  Because it was in the middle of summer, decomposition of their bodies began as soon as they died, so was decided that we would dig holes in the schoolyard and cremate them there.

On the following day, the 7th, we began cremating the corpses.  After each death, a hole was dug in the schoolyard, boards and pillars were collected from the rubble of the school building and laid on the bottom, on which the body was placed and set on fire.  At first there was the sound of maggots bursting, like air being released in short spurs.  Next came the sound of internal organs exploding with popping sounds.  Then their arms and legs stood straight up toward the sky.  I was shocked and said to the teacher, “Look!  She’s still alive!” but the teacher responded, “No, she’s not alive.  Don’t look!”  But I couldn’t move as if my body was paralyzed, and I just stayed by the burning body, all the while, shaking and trembling.  It was truly horrible.

Cremating our friends in the school grounds (August, 1945)

It took a long time to cremate the corpses using only scraps of wood.  Halfway through, a third-year students who had been mobilized in the Japanese Imperial Army’s Shipping Command, brought a can of oil, so we started pouring oil over the corpses before cremating them.  The cremated remains turned to a cherry-pink color.  Our teacher told us to pick up the Adam’s apple and the bone of their pinky finger.  Only then was my body released from its paralyzed state and tears began to fall.  We wrapped the bones in straw paper, wrote their names on them and placed them on the desk in the principal’s office.  Parents who came looking for their children took their remains and left, but even after the war ended, there were remains that no one had come to claim.  Perhaps the entire family had died.

Principal’s room of the Second Prefectural Girls’ Secondary School and Girls’ Professional Training College

All first-year students and second-year students in the East Class who had been mobilized to work at the East Military Drill Grounds were dismissed on site but were unable to return to the city due to the raging fires.  Some evacuated to Futabayama Hill, some returned to school the long way round, and some went home.  They all were badly burned, but none of those students died.  The third-year students had been mobilized to Kanawajima Island, where survivors were sent after the bombing, so they stayed on the island to care for them.  The fourth-year students who had been mobilized to work at the tobacco factory were also dismissed on site, so we returned to school or went home.

39 second-year students from the West Class had been mobilized to Zakoba-cho.  Some made it back to school, some died in Zakoba-cho where they had been mobilized, some died of exhaustion on their way back to school, some were put on relief trucks and taken to Ninoshima Island, and some managed to make it back their homes.  In the end, all of those students except for one, Setsuko Sakamoto died by the end of August.  Ms. Sakamoto managed to go over Hijiyama Hill on her own and reached her home in Danbara on the other side.  She later graduated from a junior college and worked as a junior high school teacher but died of cancer at the age of 37.

The atomic bomb victims from the Hiroshima Prefectural Second Girls’ Secondary School included three teachers, 39 second-year students from the West Class, two third-year students, and one fourth-year student, while all of the first-year students and the second-year East Class students survived.

At the Girls Professional Training College on the same campus, third-year students were mobilized that day to the Army’s Shipping Command in Kanawajima Island and were safe, and second-year students were mobilized to Mizushima in Okayama Prefecture and were in their dormitories and safe.  The first-year students were in the school building for a farewell gathering held at the school before being mobilized the following day.  These first-year students, along with the relatively healthy students like us from the Hiroshima Prefectural Second Girls’ Secondary School who had returned to the school, took care of the second-year West Class students and the injured who evacuated one after the other.  Although we were only one year apart, I was impressed by how they worked quickly and efficiently.

On August 15, the Emperor gave a speech on the radio, and we all gathered in front of the radio at school to listen to it.  I could only hear the part ‘enduring the unendurable and suffering the insufferable’, and I thought that we were being told to continue to endure and fight through the war.  But when the teacher told us that Japan had lost the war, I was angry.  Why didn’t they stop the war ten days earlier?  Even as they were dying, suffering from burns all over their bodies, the younger students said, “Don’t cry because we are dying for our country!”  If the war had ended ten days earlier, those girls would not have had to die.

I don’t know whether it was because of the Emperor’s speech or whether it had already been decided, but on August 15, the injured who had been laid in the Girls Professional Training College were moved to the auditorium of the Oko Primary School (present Asahimachi, Minami-ku), which was about 1.4km away.  Those of us who were able to move carried the injured on stretchers back and forth repeatedly to Oko Primary School.  In the auditorium, cardboard boxes and mats used for physical education were laid out in rows, and people being carried in were laid there.  People were brought in not only from the Girls Professional Training College, but also from the places that were used as temporary first-aid stations in the surrounding area.  Then the temporary first-aid station at the Girls Professional Training College finished its role and was closed.  At the first-aid station at Oko Primary School, medics from the Akatsuki Corps were efficiently giving instructions.  It, too, was closed on October 3.

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