Chieko Kiriake

On August 6, I went back to my house, worrying about my family.  My mother said to me, “Teruko hasn’t returned yet.  She might go back to school, so please stay there.”  My younger sister Teruko was a second-year student at my school, so I returned to school soon.  Our house was so heavily damaged that we could not live there.  Our school, Hiroshima Prefectural Second Girls’ Secondary School, had collapsed but Hiroshima Girls Professional Training College on the same site escaped collapse.  Until mid-September, while staying in that school building and sometimes going back home to see my family, I felt fine enough to take care of younger students and other wounded people and clean up our broken school.  However, at the end of September or the beginning of October, I started to lose my hair and bleed from my gums. 

Around that time, even though they had escaped injury, many people around me were dying after losing their hair, bleeding from their gums and developing small, purple spots on their skin.  I thought that I also was going to die soon, but I wasn’t afraid of death.  I had felt the piercing gazes from bereaved families of my classmates, and I felt guilty because I survived.  Until then, whenever I met them, I sensed their sharp stare saying, “My child is dead.  Why are you alive?”  Of course, they didn’t speak directly to me like that.  I felt rather relieved thinking that if I died I could finally free myself from their gazes and my guilty feeling. 

Those days, we had no knowledge that those symptoms were due to the aftereffects of radiation, and there was no medical treatment, even in the hospitals.  We were just told that we should eat nutritious food.  My mother pleaded with me, “Don’t ever die!” and tried hard to do everything for me.  She gave me a mix of dokudami herbal medicine.  She took her kimonos to farmers in the countryside to exchange for rice or vegetables.  Until the end of the year, I lived a life of sleeping and waking with a strong sense of exhaustion, later called the A-bomb burabura disease.

My younger sister Teruko was mobilized in the East Drill Grounds.  Almost all the students there were severely burned, but there were no deaths.  Teruko tried to return home at first, but the city was on fire, so she fled to Futabayama Hill.  There, she met a first-year student at her school, who suggested, “My house is on the opposite side of the mountain.  Why don’t you come with me?”  The student’s parents wrongly thought that Teruko had brought their injured daughter home and kindly invited her, “Stay here until the fire in the city calms down so that you can return home.”  So, Teruko stayed there, and a few days later, the student’s father took Teruko to our home in Minami-machi.

My father was working for the shipyard in Motoujina, and he escaped injury or burns.  Because Teruko didn’t return home, my father walked around Zakoba-cho and the Eastern Drill Grounds where Teruko was supposed to be mobilized.  Probably, he was exposed to a large amount of radiation there.  In September, he became bedridden with a high fever and strong sense of exhaustion, like me.  At home, my father, Teruko and I were sick in bed together.  Although he was exposed to A-bomb radiation at the age of 41, he developed leukopenia, an A-bomb aftereffect, at the age of 51.  A blood transfusion made him feel a little better and he could continue working.  When he felt sick, he received blood transfusions at the Red Cross Hospital, which he repeated for a long time.

My grandmother was at home when the A-bomb was dropped.  We don’t know what fell on her, but her forehead was split open, and she was covered with blood.  My mother took her to the doctor at the Army Clothing Depot and lay her down in the warehouse of the Clothing Depot with her wound stitched up.  My grandmother was the first to be taken there, but soon many injured people were brought there one after another, and the warehouse became a first aid station to accommodate those people.  The warehouse was filled with the putrid smell of corpses, excrement, urine, blood and pus, and my grandmother couldn’t endure it.  She told my mother, “Get me out of here.  I don’t care if I die.  Just get me out of here.”  So, my mother dragged her outside of the warehouse, laid her on a rough military blanket and kept taking care of her there.  A few days later, my mother took her back to the shack built by my father.  When my mother was busy, I helped nurse my grandmother.  In those days, there was no medicine at home except merbromin solution or Oxyfull.  Even though her injury recovered, her body was left with keloid scars.  Despite our best efforts, she died in early spring of the next year.      

Our house escaped fire, but it wasn’t good enough for us to live in.  My father drove four stakes into a nearby field, dragged several glass-pierced tatami mats out of the house, laid them upside down, placed burned-galvanized iron sheets for the roof, and hung a mosquito net which enabled our family to sleep there.  It was fortunate to make use of tatami and household goods because our house escaped the fire.  Sleeping out like that, we stayed there throughout August.  After that, my father rebuilt the house from the remaining framework and roof tiles collected out of the debris.  However, the tiles, burned by heat rays, leaked because the cover coat had peeled.

Soon after the end of the war, my twin sisters, Junko and Yoko, who had been evacuated to Numata (present, Asaminami-ku, Hiroshima) returned home.  Among those children who returned from the evacuation site, there were orphans whose whole family had been killed in the A-bombing.  We don’t know the exact number of the orphans, but the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum estimates that it was between 2,000 to 6,500.