Living with Hiroshima

Messages Left on the Walls

Fukuromachi National Elementary School was located 460m from the hypocenter. Thanks to its reinforced construction, the school remained standing despite great damage. One week after the A-bombing, the school became a makeshift relief station where my parents and younger sister stayed until the beginning of the winter that year.

After the war, the building was repaired temporarily with board and plaster covering its soot-blackened walls so that the elementary school under the new system could start.

In the last year of the 20th century, it was decided to reconstruct the aged school building. In the process of its demolition, a great number of messages and notes appeared.

When writing, “Patient Murakami,” was found, I intuitively knew that it was a note to identify my mother, who would hardly have been identifiable due to her glass injuries. With the help of my friends I launched a campaign for its preservation as a precious A-bomb relic, despite the resistance of the City Board of Education. The writing, “Patient Murakami,” is now displayed in the Peace Museum next to the newly constructed Fukuromachi Elementary School.

In the summer of 2001, a documentary, “Please, Contact Me,” was made and broadcasted as an “NHK Special.” Also, the director of the program, Kyosuke Inoue wrote a book, Hiroshima, Messages Left on the Walls published by Shueisha.

Early February in 2005, Mr. Inoue told me that he received the impression about his book from Keiko Kotoku, a marimba player, who was studying at Piteå Music College in Sweden.

On March 21 that year, I met Keiko for the first time at the Stockholm City Hall square. In her twenties, she had large impressive eyes.

Her grandfather, who ran a drugstore in Mihara, Hiroshima Prefecture, told his little granddaughter in tears about the time when he had headed for Hiroshima for relief right after the A-bombing.

When the U.S. started war against Iraq, she was a student at a music college in Boston. She raised her anti-war voice to the people around her, only to receive a reaction of “Remember She believed people should learn from history. Being roused to action, she composed a piece, “Gaku,” with an anti-war and anti-nuclear weapon theme. She has played it in various countries. “Gaku” is also her grandfather’s name.

After reading Hiroshima, Messages Left on the Walls, she composed “Onegai,” a solo piece sung in soprano voice which expressed the desperation of the people who searched for their loved ones in the ruins. Our conversation continued endlessly.

That summer, I was given opportunities to tell my A-bomb experiences at Keiko Kotoku Peace Concerts in Hiroshima, Takarazuka and Tokyo.