One Surivor's Account

(Photos courtesy of Reiko Hiramatsu)

Reiko, the year of the Nagasaki bombings:


Reiko as a young adult:



Three days ago silence fell upon Hiroshima City's Peace Memorial Park in remembrance of the world's first atomic bomb. Today, Nagasaki follows suit.

This morning thousands will gather and pray for the sufferers and bereaved families. Meanwhile, as the bell tolls at 11:02 a.m. in Nagasaki's Peace Park, one survivor will have her own private moment of reflection.

"To be alive now is a blessing," she said.

On the early morning of August 9, 1945, Reiko Moribayashi didn't flinch as sirens resounded through her hometown of Nagasaki city, signaling the threat of an air raid. Rather, she rejoiced. Two thoughts entered the 15-year old's head: 1. Here it goes again, and 2. This means I don't have to go to work after all.

At that moment, the fervor around the Matsuyama streetcar stop amplified as Reiko and her classmates talked about how they would spend their mornings, celebrating the fact that it would not be laboring on an assembly line. Their chatter continued as they were sheltered to a nearby dugout and shortly after were ordered to return to their homes.

"This was routine for us," Reiko said, "Just another day in wartime Japan."

She knew her lazy morning would soon come to an end at 8:30 a.m. when another round of sirens wailed, telling everyone that the threat was over and they were to resume their daily activities. This meant wartime work for Reiko.

She hustled down the steep slope that her house was on, meeting up with three classmates, heading towards the Shianbashi stop. The streetcar would take her three miles to a Mitsubishi factory where she spent her days -- for the time being -- with her friends working on an assembly line, instead of school.

But she never made it there. She fell short, literally. As she entered the front hall of another friend's house near the streetcar stop, a yellow light flashed before her eyes. A strong wind then overpowered her and knocked her on top of her friends. Glass shattered and windows broke. The house went dark. She got up, confused, and together with her three friends escaped to a nearby dugout close to Sofukuji Temple. Soon after, she found out she was three miles from the hypocenter of a nuclear bomb.

"I didn't hear any noise from the explosion," Reiko said, "but I do remember the roar of a plane just moments before I walked into the entrance way."

Her work place, one mile from the explosion's origin, had been immediately obliterated, along with a handful of her friends that she had met earlier that day at the Matsuyama streetcar stop. If she had left just 15 minutes earlier she would not be here to tell her story, she said.

Now, 77-year old Reiko Hiramatsu, formerly Moribayashi, reflects in earnest on her experience 60 plus years ago. She remembers the smell of death on her father's clothes. For weeks after the bombing her father would go out every day to look for his missing friends and relatives. He would come home and tell her what he saw.

"On the way he would see people curled up on sidewalks, begging for water. He thought like most Japanese at that time; water would only shock them and speed up their death, so he just kept walking. On the way home, he said those same people were dead. He regretted that he didn't give them any water. If only he had, he thought they could have died less thirsty," she said.

She remembers watching people around her suffer from aftereffects, some dying from them, while she went on living her daily life, wondering if it would happen to her the same way: the burning, the hair loss, the agony.

"I once passed my classmate being carried in a cart and saw that half of her hair was missing," she said.

These days, however, Reiko is telling a different story. She, along with the majority of other victims, celebrate the peace that the yearly anniversary of August 9, 1945 signifies.

"Every year on the same day I pray that no one will have to endure the pain of that kind of obliteration; at the same time I rejoice that since then no one has," Reiko said.

At that time 240,000 people resided in Nagasaki City. 70,000 died instantly and another 70,000 were injured from the blast or suffered from radiation poisoning. Reiko was one of 100,000 people left unscathed and one of 30,000 still living and residing in the Nagasaki area. The average age of an atomic bomb survivor is 75 years old.

Reiko is a living example of a nation's positive outlook towards peace. Last Friday I visited the atomic bomb's hypocenter and museum to fill in the details of a grim picture her words had already painted.

Bent and charred relics from Mitsubishi's shipyard, Reiko's workplace, filled the museum. Numerous pictures of a flattened city with people piled and crouched, their skin shriveled from burns, calling out in thirst, were a virtual copy of Reiko's words.

62 years later, on this morning, a community of all ages gathers in a small park tucked in western Japan. Today's ceremony reflects on the turmoil of World War II and praises the relations Japan carries today. Nagasaki's new mayor will stand in front of a glorified statue paying homage to the last mayor, who was gunned down by a member of an organized crime syndicate in front of a train station four months ago. He will preach the intolerance of crime and relish in a modern-day demand for peace. The ambiance will create a backdrop for worldwide peaceful coexistence.

(Sources for this article: Sit-down interview with Reiko Hiramatsu; Summary of Relief Measures for Atomic Bomb Survivors 2003; Nagasaki Peace Museum)