Hiroshima

At exactly 15 minutes past 8 in the morning,

The atomic bomb

The atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima.

Light cut across the sky.

None of use knew anything.

A fisherman on the inland sea saw the flash and heard the tremendous thunder.

We heard no roar.

From the mound, I could get a good view of the whole of Koi,

the whole of Hiroshima for that matter.

I saw, an astonishing panorama.

The day grew darker and darker.

I heard people crying for help under a nearby fallen roof.

I had to ignore them.

I had to ignore them.

I had to ignore them.

It can’t be helped!

I called to passers-by to help me lift it, but nobody paid any attention.

I had to leave the buried ones to die.

Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most were wounded. Patients lay crouched on the floor of the wards and in the laboratories and all other corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall and on the front stone steps, and in the driveway and court yard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside!

But the hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children; very few people even spoke.

The night was hot.

Her sister had been in the salt water of the river a couple of hours before being rescued.

Had huge, raw flash burns on her body.

“I’m so cold.”

I wrapped her up, but she shook more and more.

Then she suddenly stopped shivering,

and was dead.

Many dead lay, close and intimate with those who were still living.

But she kept the small corpse in her arms for four days,

her dead baby daughter in her arms!

even though it began smelling badly on the second day.

I found twenty men and women in the sandpit.

I realized they were too weak to lift themselves and the water was rising.

I reached down, and took a woman by the hands,

but her skin slipped off in huge glove-like pieces.

The war is over.

Don’t say such a foolish thing.

But I heard it on the radio myself.

It was the emperor’s voice.

Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones.

The bombing almost seemed a natural disaster.

The hell reached so far beyond human understanding

that it was impossible to think of it as the work of resentable human beings.

Shikata ga-nai. — It couldn’t be helped.