- Hirotami Yamada, a survivor of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, described the aftermath in very grotesque detail: “some bodies were so torched and broken, you could not tell if they were male or female” said Yamada. He also said that “to kill thousands of innocent people, you must first dehumanize them. The world cannot offer to dehumanize any more people”.
-Kohta Kiya described the sky as “so red we could not get any medicine” and Yamada wanted to “emphasize the fact that people are still dying today”. Close to eight thousand lives are taken each year from the ever present radiation that the atomic bomb emitted. Many of the citizens were so impacted by the explosion that they had no idea what was going on or what had happened after the bomb went off.
-Dr. Michihiko Hachiya explained in his diary of the aftermath how he felt and what he was thinking: “All over the right side of my body I was cut and bleeding. A large splinter was protruding from a mangled wound in my thigh, and something warm trickled into my mouth. My check was torn, I discovered as I felt it gingerly, with the lower lip laid wide open. Embedded in my neck was a sizable fragment of glass which I matter-of-factly dislodged, and with the detachment of one stunned and shocked I studied it and my blood-stained hand."
-After the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, it became very clear that participating in an arms race was not a legitimate excuse to defy the natural laws of human beings. Takeharu Terao describes the memory of the day the bomb was dropped as an “unpleasant disgusting memory that [he] wishes to erase from memory”. Terao was a student of the science department at Hiroshima College and on the morning of August sixth, everything was normal.He was a student at college and also a middle school teacher. He took roll for his junior high class and continued to do his desk work when “suddenly, a bluish-white light flashed like an electric welding spark, gas welding torch, or magnesium burning at a time. The world went white.” At first he thought it was an accident from the gas company, but he quickly realized it was something much more severe. To read more about his amazing eyewitness account, go to http://www.coara.or.jp/~ryoji/abomb/a-bomb1.html.
-Yoshiro Yamawaki was only in sixth grade when the atomic bomb came down on Nagasaki and only about two point two kilometers away from the epicenter of the detonation. He described how he and his brothers crouched down and covered their heads while debris fell everywhere around them. Upon looking up, he saw that “The roof had been blown off as well, and we could see the sky. The pillars and walls were embedded with large numbers of sharp-edged fragments of broken glass. The other houses in the neighbouhood were in the same state of destruction. Across the harbour, the central part of the city was covered in the clouds of dust.”
-Sakue Shimohira described her experience in a similar way, saying how “the air-raid shelter, which should have been empty, was full of people with charred bodies; people with ripped flesh, covered in blood; people whose eyeballs had burst out of their sockets; people whose burns had swollen their bodies by two or three times.” The detailed accounts of people’s experiences with the aftermath of the atomic bomb are truly shocking and clearly show the devastation and destruction of lives, families and cities in Japan.
