“The other day, I shared my hibakusha experience with a group of energetic sixth graders. When I was finished, some fifteen or so students came up to me. “Was that a true story?” one of them asked. I was shocked – I had to catch my breath. These children who grew up knowing only peace, these people who have never experienced war – for them, my experience sounds like fiction. I strongly believe that we must continue to communicate to future generations the horrors of nuclear weapons and warfare.

Takeoka Chisako”

“My mother was a nurse at the military hospital. I survived the initial blast, and headed down through the billowing smoke and fires of Koiue to Aioi Bridge to look for her. The river below was jam-packed with swollen corpses. Upstream, I saw a man pulling bodies out of the water and asked him if he’d seen my mother. ‘You must have traveled a long way to get here,’ he replied. ‘Your mother is not alive. Every nurse from this hospital is dead. So are the military doctors, as of this morning.’ I picked up a tree branch and began to wade through the bodies, many of them 2-3 times the size from soaking up the water. My mother had golden fillings on her front two teeth; I pried open the mouths of some 20, 30 corpses before giving up. Faint purple dots began to form on my arm, although they eventually disappeared.

Six days later, with the help of my neighbor, I was able to locate my mother at a school campus in Enami. She was in rough shape. Her right eye was plucked out of its socket and her nose was broken, with most of the flesh stripped off. I took her to another school campus – one that staff members from the military hospital used as an evacuation site – and convinced a surviving veterinarian to extract her right eyeball. There was no anesthesia, of course. We laid her atop a counter in the back kitchen and had four surviving soldiers pin her down as the veterinarian proceeded to carve out her eye. Her screams haunt me to this day.

A couple years after the bombing, I got married and gave birth to a baby boy. Shortly after he was born, purple dots began to form all over his body. Soon he refused my breastmilk, and passed away 17 days after he was born. They were the same dots that I saw on my own arm while searching for my mother.”