A Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor learnt English at 80 to promote peace.
By Cindy Lee in Hiroshima
Teruko Yahata, is a Hiroshima A-bomb survivor. Determined to promote peace, she learnt English at the age of 80 to share her experience through talks.
“I was a child at the time of the bombing, so I didn’t know anything about the historical fact,” says the 86-year-old survivor. “But as I grew older and learned about facts, I found out that the Japanese government at that time was wrong, it made me angry.”
She attended a conference in Singapore 11 years ago, where she finally discovered the truth about World War II and the war crimes committed by Japan. At that time, she was 76.
Yahata recalls a time in her childhood when the people in Japan were convinced that their country would win the war.
The United States Military dropped an atomic bomb in Hiroshima killing 140 thousand victims on August 6, 1945.
“I was eight years old when the atomic bomb was dropped…… All of a sudden, the sky was flashing, illuminated in blueish white,” she recalls, describing that morning. The force and impact of the atomic bomb knocked her to the ground, causing her to lose consciousness.
“The inside of the house was turned upside down, with shattered glass scattered everywhere,” she recalls. Although they lived 2.5 kilometres from the hypocenter, her family of eight felt the full force of the explosion’s devastation.
“Let’s die together, while we are still together.” She remembers her mother’s words as they thought they would surely die soon. Her mother covered every one in her family with a large quilt.
“I will never forget what it felt like as a child to be surrounded by my family in the warmth and security of the blanket,” she recalls.
“We fled to the mountain when the huge drops of rain began to fall, and it soaked us to the skin. We did not know that it was the black rain,” she says.
Black rain is the result of huge amounts of radioactive matters entering the atmosphere, which may affect the human body.
“Some of the dead bodies were completely burned, with their skin peeling off from their arms and dangling from their fingertips,” Yahata says.
“The crippled figure of tens and hundreds of bodies were flocking towards us like a legion of ghosts,” she says, describing the victims coming from the area near the hypocenter.
“The city continued to burn through the night” she adds.
When she received first aid at a school, she was terrified by the horrifying screams and cries of mourning.
“In the hallways and classrooms…….. The floor was strewn with tightly packed bodies, faces blistered so badly that they could no longer open their eyes,” she says.
While some could still be saved, many lost their lives.
“I was shocked to find bags that were not filled with sweets, but ashes of cremated bodies,” she says, adding that she was hungry and desperate for food at that time.
“Among the 2,000 bodies cremated there, a large number of them were sacrificed during demolition duty. They were first and second grade students,” she says.
Yahata dare not imagine how much pain the children suffered and how much they desired to live.
“Even until now, the memories of those scenes still haunt me from time to time,” she says.
She recalls a victim kept opening a lid of a pot so that she could spit blood into it during the night. She died from coughing up blood at the end.
Another scenario that was ironed in her memory was about her father’s friend. “Everyone put their hands together in prayers as we looked at the remains of our once bright and cheerful man,” she says. The skeleton of her father’s friend was found one week after the devastating day.
“Even now when I look at the drawings depicting this scene, an eerie sensation comes over me, and in those silent moments, I feel that something is tugging at my heart,” she says.
The damage done by the atomic bomb continued to haunt those who survived. Yahata’s friend Susan Kimiko was diagnosed with acute leukemia 16 years after the bombing. She passed away when she was 25.
Beyond suffering from the loss of loved ones, Yahata and other survivors also face discrimination.
“Many suffered from burns on their bodies and faces, while some developed keloid. When they went to school, others called them monsters…Survivors were all exposed to radiation,” she says.
She shares that young people were told they were not good for marriages. There were also rumours saying radiation was contagious. “But it is not true. Some children were exposed to radiation in their mothers’ wombs causing deformities,” she says.
“All that I have left to do is to tell the truth of the atomic bomb to the world and to continue to sound the alarm bells,” she says, explaining the reason why she is still working hard to spread the message of peace to this day.
Edited by Jen Lam
Sub-edited by Iris Jiang
