My Experience of the Atomic Bombing
Shoji Sawada
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 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall. The bomb was dropped at 8:15 a.m. |
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When the atomic bomb was dropped, I was 13 years old. I was sick that day. At the moment of the bombing I was sleeping at home, about 1,400 m from ground zero. Consequently, I did not see the flash nor feel the shock wave of the blast. Everything seemed to happen instantaneously.
When I came to my senses, I found that I was trapped under our crushed house. I struggled and wiggled, and at last I was able to crawl out of the piles of broken wood and plaster. When I stood upon our crushed house, the world I found was like night – the morning sunshine blocked by dark brown air that changed to yellow and then white, and finally became clear. At that moment, I was shocked to find that all the city of Hiroshima was flattened as far as I could see. I could not grasp what had happened.
Immediately, I heard my mother call my name. Her voice seemed to come from far away, though I knew there was not much distance between her and me, that her voice came from just under my feet. So I inferred that the broken roof and piles of crushed plaster prevented her voice from reaching me directly.
My mother said that she was unable to move, that her legs were caught between big beams or pillars. I tried with all my might to pull away these beams or pillars. But it was far beyond my ability. I called out in vain to adults for help, but those wounded could do nothing more than find a safe place for themselves. During rescue work of my mother, I asked her "Is this a big earthquake?" She said, "No, a huge bomb exploded very close to our house."
I did not notice the fires at first, but they were spreading gradually. At the instant of the atomic bomb explosion, everything that could burn caught fire, though on places only smoldered at first. When I told my mother of the approaching fires, she told me, "You should survive, you should become a good person by studying well." Though she could not see the fire, which was growing stronger, she said, "That's enough, never mind your mother. Get away from here!" I hesitated in leaving my mother. But when a large fire storm arose, my mother said, "Get away right now." It seemed faint, but it was strong, and so I could decide to leave without her. As I escaped, I said, "Forgive me, mother!"
That was the last conversation I had with my mother.
There was no road, and amidst the flames and smoke I could see only piles of houses and badly burned people escaping. Their burned skins were hanging down from their chins or nails which were not burned. At last I could reach the riverside, and swam across the river, and sat on the dry riverbed watching the burning town from the other side. The smoke and flames became a cloud over my head. When I thought of my mother beneath the flames, my heart was broken, and I thought, "Was there not something I could have done to save her?" Even now, the same feeling comes over me whenever I think of my mother.
In my view, I have a double responsibility to abolish nuclear weapons, a responsibility to all human beings. This will be as well a response to my mother's last words. My responsibility stems first from my role as a survivor who experienced the disaster of that day. Today, about 280,000 survivors of atomic bombing living in Japan, Korea, and in other countries are still struggling against physical and mental difficulties, difficulties which grow harder with age. In the rest of the world, including the US, the former Soviet Union, and the other nuclear weapon states, there are millions more radiation victims, the result of the entire nuclear weapons cycle from uranium mining to weapons production to nuclear testing. For survivors of the atomic bombing, it is obvious that using nuclear weapons is the most inexcusable crime in human history. They should never be used against anyone, for any purpose, for any reason, anywhere.
The other source of my particular responsibility is as a scientist and a physicist. The 1954 hydrogen bomb test at Bikini atoll shocked me greatly. At that time, I was an undergraduate student learning physics. I came to believe that nuclear physics was being misused to construct weapons that could destroy all civilization and everything alive on earth. I then began to act, to abolish nuclear weapons, first as a student of physics and later as a physicist.
