Chapter OneThe BlastIt was August 6, 1945, at about 8:15 a.m. The world's first atomic bomb had exploded in the sky above Hiroshima. But not one person knew it was an atomic bomb. I learned afterward that Dr. Fumio Shigeto, the deputy director of the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital, surprised by the strange flash and great destructive energy, had the next day gone to the basement to develop X-ray film that had been left in the darkroom. He found that the film had been exposed and realized that we had been attacked by an atomic bomb. In Hiroshima, this doctor was the only person aware of what had happened. He was different from the rest of us.
That morning, I had felt tired. The night before, I was up late giving out defense instructions during an air-raid alarm. Still, I got up at five that morning, for I had promised to haul some furniture. During those days, I was moving property out of my church—an organ, a piano, Bibles, hymnals, records, pulpit, chairs, clocks, and utensils for the sacrament and other services. It was expensive to rent a truck, and by this point in the war there were few workers available. It was not easy to find laborers, no matter what price you offered to pay. Therefore, I had been moving out these goods in a pushcart I had borrowed, and my wife, Chisako, and a few other women involved in the church were helping. An article such as a small organ could be managed, but with so few hands nothing could be done with the piano. All the young men of my church had been called to serve in the army or military plants, and the elderly had been evacuated from the city. I had to ask for assistance from neighbors who were not believers, and I received help from Mr. Matsuo, Mr. Kawahara, and Mr. Jaguchi, local leaders in our community, in transporting our equipment to Koi, about two miles out of town. This morning, I had promised, in return, to help Mr. Matsuo move some of his daughter's possessions there.
For breakfast I had a cereal of soybean powder and rice bran mixed in hot water and seasoned with salt. Because of the food shortage, many pastors were bedridden with malnutrition. No matter how much I ate of such meals, I never had enough food to fuel my heavy work. It was terrible. Immediately after the meal was over, I was pursued by a sense of hunger. The problem of eating was one of the most serious matters in my life, and it was an embarrassing situation for a pastor.
During those days, Mrs. Tanimoto, realizing that Hiroshima would surely be bombed, thought it best to stay in a safer area—at least during the nights. So, as usual, she was out with our baby girl, Koko, in the northern corner of the city in the Ushita neighborhood, where her friend Mrs. Tada lived. I went to Mr. Matsuo's home a little past six.
We left Mr. Matsuo's place, after borrowing the cart and getting ropes for tying up the articles. It was already near seven.
Passing through the neighborhoods of Noboricho, Teppocho, Hatchobori, and Hondori, and by the Hiroshima Central Post Office, we crossed the Motoyasu bridge and got to Nakajima-honmachi. After passing through Tenmacho, we reached Koi. According to Japanese scientists who carried out an investigation after the explosion, the world's first atomic bomb exploded five hundred meters above the south gate of the Hiroshima Central Post Office. Fortunately, we had passed that spot forty minutes before. Some people in the city had not yet opened the doors of their houses. Most had just opened their shutters.
Along the streets that morning, groups of industrial workers, students, and young men and women mobilized from farming and fishing villages, as well as soldiers, were beginning their work of clearing away wooden houses in the area. The city at this time was implementing its sixth great house-clearing program. Due to the extensive American air raids that had attacked other Japanese cities—but not yet Hiroshima—the city was preparing for possible heavy B-29 raids by establishing fire prevention lanes and by creating access to the seven rivers running through the city for water that could be used to douse fires caused by a bombing. The hope was that at least a part of Hiroshima would remain undestroyed by any such fire.
We had crossed the city on the main road running from east to west, and along this road we had seen these workers heading to their assigned places to begin the day's work. In one spot, a soldier was sawing a pillar of a house, and another, wearing a helmet and using a heavy hammer, was knocking down walls and fences that interfered with the razing of houses. Some high school boys and girls were vigorously pulling on ropes to collapse the house. Members of the volunteer corps who had come from neighboring villages were pushing and tugging at large pieces of timber from the crushed buildings to clear them away one by one. People were heaving and shouldering boards and other material. Some were pulling loaded carts toward the suburbs. The streets looked like a battlefield.
We reached the country house of the Satows, which was located by a small hill beyond the nearby railway station, at about 8:00 a.m. Mr. Satow had been the president of a rayon factory and had died the previous year. The estate was looked after by only a watchman. Mrs. Satow was living in our neighborhood. But this spot outside of town was comparatively safe from possible air raids. It had a strong, fireproof storage place, and many evacuated goods were being kept there.
As we were in front of the porch, Mr. Matsuo gave a fearful cry: "Oya!" He was in his fifties, and he must have felt something predicting an air raid. I stood there, puzzled by his cry, and lifted my head to look at the sky. Just then a sharp flash of light streaked out of a dim, brown cloud from the east toward the west. Previously, I had experienced a machine-gun strafing from a plane. Feeling the same kind of fear, I took a few steps backward and dropped to the ground on my belly between two garden rocks near the porch.
At the same time, a strong blast of wind filled the air. My ears were stunned. I placed my fingers in my ears and opened my mouth, doing what I had been taught in defense maneuvers. Small bits of shattered material fell on my body. "Good heavens," I thought, "what hard luck to suffer from an air raid way out in a place like this." When it seemed to calm down, I got up and found that the glass door in the entrance had been shattered to pieces. I crawled into a pile of counterpanes because I thought the planes were still soaring above. But, as everything seemed quiet, I came out. I couldn't see Mr. Matsuo and shouted for him. He came out slowly from under the counterpanes. We both took off our shirts to find out if we had been injured, but we had no wounds. I felt embarrassed for being so confused.
This place was strongly protected from the atomic bomb. The slope of the hill stretched out toward the south and stood as a screen from the center of the explosion. The estate was in the valley, and, above it, there was solid earth. A Western-style room next to the porch had also protected the spot where I was standing. A small blast was all I felt of the first atomic bomb used in the history of mankind.
I was surprised when I stepped away from the house. Injured women, both young and old, appeared, one after another, with wounded faces and limbs. Half-naked soldiers, bleeding from injuries, were running out of dugouts they had made in the side of the hill. The cement fences around the house had been smashed, and the roof of the estate blown away. The inside of the house was chaos. All its glass windows had been shattered. The houses standing on both sides of the estate were on fire. I presumed that the bomb had hit somewhere nearby. Everyone in Hiroshima thought it was his own neighborhood that had been hit.
One young mother had been wounded in her breast and could not find a way to stop the bleeding. She was crying out for something to be done about it, but I did not know what to do myself. I told her that maybe the soldiers might know how to stop the blood. An old woman came running toward me saying, "I've been hit." She had a boy on her back. With one hand she was pressing her head where blood was trickling out. I took the boy on my back, and, taking the woman's hand, I asked, "Where is the first-aid station?" She said, "In the school over there." I took her to it.
Here I was again surprised. The school grounds were covered with broken pieces of glass, and the hall and classrooms were in confusion and crowded with wounded people. A few medical officers and nurses were running about treating the injured. While I was wondering how so many people could have been wounded at once, someone cried out "Taihi!" Run for your lives! Without a second thought, I jumped into a nearby concrete gutter. I soon came out after learning it was a mistaken alarm. Thinking that it was useless to stay here any longer, I rushed back toward the estate.
Along the road leading to the hilltop, there was a long line of wounded people. "How," I thought, "could so great a number of people be injured?" Until then, Hiroshima had been bombed twice by enemy aircraft but only on a small scale. When bombs had been dropped, there had been much loud noise from the aircraft. However, only ten people were killed at that time. But many people had been injured in this bombing, and yet there had been no great waves of bombers.
Could I have been dreaming before and not known of an immense air raid that had struck Hiroshima? I began questioning myself and even became doubtful of my own senses. Thinking that I should take a look at the city, I went to the end of the estate's garden. This spot was about three kilometers from the center of Hiroshima, and it offered a good bird's-eye view of the city.
Copyright © 2026 by Kiyoshi Tanimoto. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
