AKITA Kozo

Kozo was a third-year student at First Hiroshima Prefectural Junior High School. At the time of the nuclear bombing, he and his classmates were working at an aircraft factory in Hiroshima’s Koi neighbourhood, around 800 metres from the hypocentre of the explosion.

His father, Masayuki, was at home at the time. The bomb’s blast threw him through the air and he was crushed under the collapsed house.

“My head was badly injured, and I was bloody from head to toe from the broken glass, but what came across my mind then was only the safety of my son,” he wrote in an essay years later.

Hiroshima was a sea of fire. “It’s quite impossible to go there,” Masayuki thought, but he made his way by foot along a railway bridge to a first aid station in Gion.

“As I went on, I heard groaning voices here and there. A wife was calling for her husband, a husband his wife, parents their children, brothers their brothers. They called out names desperately with all their failing strength.”

Masayuki called out his son’s name: “Kozo! Kozo! Akita Kozo of the First Middle School …”

He stumbled over piles of dead bodies along the way. All around him, he heard the desperate pleas of the dying. “Give me water! Please!”

Masayuki was on the verge of fainting but pressed on towards his son’s assigned worksite in Koi. When he arrived, he found the aircraft factory filled with dead bodies.

“Amid the stench of rotting flesh, I saw 50 or 60 people suffering and groaning. Their faces were deformed to such an extent that they looked far from human,” he recalled.

His wife joined him in the search. They ran to and fro, calling out their son’s name. “Kozo, your father is here!” “Akita Kozo of the First Middle School, your mother is here!” “Does anyone see Akita Kozo?”

Then they heard a faint voice, “Father? Mother?” It was their child, on the verge of death.

“Sorry, Papa. Sorry, Mama,” he uttered, before recounting what had happened that morning. He said that his classmates had died one after another, right before his eyes.

The following morning, with Hiroshima still ablaze, Kozo took his last breath.

“Our son Kozo passed away together with his school friends,” Masayuki wrote, recalling Kozo’s miserable state, with the remnants of his school cap burnt onto his head.

As a young boy, Kozo had hoped one day to become a doctor. His father believed that this profession would be well suited to his nature and character.

However, during the war, Kozo decided that he instead wanted to become a soldier, and insisted on enrolling in the military preparatory school. This troubled Masayuki greatly, as he knew that the registration process would involve disclosing to Kozo that he had been adopted as a baby.

“I had not intended to keep it secret for his whole life, but my blood ran cold at the thought of the effect it might have on him if I disclosed the secret of his birth now,” Masayuki recalled.

Years after the bombing, Masayuki helped establish an association of parents whose children attended First Hiroshima Prefectural Junior High School and were killed in the bombing. They compiled a collection of essays reflecting on their children’s deaths.

A condensed version was later published as a book titled The Twinkling Stars Know Everything.

“As one of the bereaved, I would be more than happy if these essays, written by the families of the deceased, were read by as many people as possible, so that mankind could be spared a recurrence of such tragedy,” Masayuki wrote in an introduction.

“Our voices may be small and weak, but our heart-rending appeals will surely become an important step in the pursuit of world peace.”