EGASHIRA Harumi

(江頭 晴美)

Girl killed by the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki at 5 years of age

Date of death: 9 August 1945

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Harumi was born the third of five siblings. With a gap of six years between her and her next eldest sibling, Harumi’s parents had almost given up hope of having another child. They were delighted when Harumi was born.

Chiyoko, her mother, remembered her infancy as a time of great happiness for the family.

Harumi grew up in Nagasaki’s Shiroyama neighbourhood. Chiyoko worked as a teacher at Shiroyama Elementary School.

After the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, it was reported in the newspaper, without much detail, that “a new type of bomb” had been dropped on the city.

Ukichi suggested at breakfast on 8 August that the family consider evacuating his mother, Fuku, who lived with them, and the girls to a safer place. This was despite the fact that the Shiroyama neighbourhood – a residential area removed from central Nagasaki and the city’s manufacturing facilities – was considered at low risk of air raids.

Still, as a precaution, Fuku and the four girls were spending their days in an air-raid shelter.

Despite air-raid warnings, the Egashira children were cheerful on the morning of 9 August. Harumi and her sisters compared the snacks their mother was putting in each of their emergency bags.

Harumi’s elder brother, 13-year-old Takashi, with a bright smile, asked Chiyoko to consent to a plan he and Ukichi had hatched to go fishing the following Sunday.

Fuku and the four girls left for the air-raid shelter, with 11-year-old Mitsuko leading six-year-old Harumi and four-year-old Kazumi by the hand. However, the youngest child, one-year-old Naomi, would not stop crying in the shelter, so Fuku took her back home to have Chiyoko take her to work with her. Although school wasn’t in session, the teachers were busy with various tasks.

At 11.02 am, the nuclear bomb exploded above Nagasaki’s Urakami area, including the Shiroyama neighbourhood. By that time, Mitsuko, Harumi, Kazumi and their grandmother had returned home from the air-raid shelter. It was there that they were exposed to the bomb.

Chiyoko and Naomi, meanwhile, were exposed at Shiroyama Elementary School, just as Chiyoko was putting Naomi down for a nap in the vacant nurse’s room. Shards of shattered glass and splinters of wood pierced Chiyoko’s back as the bomb’s shockwave ripped through the school building, and she lost consciousness.

She awoke still holding Naomi, who was covered in ash and Chiyoko’s blood. Although the school’s concrete structure was still standing, everything inside had been smashed to pieces. Outside, all the green leaves had been stripped from the trees. Chiyoko watched as the city burned.

Eventually, Ukichi – who had no visible injuries – found them and took them to a farmer’s potato cellar that was being used as an air-raid shelter. He cared for Chiyoko and Naomi, who were suffering attacks of nausea, while making repeated trips to their neighbourhood to search for their missing family members.

At around noon on 11 August, Ukichi returned to the cellar holding a pot containing pieces of bones. He had found the remains of his daughters and mother in the burnt ruins of their home.

A neighbour had told him that Harumi’s body – half burned – had been found in front of the neighbour’s house. She was identified by a nametag.

Chiyoko held the pot and lamented, “Forgive me, please. Why couldn’t I die with you?”

“When I saw what my children had become, it was so awful that tears wouldn’t even fall from my eyes,” Chiyoko later recalled in a testimony.

Harumi’s elder brother, Takashi, died on 14 August from burns sustained while working as a mobilised student.

Her father, Ukichi, died from acute radiation sickness on 9 September. As he took his last breaths, he said to Chiyoko, an expression of joy on his face, “My mother and our children have all come to welcome me.” Chiyoko begged him to take her with him and sobbed through the night.

In the following years, Chiyoko rebuilt her home, continued teaching and raised Naomi – silently but desperately hoping that the bomb would not claim her last daughter. She was a strong advocate for peace and nuclear abolition for the rest of her life.

“We are all born into this world as human beings, and then we grow up, and we have children that we love,” Chiyoko said in a testimony. “The children didn’t know anything about the war. They were reduced to black charcoal before they could even call out ‘Mother’. They were reduced to ashes.”

The Egashira family. Harumi is in the centre, alongside her sister Kazumi. (Photo courtesy of YOSHIFUKU Kanami)

Main source: Genbaku Sensei (A-bomb Teacher) by Egashira Chiyoko

The Children’s Peace Memorial was established in 2025 by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) to commemorate the 80th anniversaries of the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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