FUJITA Kumiko

At the time of the nuclear bombing, one-year-old Kumiko was with her mother, Sano, as well as her brother, three of her sisters, and two children from a neighbouring family.

They had spent the morning climbing Kakinokiyama Hill, believing that it would be safer there in the event of a US air raid. Kumiko’s 11-year-old sister, Kinuko, was carrying her on her back.

Having almost reached the top of the hill, the group of eight stopped beneath a large sumac tree to rest. Then they heard a strange droning noise in the distance and spotted two aircraft above. Moments later, there was a blinding flash.

“Lie down!” Sano shouted.

“Ouch! Ouch!” Kinuko screamed, jumping around frantically. The sash holding Kumiko to her back had caught on fire. Sano tried desperately to smother the flames.

Horribly burned and in shock, they were then transported to a cave that served as an air raid shelter during the war. “Water! Water!” the children begged when they arrived. Sano crawled on all fours deep into the cave to find some for them.

With each passing hour, the children grew weaker and weaker due to their burn and blast injuries and their exposure to the bomb’s radiation. “When the children stopped asking for water,” Sano recalled, “it meant they had died.”

Kinuko was the first to succumb to her injuries, two days after the bombing, followed soon after by Kumiko. “Baby Kumiko died in my arms,” her mother remembered.

Then Kumiko’s eight-year-old sister, Fujiko, died, followed by her five-year-old brother, Mitsuhide. “I kept thinking that human beings shouldn’t die so easily,” Sano wrote years later in an essay reflecting on the deaths of her children.

Another of her daughters, 14-year-old Akiko, was also killed in the attack at a different location. She had been working in a factory close to ground zero as a mobilised student. Sano’s husband, Hatsuichi, was killed, too.

Only one of her six children survived: 17-year-old Hatsue, who was on the hill with them that fateful morning. The two children from the neighbouring family also survived.

When they left the cave after almost a week to seek help, Sano turned to the bodies of her deceased children (Kumiko, Kinuko, Fujiko and Mitsuhide) and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be back to get you later.”

The injured survivors stumbled along. Hatsue’s face was so swollen that she had to use her thumbs to lift her eyelids to see what was in front of her.

Eventually, they came across a soldier, who offered to take them to a temporary relief station. Sano told him that she wished she had died alongside her children at the cave.

When they reached the makeshift hospital, Sano and Hatsue and their neighbours received little by way of treatment, as there were no medicines or other supplies. They spent hours each day picking maggots from their festering wounds.

Over time, Sano’s burns healed but formed thick keloid scars. For the rest of her life, she struggled to eat, as her mouth was partially “welded together” due to her injuries.

Hatsue preferred never to think or talk about the bombing and its aftermath. It gave her nightmares. “I was really scared at that time. The mere thought of that experience makes me shudder,” she reflected years later.

“We atomic bomb survivors manage to live on somehow.”