HAYASHI Kayoko

A fourth-year student at Nagasaki Prefectural Girls’ High School at the time of the nuclear bombing, Kayoko was remembered with affection by her friend and classmate Iwanaga Miyoko.

Growing up, the delicate and flexible Kayoko excelled in gymnastic exercises but wasn’t a strong runner. She could play the piano and had perfect pitch, easily naming the notes she heard in music class.

Kayoko and Miyoko both lived in central Nagasaki, near the city’s famous Megane Bridge. Miyoko’s family owned a hardware store for metal items and had a number of live-in male employees. “The guys are scary,” Kayoko, an only child, would say with a laugh when she came over to visit.

Miyoko cherished a class photo from their first year of high school in 1942. Due to their similar heights, she and Kayoko were lined up next to each other in the back row.

As the Pacific War increasingly turned against Japan, Kayoko, Miyoko and their classmates were mobilised from October 1944 to work at a Mitsubishi weapons factory that manufactured torpedoes. Miyoko remembered wishing she could go to school instead.

When the Allies began bombing Japan, the weapons factory divided its operations between various locations to mitigate damage. Not physically robust, Kayoko was transferred to the factory’s payroll section, which had relocated to Shiroyama Elementary School in Nagasaki’s Urakami area.

Miyoko, on the other hand, elected to work in a part of the factory housed in a tunnel east of the city centre – her relatives lived nearby.

On 9 August, Kayoko was at work on the third floor of Shiroyama Elementary School when the nuclear bomb detonated. The school was roughly 500 metres from the hypocentre. Out of the 152 people working at the school that day, 132 were killed.

From 10 August, Kayoko’s parents searched for her every day, at one point returning home with a body they believed to be hers – but they soon realised it wasn’t.

They finally found Kayoko’s body buried in the rubble on Shiroyama Elementary School’s third floor on 30 August, three weeks after the bombing. The schoolyard was still littered with bones. Kayoko’s parents cremated her in a corner of the yard.

School resumed in October 1945. When Miyoko heard that Kayoko had been killed in the bombing, she couldn’t help raising her voice in surprise. But, numbed by the scale of death and destruction in Nagasaki, she also recalled feeling paralysed by grief.

Kayoko’s mother, Tsue – whom Miyoko remembered as “just as dainty as Kayoko was” – blamed herself for her daughter’s death. Kayoko had been reluctant to go to work the day of the bombing, but her mother had urged her to go.

Parents of mobilised students were financially compensated for their children’s deaths, but Tsue told Miyoko she was too upset to take the money.

“Why don’t you imagine that Kayoko is not dead but is still working far away and sending money back home?” Miyoko suggested. That seemed to console Tsue.

In 1949, Kayoko’s mother donated 50 cherry saplings to Shiroyama Elementary School in memory of her daughter and the other female students killed by the nuclear bombing. Kayoko had been fond of flowers.

The cherry trees were planted in the schoolyard. A number remain there today, and second-generation saplings have been sent across Japan. The story of Kayoko and the cherry trees has been featured in picture books, songs, documentaries and peace education materials.