KISHIDA Eiji

On their way to see a doctor, four-year-old Eiji and his mother, Ayako, were exposed to the nuclear bombing while crossing Hiroshima’s Yanagi Bridge, roughly 1,300 metres east of the hypocentre.

Both Eiji and his mother suffered severe burns. With swollen faces and skin peeling away from their blackened bodies, relatives only managed to recognise the pair by Ayako’s voice and a unique pin in her hair.

Ayako’s younger sister, Setsuko, who was 13 years old at the time, recalled Eiji’s many pleas for water as he suffered in agony. She held open his mouth and gave him juice from a tangerine.

Ayako died four days after the attack and Eiji died on 21 August. “My little nephew was at a time of life when he was so lovable,” Setsuko recalled.

Soldiers cremated their bodies in a ditch, throwing oil over them and rolling the corpses to ensure they burned completely. Setsuko remembered the clinical comments of the men as they worked: “The belly of this one isn’t burned yet. The brain is only burned half way.”

Overwhelmed by “this most grotesque violation of human dignity”, Setsuko couldn’t even cry. For years, she felt guilty for not having grieved appropriately as Eiji and Ayako burned, until she eventually learned that such emotional numbing was a natural psychological response to protect the mind.

Setsuko went on to become a leading advocate for nuclear disarmament, including as a member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. In 2017, she jointly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the campaign at a ceremony in Norway.

“Whenever I remember Hiroshima, the first image that comes to mind is of my four-year-old nephew, Eiji – his little body transformed into an unrecognisable melted chunk of flesh. He kept begging for water in a faint voice until his death released him from agony,” she told the assembled dignitaries.

“To me, he came to represent all the innocent children of the world, threatened as they are at this very moment by nuclear weapons. Every second of every day, nuclear weapons endanger everyone we love and everything we hold dear. We must not tolerate this insanity any longer.”