OSHIMA Chikako

A first-year student at Nagasaki Prefectural Girls’ High School, Chikako lived with her mother and grandmother. Her father, who had been a skilled engineer at a Mitsubishi steelmaking plant, died in a work accident prior to the nuclear bombing.

Chikako had attended Shiroyama Elementary School before progressing to the girls’ school.

She was exposed to the nuclear bombing and died eight days later, on 17 August.

In the neighbourhood where Chikako lived, another family lost a young girl, 10-year-old Fukutome Minako, the following day. Their guardians decided to cremate the two girls together in a vegetable field; they dressed them in kimonos, applied light makeup to their faces and folded their hands neatly on their chests.

Just at that moment, a junior high school student named Matsuzoe Hiroshi happened to pass by. He had sustained a slight burn injury from the bomb’s heat at his home 3.8 kilometres north of the hypocentre and was returning home from seeing a pharmacy student about the injury.

Hiroshi was struck by the sight of the two girls in beautiful kimonos and came to take a closer look, wondering how they had died.

Soon the pyre was set alight, and Hiroshi fled, not wanting to watch the girls burn. He didn’t know their names, but the beautiful, mournful scene was etched in his mind forever.

In 1974, Hiroshi learned that a television station had put out a call for artwork related to the bombing. He had always wanted to paint the girls in kimonos, and knew the time had come. Completing the painting all in one night, Hiroshi shed tears as he reflected on how the lovely, innocent girls had fallen victim to the nuclear bomb.

In 1988, Hiroshi ran into a former neighbor in a hospital waiting room by chance. The woman was able to identify the girls in his painting as Chikako and Minako, and from there Hiroshi pieced together more of their story.

Hiroshi’s painting, A Sad Farewell, is on display at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. He also published a picture book titled Girls in Kimonos.

Minako’s mother, Shina, hoped to also commemorate her daughter and the other victims with a statue; a sculpture titled Children Trusting in the Future was placed in the museum’s rooftop garden when the current building was opened in 1996.

In Nagasaki and beyond, the image of Chikako and Minako in kimonos has become a well-known and poignant symbol of nuclear tragedy and the wish for a peaceful world.