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Miyako Yano

Miyako Yano
Witnessing That Day of Hiroshima

My name is Miyako Yano. I was born at the Kanda Shinto Shrine in Ujina, Hiroshima in 1931 as the forth daughter of Kinji Ikeda, my father who was Shinto priest, and Tomo, my mother. It was the year when the Manchurian Incident broke out with the action of the Japanese forces, the start of the 15 year war, which would lead to the tragedy of Okinawa and to the calamity of the atomic bombings.

I entered the elementary school in 1938. In the previous year, Japan had expanded the war front on the Chinese Continent, launching a full-fledged war against China. In 1941, my elementary school was abolished and incorporated into the national school. In 1944, I finished the compulsory education and entered the Hiroshima city girl's high school. In those days, Japanese forces were losing one battle after another. Soon after I entered the school, upper class students began being mobilized to work in munitions factories. We, the lower grade students were able to engage in our school lessons but only during the first semester. With the deterioration of the war situation, wartime-exception laws were passed by the Cabinet in rapid succession, under which the school curriculum for physical training increased. We dug shelters in the schoolyard, cultivated idle lands to help increase production of provisions, or went to help farming families, who were generally shorthanded because their male members were sent to the battlefield.

In April 1945, the school was closed for one year until March 31 next year. We went everyday to work at military uniform, tobacco or canned food factories. In June 1944, the Japanese navy had lost the major battle near the Marianas. That made it possible for B29s, the US bombers, to begin heavy bombings over Tokyo, Osaka and many other Japanese major cities from their base at the Tenian Island. With the landing of US forces on Okinawa, the ground battle started there, and air raids continued everyday everywhere in the mainland Japan. Strangely, however, Hiroshima was not bombed. In anticipation for the final battle to take place on the mainland, the Second General Military Headquarters was set up in Hiroshima. From early August, citizens were ordered to evacuate from city and their houses began to be demolished to make a huge firelane that would divide the city into northern and southern sectors. It was to protect important institutions from possible fire caused by the bombing. Soldiers, who were called up again after their retirement engaged in the work. Volunteers, local residents and middle and girls' schools students aged 13 or 14 helped them.

On August 5, the students of our school began the work around what is now the Peace Memorial Park. The school at first refused to undertake the work in fear that it would be difficult to evacuate many students from the open space in the event of air raids. But, the military in command insisted that the work had to be accomplished. The school had not choice but to accept the work, assigning more teachers to accompany the students and making the working hours shorter than initially planned. The work started early in the morning and ended at noon.

In the evening on August 5, air raid alerts were issued so frequently that I stayed many hours in the shelter. In the meantime I developed a terrible stomachache. So, I could not go to work on the following day. That saved my life. Six hundred fifty four students and teachers who were engaged in the work on the morning of Aug.6 were caught by the explosion. They were 500 meters from the hypocenter, and all died instantaneously; some must have been trapped under fallen buildings and burned alive in the fire; others must have fled into river and were drown while asking for help. Their bodies have not been found or identified even now, more than 59 years later.

I was in the living room of our house with all my family members and an aunt when the atomic bomb exploded. We were 4km south of the center of the blast. PIKA! Suddenly, a light flashed in the north of the sky. My father rushed toward the backyard, saying that gas company tanks about 2 km north were bombed. He had light burn on his right hand. Others rushed to an air-raid shelter, but I was late in following them. Suddenly I was blown into the air with the tatami mat I was on, as if I had been thrown up by mighty power from underground. The floor was destroyed, and furniture, fittings and flowerpots in the garden blew off. I rushed outside and saw a big pine tree in the garden toppled from its roots. The house was heavily damaged, thorough not completely knocked down.

I looked up to the sky, having no idea about what happened, and I saw there a indescribably strange fireball floating up in the mid-air, colored in red, yellow, orange, purple and other colors. Then, a weird thundercloud swelled and rose up. It became dark as if it was a solar eclipse. I heard a voice from behind a house saying, "Someone is buried under the fallen house! Please help!" My parents ran toward the voice. Soon, Mother came back. She was bleeding from the forehead. She realized only then that a fragment of glass was lodged there, and that because she had run it began bleeding. She went to a hospital nearby. The hospital building was also heavily damaged. An old doctor, despite his own injuries from shattered glass, gave her first aid treatment. Though fragments of glass were stuck in both of my legs, too, I was too stunned to feel pain at that time. Three pieces were removed about 5 years later, but one still remains in my left leg. Like a needle, it moves inside it, and when it touches a nerve running near the sole, it sharply pains me.

With the passing of time, more and more people, all severely burnt came to the hospital. Their skin was peeling off and dangling down, and their faces were so badly swollen and red that even their friends or relatives, if there were any, could not identify who they were. Soon, our shrine became full of escaping people. Then came an order from the military that the injured be sent to the Hiroshima Island, because the bombers might come back. We carried injured people on door boards and two-wheeled hand-drawn carts to the Ujina port until it was dark.

Incessant lines of injured people continued to arrive till late at night, and about 50 people had to stay at the shrine overnight. Our family slept in the open that night. The whole city was on fire and it seemed the fires would burn the sky.

On the next morning, I was stunned. Even those who did not seem injured were dead. Father went out early in the morning to inquire about the safety of our relatives and friends at other shrines. The rest of the family engaged in relief activities. Injured people clung to my leg and cried, saying, "It's hot. Water, please water!" But we had been told not to give water to the heavily burnt people, that water would kill them. Nevertheless, it was very painful to turn down their desperate requests.

For people who were scantily clad in tattered cloths, my mother and elder sister made underwear out of towels. There were no medicines. Flies gathered on the burns and injuries. Maggots swarmed and crawled into the flesh. The injured people were unable to remove them. So, we picked them off with chopsticks. There were so many of them that no sooner had we taken one off than others appeared. People around me may have thought it was too cruel for a little child like me to face such miserably injured people. They told me to go to watch out the fire that was burning corpses.

In a few days, the evacuees began to develop symptoms including high fever, heavy diarrhea, loss of hair, purple spots on the skin and others. Many cried, "Please kill me, please!" Military planes still flew over the sky of Hiroshima (which I later leaned were scout planes). So, it was decided that my immediate elder sister and I would be evacuated to the countryside. On August 15 we went to our relative's house at Hesaka-mura, some 10 km away from our house, walking along burnt out areas. I felt that it might be my last farewell to the family. At the village, we saw quite a few groups of people, who had lost their houses to fire, listening to the radio. There was an important announcement at noon. I could not fully catch the speech, but I knew was the Emperor. I was told by one of the men that Japan finally surrendered. We decided to return home, following the road we had walked along in the morning. On our way home a military truck kindly picked us up, and we managed to arrive home by the evening.

The next day, my elder sister went to the factory to which I had been assigned as a mobilized student and to my school for the first time since the bomb was dropped to report that I was safe. The school buildings had collapsed, but did not catch fire. That evening, she had a high fever and had to lie in bed. Her symptoms were similar to those that had appeared among the people injured by the new bomb. A military doctor checked her and told us that she had contracted dysentery, and that we had to set her apart from us. We did not have any place where we could send her. Besides, as we were all suffering from diarrhea, we actually thought that her sickness was due to malnutrition and poor sanitary conditions. She had to stay in bed for one month and a half.

School reopened on September 1. Because school buildings were heavily damaged, level class students who came to school were engaged in repair work on fine days, while first and second year students who survived went to the places where students and pupils had died to collect their ashes and remains. In the spring in 1946, when relative peace returned, a teacher distributed questionnaire to us, instructing us to fill in answers to the questions, which asked us in detail what had changed in our health since the bombing. Later, it occurred to me that the inquiry had been ordered by the US forces. After the inquiry ended, a Japanese-American soldier (Nisei) came to the school on a Jeep. He interrupted the class and took students to the Atomic Bombs Casualties Commission (ABCC), which was initially set up in the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital. They came back, crying, and said that in a shameful manner, many X-ray photos had been taken of them. This happened over and over again.

I was a good swimmer and kept fit. But beginning in fall of 1948 (when I was 17 years old) I often fainted from anemia. Canker sores and sties appeared; purple spots appeared too, and I felt unbearably weary. A check at a hospital revealed the decrease in the number of my white corpuscles. The doctor, however, had no idea about what had caused these symptoms. After graduating from high school in 1950, I stayed at home idly for about one year. Mother said that I was lazy, but a deep weariness kept me from doing anything active.

On September 9, 1945, the General Headquarters of the occupation (GHQ) issued a press code banning the press coverage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Foreign journalists were banned from entering Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All research data by Japanese scientists and documentation of medical treatments by Japanese doctors were confiscated by GHQ. It was officially determined that Hibakusha were people who were burned or injured within 2 km radius of the hypocenter. Therefore, when the doctor diagnosed me, he concluded that my symptoms had nothing to do with the bomb because I had been 4 km away from the center of the explosion. It was natural that none of us doubted him. In fact, neighbors who engaged in relief work with us, but not my own family, thought for a long time that they, too, were suffering from the bomb.

The Japanese government still bases its Hibakusha-related assistance on the wrong information provided by the US occupation authority. At present, there are many Hibakusha lawsuits over the state's refusal to recognize A-bomb diseases. Dr. Shuntaro Hida and Prof. Shoji Sawada, a physicist, (who are themselves sufferers) have testified in the court about the effects of fallout that fell over wide areas, as well as about low-level radiation. Guess how many Hibakusha have died in agony, while the truth of their suffering was kept secret. My uncle, who engaged in burning corpses with me, and my father, who died of stomach cancer after suffering from tuberculosis without any adequate treatment, were both victims of the bomb.

We humans should not allow any more outrage that would lead to the destruction of our planet. I went to appeal that humans cannot coexist with nuclear weapons. There is no other way for us but to completely abolish nuclear weapons, the ultimate tools of war.

Note: This testimony was given on April 23^rd at Hiroshima-Nagasaki 2005 Conference at Tufts University.

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