Keiko Ogura, an atomic bomb survivor, spoke to University of Idaho students in a webinar on Tuesday in partnership with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, CLASS and the Habib Institute for Asian Studies. She discussed her experience living through the 1945 bombings.
Ogura was born in 1937 in Hiroshima and raised within a few hundred meters of the eventual hypocenter. During World War II, major Japanese cities suffered frequent air raids from American aircraft dropping incendiary bombs that leveraged the combustible material of Japanese construction as fuel for district destroying fires. This tactic, known as firebombing, led to the creation of a force composed of working age citizens, defined as those over 12 years old, to dismantle buildings along major streets and create fire breaks.
Ogura’s family did not live close to any of the public shelters, which worried her father. Because of this, he moved the family to a small town on the northwest side of Futaba-yama mountain, 2.4 kilometers north of the eventual hypocenter.
Hiroshima Castle was used as a military encampment for over 10,000 soldiers. An underground bunker housed operations that monitored enemy aircraft passing over the country and initiated air raid warnings. Hiroshima residents were repeatedly woken by warnings on the night of Aug. 5, 1945, as many planes flew overhead.
After sunrise, the commanding officers lifted the lockdown and stepped outside with a changing shift of strategic communications personnel. Inside the bunker, a single B-29 bomber known as the Enola Gay caused a state of alarm, but it went unheard by the commanding officers and no air raid warning was put in place.
Ogura’s older brother had worked the previous day in the city center demolishing buildings on a road now known as Peace Boulevard. On Aug. 6, 1945, he was working along with 1,000 other students in the potato fields north of the main station. They paused their work to look at a silver dot in the sky.
“Nobody could imagine that a bomb could be dropped from so high in the sky,” Ogura said.
At 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Her brother did not see a bomb fall from its underside and turned back to work before the blast. Those who did not turn away went blind.
Ogura’s father told her to keep close to home that day. He had a bad feeling after the previous night’s air raid warnings. She was outside walking the street in front of her house and saw a flash illuminate everything—seconds later, an impossibly strong wind struck her down.
“I was in a tornado,” Ogura said. She landed in the street unconscious and woke to see a small burning cottage. She thought she had slept until evening; it was quiet and dark. The first thing she heard was her little brother’s cries. She rushed home to find their windows had blown inward, a thousand knives of glass lodged in the opposite wall.
Her father was still home, running late for work. Miraculously, he had been standing at a point along the wall shielded by a large pine tree. Her little brother was bleeding from a roof tile hitting him on the head. Charcoal rained from the sky as the city lit up in fires. Ogura’s white blouse became stained, and unaware of the gravity of the situation worried her mother would scold her.
During the war, Japanese civilians had been told Shinto Shrines, Buddhist temples and schools would be first aid stations. Ogura’s family lived close to Waseda Shrine, and she set out to find bandages. People covered in burns with peeling skin ran, or if they could not, clawed their way up the shrines’ stairs holding hope of medical relief.
“Water.” The thousands of injured could only say one word. Ogura ran to the well outside of her family’s home, filling a bucket as fast as she could and returning to the shrine’s stairs. Two people were alive, speaking and reaching for the water. One was smiling, one had a face of fear. They died in front of Ogura, a girl of 8 years and 2 days. For 10 years, she had nightmares that she had killed them by giving them poisoned water.
When the bomb ignited, the fireball measured millions of degrees within microseconds, charring the people directly below the hypocenter and igniting buildings for more than a kilometer. Then the shockwave hit, crumbling buildings onto the thousands of people who ran frantically trying to strip themselves of what was burning.
The force of the blast displaced the air, creating a vacuum that briefly extinguished fires just seconds after they ignited. However, this vacuum triggered a secondary blast as air rushed back toward the explosion’s center, striking survivors from all directions and intensifying the devastation.
The shockwave had immobilized many people under fallen debris. Those who could came to help the trapped people, but many had to be left behind to burn alive screaming for help as the smoldering embers grew in flames.
Her older brother had climbed Mount Futaba-yama on his way home, witnessing the destruction from above.
“The city was completely destroyed. It became a sea of flame,” said Ogura.
Ogura’s mother had said that her older brother was lucky to be working in the fields. Everyone in their town believed the bomb had been dropped on them. It was the only explanation for the scale of devastation. Her brother came home covered in burns and talked about the hundreds who had made their way to the train station, hoping to get away from the destruction.
The city burned through the night. In the following 2 days, thin lines of smoke rose from the blackened wasteland as the thousands of dead were cremated. People who spent too long in the city center searching for their loved ones died soon after, unaware of the radiation poisoning they were being exposed to.
Three days after the bombing, a single streetcar became operational again, though only able to operate on a small stretch of track. Seeing just one thing that wasn’t broken gave people hope and energy to rebuild, according to Ogura.
After the war, American students sent resources, crayons and clothes to the people of Hiroshima who had lost everything. Food, water and shelter were scarce. Orphans gathered under the remaining structures, crying for family that no longer existed.
It took years to rebuild Hiroshima and just as long to forgive the bombers. In war, Ogura says, a punch is thrown, and each subsequent punch is an act of revenge for what came before. It is easy to tell someone else to stop; it is hard to make that choice for oneself. The people of Hiroshima forgave rather than retaliating.
In 2011, Ogura was appointed as the official Atomic Bomb Storyteller by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation. In the center of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park burns the Flame of Peace, a sculpture of two hands cupping a flame that will not be put out until the last atomic weapon is disassembled.
Ogura is one of the few remaining survivors from the atomic bomb and holds a story that must be continued so that the world does not forget the devastation of atomic weapons.
Joshua Reisenfeld can be reached at arg-news@uidaho.edu.