The voices of Hiroshima’s children

How the youngest survivors turned trauma into testimony

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ighty years ago, on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, Hiroshima’s residents experienced the unimaginable horror of atomic warfare. The exact number of casualties remains unknown, but nearly 70,000 people perished in the initial blast, and within five years perhaps 200,000 were dead from injuries and radiation. Even the mosquitoes, some early reports noted, were destroyed that day.

Among the injured was a professor at Hiroshima University, Arata Osada. Wounded by shards of glass and stricken with radiation sickness, he later wrote, “For four months I roamed in the land of Death before some fate gave me back my life.”

After recovering, Osada committed himself to promoting children’s welfare and peace, believing peace could be built through education. In 1951 he acted on this principle by working with several dozen schools around the city to solicit over a thousand firsthand accounts from young survivors of the atomic bombing.

As the stories poured in, Osada, his sons and several college students compiled 105 of them into a book. Genbaku no ko: Hiroshima no shonen shojo no uttae (Children of the A-Bomb: Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima) was published that year, and the first English edition appeared in 1959. The book contained emotionally gripping and philosophically poignant expressions from writers as young as four at the time.

“When I remember how my brother suffered and died like that, my heart overflows and I can’t stop crying,” wrote sixth grader Taeko Matsumoto. “At the same time I think that there must never be another war. I pray that all the countries of the world will become bright with peace.”

Others dwelt on the tension between humanity’s ability to do good, and our broken nature. “In the left hand penicillin and streptomycin – in the right hand atom bombs and hydrogen bombs,” commented Yoshiko Uchimura. “Now of all times the peoples of the world ought to reflect coolly on this contradiction.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Osada heard his own echo of Christ’s lesson in the young survivors’ words, and reportedly inscribed copies of the book with, “Listen to the voice of God’s small children.” The letter of thanks he wrote to each of his juvenile writers made his aims clear:

When I think of you taking up your pen . . . when I imagine how the remembered figures of those whom you lost came before your eyes, and how you must have talked to them, I feel that these words which you have written are a sort of prayer for the tranquil repose of their souls. If we can publish them, both within our country and without, these words of yours will build in people’s hearts an enduring, spiritual Memorial Tower, which will surely give joy to the spirits of those who have died. And I believe that not only in Hiroshima, but in all of Japan, and in all the world, people of conscience will offer their hearts’ prayers at this Memorial Tower which you have built.

This work was not easy for the children. “We stand in awe of touching this part of our minds,” confessed Toshiko Ikeda. Fifth grader Ikuko Wakasa wrote reluctantly. “Since I was assigned this for homework, and even though I don’t want to do it, I am making myself remember that awful time.”

These young survivors were taught to sublimate their grief into the redemptive work of peace, to reopen their wounds and do good with their pain. Their voices, Osada wrote, might help “make this tragedy not the end, but the beginning of the new world.”

The children of Hiroshima don’t fit neatly into the usual ways we commemorate the end of the war, which often focuses on military sacrifice and victory. But these young survivors are worth remembering. Their words, decades later, remain a sombre reminder of war’s horrors, and a call to rededicate ourselves to the work of peace.

Caroline Lieffers is an assistant professor of history at MacEwan University in Edmonton. Parts of this text were adapted from her article in the Journal of Juvenilia Studies in 2021. Read more at FaithToday.ca/HistoryLesson. Photo: Hiroshima, 1945 (Aftermath of the Atomic Bomb)