Silent Witness

by Kyoko Niiyama, Staff Writer

Most of the shirt, including the chest area and sleeves, was scorched and torn into a nearly unrecognizable shape. Yoshiro Mutsuoka, then 13 and a first-year student at Hiroshima Municipal Junior High School (present-day Motomachi High School), was wearing the shirt at the time of the atomic bombing. He was exposed to the A-bomb’s thermal rays while engaged in the work of helping tear down buildings to create fire lanes in the area of Koami-cho, located in Hiroshima’s Naka Ward, about 900 meters from the hypocenter.

His home in the district of Fukushima-cho, about two kilometers from the hypocenter in the city’s Nishi Ward, was completely destroyed by the bomb’s blast. Mr. Mutsuoka’s parents carried from their home his grandmother, who was so badly wounded that her skull protruded from her scalp, fleeing to a nearby river embankment. When his mother, Shikayo, returned home, she found that her son had returned. His eyes had been crushed and he had suffered burns over his entire body. She described how he had placed his hands together in prayer as soon as he was able to see her.

Conventional wisdom at the time held that if someone suffering from burns drank water they would die. But because her son wanted something to drink so badly, Shikayo relented and gave him water from a nearby pump, thinking at the same time he would not survive. As it turned out, he died the following morning.

Mr. Mutsuoka and his brother Koji had fought over a trivial issue the day before the atomic bombing, and on the morning of August 6, 1945, they parted without speaking to each other. Koji was interviewed by the Chugoku Shimbun in 2001, and he recounted how on that day, “I lied down next to my brother, who could no longer move, and gazed at the starry sky.”

(Originally published on December 6, 2021)