Silent Witness: Keepsake belt
Jul. 13, 2021
Continues to exude warmth of father, son
by Kyoko Niiyama, Staff Writer
The silver buckle is imbued with a pattern, and one part of the leather band is discolored, mostly like due to the atomic bomb’s thermal rays. Takao Nakamura, then 14 and a second-year student at Hiroshima Municipal Junior High School (present-day Motomachi High School), was wearing the belt at the time of the bombing. It was a keepsake from his father, Yukio, who had been killed in fierce fighting on the island of Iwo Jima at the end of the Pacific theater of World War II.
His father was drafted into the military in June 1944. Takao’s pregnant mother, Masako, who had been living in Yokohama, evacuated to her family home in the area of Kabe-cho (now located in Hiroshima’s Asakita Ward) with Takao and his sister, Miyoko. After that, the island of Iwo Jima fell in a fierce attack by U.S. military forces.
The oldest son in the family now without a breadwinner, Takao often helped with the household chores. On August 6, 1945, he left the house to help tear down buildings for the creation of fire lanes in the Koami-cho area (now part of Hiroshima’s Naka Ward), wearing work clothes made from his father’s hand-me-downs as well as the leather belt.
The day after the bombing, Masako headed to the central area of Hiroshima to find Takao. She checked each of the faces of corpses lying on the ground but was unable to find him. In a bamboo grove in the area of Shinjo-cho (now part of the city’s Nishi Ward), someone informed her that Takao died there during the night and had been carried to a nearby shrine.
She hurried to the shrine and found a body awaiting cremation wearing the familiar leather belt. Her son’s eyelids had been brutally torn. When she grasped his hand, the skin peeled away and his fingernails fell off.
The belt serves as evidence that her husband and son had lived. “I feel as if the warmth of their skin remains,” said Masako of the belt, which she kept in her care until 1975, the year she donated it to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
(Originally published on July 13, 2021)
