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Silent Witness

Silent Witness: Tweezers used to remove glass fragments

Dozens of glass shards impaled in bodies of wounded

by Rina Yuasa, Staff Writer

Many people suffered wounds from the innumerable shards of glass shattered by the atomic bomb’s blast that had hit their bodies at the instant of the explosion. A pair of tweezers, about 20 centimeters in length, was used to treat the wounded by Fujio Oka, a corpsman in the Army Marine Artillery Corps.

Three days after the atomic bomb was dropped, Mr. Oka, 25 at the time, went to a temporary relief station located amid the burned ruins. “There was no place to stand,” he wrote in his personal account of that time. First-aid was provided with cooking oil and mercurochrome solution, but supplies soon ran out. Dozens of glass shards were impaled in the bodies of the wounded. “When I would insert the tweezers into the wounds on patients’ backs, I heard the sound of the tweezers scratching glass,” he wrote. “When I removed the glass, (the patients) would groan.”

When he reached the relief station, some of the wounded on the verge of dying would reach the end of their lives without being able to speak their names. “It was hell on earth,” Mr. Oka wrote. He himself experienced the atomic bombing in the schoolyard of Hiroshima Girls’ Commercial School (in the city’s present-day Minami Ward), where he had been stationed. The school was located about 2.1 kilometers from the hypocenter, and despite suffering severe burns on the left side of his face in the bombing, he found a way to the relief station.

Mr. Oka donated the tweezers to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 2009.

(Originally published on February 14, 2023)

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