Silent Witness

by Rina Yuasa, Staff Writer

The roughly five-centimeter doll of tied yarn was handmade by a woman who was 20 years old at the time of the atomic bombing. She created it after the war had started and constantly hung it from her work pants as an amulet for good luck.

Katsue Nakamoto, who died in 2018 at the age of 93, was the creator of the doll and lived in the area of Tera-machi (now part of Hiroshima’s Naka Ward). In the morning on August 6, 1945, Ms. Nakamoto left home and headed to a relative’s home in the Nakahiro-machi district (in present-day Nishi Ward). Soon after her arrival, the atomic bomb exploded above Hiroshima. With her face and other parts of her body showered with countless glass shards, she was taken by truck to a national school in the area of Furuichi (now part of Asaminami Ward). After hovering between life and death with symptoms such as bleeding gums, diarrhea, and hair loss, she somehow managed to survive.

When she was 36 years old, Ms. Nakamoto’s husband died of an illness, leaving her to try and raise their three children alone. According to her grandson, Takeshi Morimoto, 48, a resident of Shunan City in Yamaguchi Prefecture, she almost never spoke to her children or grandchildren about her experience in the atomic bombing.

She continued to carefully hang on to the amulet. “That doll saved my life,” she would say. In 1985, she donated the doll on her own to the Peace Memorial Museum, located in Hiroshima’s Naka Ward.

(Originally published on June 19, 2023)