Silent Witness

by Kyoko Niiyama, Staff Writer

The radio broken in the atomic bombing was said to produce sound for about six months afterward. However, because it also generated lots of noise, the radio was considered to be useless. Still, Yoshinobu and Shizue Tsuchiya, the radio’s owners, held on to and cherished the radio because, “It saved us.”

The radio was originally a gift from Shizue’s father in August 1943, when the couple married. It was the latest model at that time. The brand-new radio marked for the couple the start of a family.

On the morning of the day of the atomic bombing, Shizue was knocked to the ground by the A-bomb’s blast while at their home in the area of Yamate-cho (now part of Hiroshima’s Nishi Ward). In the darkness that followed, she became aware of the sound of static coming from the radio as it broke the eerie silence. With that, she regained consciousness and was able to escape from the approaching fires that arose after the bombing.

Yoshinobu, a lieutenant in the Hiroshima military police corps, experienced the atomic bombing while at Kodo National School, located approximately 700 meters from the hypocenter. Complaining of the intense heat, his coworkers threw themselves into a fire-prevention tank and died as the bodies piled up. In a personal account that he wrote in 1969, Yoshinobu described his experience of stepping over numerous corpses while escaping the area as a “living hell beyond misery.”

Shizue was eight months pregnant at the time of the bombing, and August 6 was the date for one of her scheduled medical check-ups. As written in Yoshinobu’s account, “Thanks to the broken radio, she was unharmed.” Eighteen years later, Yoshinobu donated the radio to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in the hope that it would be preserved permanently.

(Originally published on September 25, 2023)