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Documenting Hiroshima of 1945: October 5, bone fragments remain near Aioi Bridge

“This can’t be real,” he murmured, upon seeing completely destroyed city

by Kyosuke Mizukawa, Senior Staff Writer

On October 5, 1945, two months after the atomic bombing, the central area of Hiroshima City was still in ruins as far as the eye could see. “This can’t be real,” the photographer Shigeo Hayashi reflexively murmured as he looked out over the city from the Hiroshima Prefectural Association of Commerce and Industry (present-day Hiroshima Chamber of Commerce and Industry), located around 260 meters to the northwest of the hypocenter. Mr. Hayashi was engaged in the work of taking panoramic photographs of the scene.

“I was emotionally unable to accept that so much damage had resulted from a single bomb.” On October 5, 1945, Shigeo Hayashi, as a 27-year-old photographer taking panoramic photos of Hiroshima’s central area, wrote about the shock he felt in his publication titled Bakushinchi Hiroshima ni Hairu (in English, ‘Entering the hypocenter of Hiroshima’), published in 1992. Mr. Hayashi died in 2002 at the age of 84.

During the war, Mr. Hayashi was a member of the photography department at Tohosha, a company established by Japan’s Imperial Army General Staff in 1941, and took photographs for propaganda magazines designed for overseas readers. After the war, in September, Nippon Eigasha (Japan Movie Co.), which was accompanying a special task force formed to produce a documentary film on the damage caused by the atomic bombings, asked Tohosha officials to take photos on the ground at the site of the bombing. Amid a flurry of speculation about how “hair would fall out” and “people would become infertile,” Mr. Hayashi volunteered to go with the idea, “I will look at everything.”

He was the lead on the company’s physics team and began taking photos in the city on October 1. The panoramic photos were taken from a rooftop deck of the four-story reinforced concrete building of the Hiroshima Prefectural Association of Commerce and Industry (now the Hiroshima Chamber of Commerce and Industry), around 260 northwest of the hypocenter, an area that had escaped the fires.

“I took photographs in a state of heightened awareness, making full use of both my hands and eyes,” Mr. Hayashi wrote in his book. The 360-degree panoramic photo was divided into 16 separate shots, which were taken when the weather was deemed to be appropriate. The photos that Mr. Hayashi took just after 10 a.m., looking to the southeast, were backlit. He snapped the shutter after shading the camera with his left hand to block the light from entering the lens.

He also walked around the hypocenter, focusing his camera on the details in the scorched earth. One such photo, taken at the west end of Aioi Bridge on the west side of the Hiroshima Prefectural economic association, shows bone fragments from bodies that appear to have been cremated.

“Every few steps I would find cremated remains. Wherever I turned my camera, I felt as if I could still hear people screaming in pandemonium two months before then,” he wrote. He stayed in Hiroshima City until October 10, then moved on to Nagasaki City, where he took photos that documented similar scenes of the A-bombing tragedy in that city.

(Originally published on October 5, 2024)

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