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“My parents didn’t say things like, ‘he was this way and that way,’ probably because they couldn’t bear it,” said Katsumi Hino, 77, a resident of the town of Kurahashi-cho in the Aki-gun district of Hiroshima Prefecture. In front of a cotton bag and an aluminum lunch box she had removed from the family’s Buddhist altar, she explained how she had avoided speaking with her parents about the atomic bombing. When she laid out the bag featuring the school emblem of Hiroshima Second Middle School on the front, the name of the then 13-year-old owner of the bag, “Naofumi Hino (first-year student),” was clearly marked in sumi ink.

Bag handsewn by mother

To celebrate her only son Naofumi’s entrance into junior high school, Masuko, his mother, made a shoulder bag for him by removing the stitches from a kimono sash and sewing it to a cotton hand-towel. Carrying his family’s expectations inside the bag with his other things, Naofumi left what was then known as Kurahashi Island Village, in the Seto Inland Sea, and moved into the Hiroshima Second Middle School dormitory, located at Nishikanon-machi 2-chome, Hiroshima City.

Four months later, the bag and lunch box became keepsakes. Naofumi’s older sister, Katsumi, who was a teacher at Kurahashi Elementary School (a national school at the time), found them on the left bank of the Honkawa River, which is now part of Peace Memorial Park. It was the site at which first-year students at the school had been mobilized to engage in building-demolition work. On the morning of the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, Katsumi arrived by fishing boat from Ujina, following her father, Naoto, in search of her younger brother.

“The mother of Yasushi Okukubo, Naofumi’s friend from Kurahashi Island, who I had met on the way to the site, told me that she had seen Naofumi’s air-raid hood in the Honkawa River, which gave me a clue as to where to look for him,” said Katsumi. The riverbank was slightly higher than the road along the river, and lunch boxes and other items that the students were thought to have placed on the bank in piles by class remained there unburned. Next to that spot, soldiers had been gathering and cremating large numbers of dead bodies.

Headed to fields without watching Peace Memorial Ceremony

Naofumi, who was in Class 4 of the first year, could not be found anywhere, leaving his sister to take home the bag and lunch box, with its charred food inside, which she had discovered among the work site ruins. The remains of Yasushi Okukubo, who was 13 at the time and in Class 2, have also never been found.

Katsumi, who inherited her family’s name and home, made sure not to remove Naofumi’s keepsakes tucked away at the back of the family’s Buddhist altar in front of her parents. Her mother, who died in 1974, would always go out to work in the farm fields each August 6 when the Hiroshima City Peace Memorial Ceremony was broadcast on television.

While folding up the cotton bag, Katsumi said in front of her daughter, who lives with her, “I long for the day when I can say, ‘Oh! I remember these things,’ and be able to just throw them away.”

Of the 271 first-year student victims whose detailed circumstances at the time of death in the atomic bombing were recently identified, the remains of 113 of the students, or 42% of the total, have never been found. Many of the boys’ belongings in their rooms, taken with them and scheduled to return home, are still in the possession of siblings, who cherish the items with thoughts about their deceased parents.

Entrusting wishes for overseas travel

A travel bag bearing the initials “F. K.,” for Fumiharu Kano, 12 years old at the time and a student in Class 1, remains at the home of his older sister, Akiyo Kano, 72, who lives in the home where she was born in Higashihiroshima City. Their father, Fukuharu, and mother, Komeno, delighted by the birth of their first son after having four daughters, had sought out the bag for purchase. Measuring 40 centimeters in length and 70 cm in width and made of horsehide, the bag was never used and as a result looks brand new.

Akiyo says, “My father died of illness when I was young and is said to have entrusted the bag with the wish that, ‘I hope my son grows up to be someone who travels overseas.’” Fumiharu’s other older sister, Toyoe Okuda, 69, who also lives in Higashihiroshima City, said, “My mother, who died seven years ago, would go into Hiroshima City every day in search of Fumiharu, saying, ‘I’m sure he’s still alive.’”

This year, once again, his two older sisters together visited the A-bomb memorial monument for Hiroshima Second Middle School, located on the left bank of the Honkawa River. As the number of familiar faces dwindles, they were once again reminded that the Showa era (1926-1989) is now fading into the past.

(Originally published on November 22, 1999)