Features

Gently running hands over younger brother’s name engraved on monument

by Masami Nishimoto, Masanori Nojima, and Junpei Fujimura, Staff Writers

“Whenever I come here, I run my hands over the engraved name of my younger brother. I am of the mindset that I am alive today because he gave his life to me,” said Makiko Konami, 71, a resident of Okayama City, at the memorial monument for Hiroshima Second Middle School student victims of the atomic bombing, erected on the left bank of the Honkawa River inside Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima City’s Naka Ward. The eyes of the older sister, Ms. Konami, were wet with tears as she pointed with her index finger to her brother’s name engraved on the monument. On November 19, 1999, a mild sunny day, Ms. Konami was visiting the monument with her husband, Isao, 76, the former principal at an elementary school. The couple always visits the monument at least once a year.

The memorial monument is engraved with the name Hiroshi Matsunaga, her younger brother, 12 at the time, who she took care of until his death after the bombing, and that of her father, Kozo Matsunaga, then 43, who was trapped under the school building, located in the area of Nishikanon-machi 2-chome. Kozo, the school’s vice principal, also served as housemaster of the Hiroshima Second Middle School dormitory. Ms. Konami, who was 16 at the time, experienced the atomic bombing at the Hiroshima Prefectural College for Women (present-day Hiroshima Women’s University), located in Hiroshima’s Ujina-machi, to which she commuted from the family housing in the dormitory provided for government workers.

Ms. Konami said, “When I returned to the dormitory, my younger brother, suffering such severe burns that I didn’t recognize him, was lying outside with other students.” Around midnight, the decision was made to transfer the wounded students that were still alive to the village of Hera (present-day Hatsukaichi City), located 15 kilometers northwest of the city, using a coal-powered truck. Just before she got on the vehicle, the teacher who was to drive it informed her of her father’s death, saying, “To tell you the truth….”

The following morning, at the village government office where Hiroshi had been taken, her younger brother asked, “How is father? How is Mr. Yamamoto (his class teacher)?” With the words, “Thank you for everything, sis,” he passed away.

National memorial hall for A-bomb victims to be constructed

Ms. Konami donated the entire amount of the “special funeral benefit” she had received from the national government based on the Atomic Bomb Survivors Relief Law, enacted in 1995, 50 years after the deaths of her father and younger brother, to Hiroshima Prefectural Kanon High School, which is responsible for maintaining the monument. The benefit was paid only to surviving families with Atomic Bomb Survivor’s Certificates. Through the donation, she was able to reflect the wishes of her younger sister, who did not have a certificate after having been evacuated to Okayama Prefecture, their father’s home, and of her mother, who died 15 years ago after experiencing the atomic bombing at the government-housing dormitory.

Another key project designated by the Atomic Bomb Survivors Relief Law is to begin soon in Peace Memorial Park. That project aims to construct a national Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, as stipulated in Article 41 of the law, which sets out, “The project will be conducted to raise awareness among Japanese citizens about the tragic consequence of the atomic bomb … and pay tribute to the victims of the bombing.”

The memorial hall will hold and exhibit for the public 89,000 personal accounts that had been written in the free-comment field of a fact-finding survey of A-bomb survivors conducted four years ago by Japan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare. The hall’s memorial space fashioned into an open atrium, measuring eight meters in height with a diameter of 18 meters, is expected to indicate “140,000 victims with a margin of error of plus or minus 10,000,” the number of victims estimated by the Hiroshima City government to have died by the end of 1945 after the atomic bombing. The hall will show such victims in the form of individual dots as well as a panorama of the scene after the atomic bombing. The facility is scheduled to open in 2002.

While designed to commemorate the dead, the facility will use only the estimated value with the wide range of variance of plus-minus 10,000 because the national government has never completely been able to capture the overall picture of damages caused by the atomic bombing. Unclear even today is the number of mobilized students who died in the bombing, despite the fact that they had been mobilized on the basis of an order passed down by the national government.

“We should never forget”

The total victim number of “5,735 students from 40 schools” is listed in three volumes of registers of mobilized A-bomb student victims developed by the different schools in the city in accordance with the establishment in 1952 of the Act on Relief for War Victims and Survivors. In those three volumes, kept at the social welfare department of the Hiroshima Prefectural government, the number of Hiroshima Second Middle School’s victims is listed as “318.” Based on a further investigation by surviving family members and school staff, the names of 344 students (of that total, two were found to still be alive) were engraved on the monument, which was erected in 1961.

Pointing to the names of her father, younger brother, and countless numbers of other victims, Ms. Konami offered voluntarily how, “I believe we should never forget that time when so many people died instantly in the atomic bombing, or at least that is my hope.”

What the war and the atomic bombing stole were the lives of individual victims.

(Originally published on November 24, 1999)