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Girl’s diary, school uniform now on display at Peace Memorial Museum

by Kyosuke Mizukawa, Staff Writer

To convey more stories of what happened in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is now exhibiting the personal belongings of victims. Most of these items had previously been held in the museum’s storage room. Because the main building of the museum is now closed for seismic reinforcement work, a temporary exhibition space opened in the east building on April 26. One of the exhibits is a diary that had been kept by Mutsuko Ishizaki. She was 12 at the time of the atomic bombing, a first-year student at First Hiroshima Prefectural Girls’ High School (now Minami High School). The last entry of her diary was dated August 5, the day before the bombing. Her sister hopes that her diary and personal belongings will help people appreciate the preciousness of life.

In the exhibition room on the first floor of the east building, Mutsuko’s diary and a panel showing the entry for August 5 are on display. The entry says that she went swimming in the river. She also wrote, “Today was a very good day. I will keep doing a good deed each day.”

But the next day was the A-bomb attack. A total of 223 first-year students from the high school, including Mutsuko, were mobilized to help tear down homes to create a fire lane in Koami-cho (now part of Naka Ward), about 800 meters from the hypocenter. None of them survived.

Mutsuko’s diary had been kept by her mother Yasuyo until she died in 1985 at the age of 77. Then, Noriko Ueda, 85, Mutsuko’s sister, held the diary until she donated it to the museum in 2004. It was last on display between 2010 and 2011. Now Mutsuko’s diary, along with her school uniform, are on display and again touching the hearts of visitors.

Ms. Ueda was a second-year student at the high school, and she was working at a factory in Minamikanon-machi (now part of Nishi Ward) at the time of the bombing. She has been sharing her A-bomb experience with students on school trips to Hiroshima for more than 20 years and always tells them about her sister’s diary.

Traumatized by the horrific scenes she saw after the atomic bombing, Ms. Ueda has avoided entering exhibition rooms when she comes to the museum to relate her account to visitors. But she looked at her sister’s mementos in the exhibition room on April 26. She said that her mother sometimes went to sleep while clutching the diary in her arms, adding, “Mutsuko wrote in her diary every day. I hope that the diary and her small uniform will help people realize how terrible it was that the life of a child was suddenly ended in this way.”

The museum is now displaying 52 real artifacts in the exhibition room. Forty of the items have been brought out from the museum’s storage room. The exhibition will continue until the main building reopens in July 2018, and some of the items on display will be replaced with others during this period.

(Originally published on April 27, 2017)

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