8000 Stolen Futures: The Children at the Center of the A-Bomb

Some 77 years ago, thousands of children were robbed of their future in a flash.

Recently, this atomic bomb survivor was reunited with a memento of her little sister, who died on that day.

It's a uniform from the girls' school they both attended at the time.

Her hands were here. Her wrists and hands...
And her face was here.

The sister was 12 years old, and in the first year of junior high school.

On August 6th 1945, the first ever nuclear bomb deployed in war was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, leaving an estimated 140,000 people dead by the end of that year.

Over 50,000 perished on the day of the bombing alone.

Among the victims, one particular age group stands out for the sheer number of fatalities sustained.

12 and 13 year-olds: first year junior high schoolers in today's system.

To find out what might lie behind this discrepancy, we conducted an independent investigation, collecting lists of the dead and records of damage still kept by schools and bereaved families nearly eight decades on.

Based on the data gathered, we made the first ever attempt to visualize where these young students were when the bomb exploded, as well as how they died.

On the morning of August 6th, some 8,000 junior high school students gathered in downtown Hiroshima.

Most of them were first years.

They had been mobilized to help demolish wooden houses, a military-led operation to create firebreaks in preparation for US air raids.

Outdoors, and without cover, the students were exposed to the full fury of the atom bomb blast.

They were crying, "It hurts!," "It burns!,"
"Teacher!," "Mommy!"

They were even screaming,
"Kill me! Please kill me!"

Their faces were severely burned beyond help, wrapped in gauze with holes for their eyes
and nose.

There were so many of them.

Of the 8,000 students, some 6,000 died within a month of the bombing.

After the war, the survivors among them continued to be haunted by their memories of that day.

It's so painful I can't breathe.
All the things I saw and heard, the memories just overwhelm me.

How did these children come to pay such a heavy sacrifice?

In a world where today, threat of nuclear war once again rears its menacing head, we delve into the records of these 8,000 junior high school students

who had their bright future cruelly snatched away by the atomic bomb.

Running some three and a half kilometers from east to west through the center of Hiroshima lies Peace Boulevard.

For a city that was reduced to ashes by the A-Bomb, the street became a symbol of reconstruction and regeneration.

However, the area spanned by the boulevard is in fact where countless school children died on the day of the bombing.

Cenotaphs bearing the names of students killed nearby line the boulevard's green walkways.

On that fateful day, a large number of students had been mobilized, some coming to the area from homes as far as 30 kilometers away.

There were some 8,000 in total, hailing from 39 different schools.

Most were in their first year of junior high.

Among them was Ishizaki Mutsuko.

She was 12 years old at the time.

In the spring of 1945, she entered the girls' school she'd been longing to go to.

Her diary recording her school life has survived to this day.

"April 6th.

In a once-in-a-lifetime event, I attended the entrance ceremony to officially become a student at the First Prefectural Girls' High School.

Full of emotion, I felt determined to study very hard."

Mutsuko was the second of three sisters.

She was very close to her one-year-older sister, Noriko, who attended the same school.

I'd call her "Mu-chan." Her skin was fair and white,
and her hair was jet black and straight.

She was articulate, and never hesitated
in anything she did.

We were always inseparable. After bathing, we'd
go for a stroll together in our summer kimonos.

One month into her new school life, signs of the war became more prevalent in Mutsuko's diary entries.

A term that starts to appear daily from this period is "air-raid siren."

By this time, the war's impact on ordinary people had gone from bad to worse.

Air raids had become frequent across Japan.

Incendiary bombs caused fires, resulting in widespread destruction.

Amid the disarray, one diary entry reveals the initiation of a particular project.

"May 17th.

Starting today, we'll be cleaning up the debris of demolished houses."

Cities across our country are vulnerable to air raids.

Preventive demolition is part of the home-front battle
to prepare for enemy attacks.

In preventive demolition, wooden houses in densely built-up areas were pulled down to help prevent fires from spreading.

However, the question became who to assign this task to.

As the war situation worsened for Japan and labor shortages intensified, countless boys were being sent to the battlefield.

Those in the second year of junior high school and up were often dispatched to sites such as munitions factories to work as laborers.

That left mostly just first year students to be assigned to the demolition work, with even the youngest being mobilized.

Areas densely packed with wooden houses around what is now Peace Boulevard were subject to the preventive demolition order.

Our school was responsible for
this area just here.

Adults cut the pillars of the wooden houses,
tied ropes around them, and tore them down.

Our task was to separate clay, tiles, and timber.

Wherever you looked there were junior high
students, boys and girls, all of them first-years.

Mutsuko's diary also describes her days of manual labor.

"Today I felt more tired than yesterday, but nothing feels as good as a day of work.

I want to keep working hard to make my heart and mind strong."

It's amazing this survived.

Takahashi Fukuko was Mutsuko's classmate.

Despite their young age, she says she and all her fellow students would work as hard as they could.

We'd say things like, "This is a cream puff!"
as we passed each other rooftiles.

We pretended they were cream puffs.

We'd play with words as we worked.

We simply believed we were
doing our part for our country.

While laboring under the blazing sun, one thing Mutsuko looked forward to was making a work uniform.

We'd make uniforms during sewing class.

White clothing would catch the enemy's eye,
so we dyed the fabric.

We picked mugwort, boiled it, and soaked
the white clothes in it.

The liquid had a dirty green color.

I vividly remember how that white fabric was
instantly transformed to the color of mugwort.

"In sewing class today, I got as far as sewing the pocket.

I can't wait to finish up and try it on.

Anything I make myself makes me feel so happy."

The sky was blue, deep blue.

The air raid alert was lifted around 7:30 that morning.

Everyone in Hiroshima left home feeling safe, saying to their loved ones,
"See you! Have a good day."

Mutsuko went out in her newly-dyed mugwort-colored uniform.

From her home in the southern part of the city, she headed for a work site in the Dobashi district.

Some 8,000 junior high school students assembled on that day, the largest number ever to have been mobilized up to that point.

At 8:00 AM, the students began work at six different locations along what is now Peace Boulevard.

But just 15 minutes later...

The atomic bomb detonated above their heads.

Near the bomb's hypocenter, the surface temperature is believed to have reached over 3,000 degrees Celsius as a blast wave struck at a speed of close to sixteen hundred kilometers per hour.

According to the data we compiled, in the Nakajima district, the closest of the six work sites to the hypocenter, more than 1,800 students from 11 schools had gathered.

"Where's my brother?"
That's all I wanted to know.

There were dead bodies on
both sides around here.

That day, Nuibe Nobuyasu traveled from his home some 10 kilometers away to find his brother, who was working in the district.

Nobuyasu's younger brother Kazuhiko was among the junior high first years.

He recalls that morning being the first time Kazuhiko had moaned about the daily labor.

He said, "I'm not going to school today."
My mother asked, "Why not?"

She said, "What kind of a man are you?
A Japanese man doesn't give up. Just go!"

So he went. That was the last time I saw him.

Can you see the base of that bridge?

People were crowded tightly together
on the stone steps.

They had no hair and no eyebrows.

They were completely naked,
and their skin was terribly swollen.

The records of a school whose students were mobilized to Nakajima district describe events that day.

"August 6th.

Many collapsed to the ground at the scene, instantly blinded.

Others headed to Shin-Ohashi Bridge in search of water and jumped into the river.

Students from our school, who'd realized they wouldn't survive, chanted 'Long live the Emperor!' three times, quietly sang the national anthem, and closed their eyes.

Nobuyasu says it was his mother, who had scolded Kazuhiko as she sent him off that morning, who eventually found his body among the hundreds floating in the river.

My mother said, "This is my child."
But I couldn't tell if it was my brother.

The body was so bloated, I couldn't even tell
if it was a boy or a girl.

My father and I picked up the body
close to this spot.

A gaiter fell off the body, and when I looked
I found Kazuhiko's name on it.

Then I knew it was him for sure.

He must have been in such pain.

It really was like hell.

At least 1,500 of the over 1,800 students working in the Nakajima district were dead by the end of the day.

The Dobashi district where Mutsuko was that morning was just 800 meters from ground zero.

More than half of the students here died.

Overall, some 3,200 of the students here would be dead by the end of the day.

Yet what awaited those children who survived?

Hisago Fumiko was working about a kilometer from the hypocenter.

She lost consciousness in the blast, and woke up to find herself buried under rubble.

I struggled to stick my head out.
It was pitch dark.

There was no one to be seen,
just fire burning all around me.

I thought I'd be burned to death if I stayed put,
so I knew I had to dig myself out somehow.

Eventually I managed to dig myself free.

Only then did I realize I was burned.

I had burns from around here, all the way
to my shoulders and back.

Then I looked at my hands, and from here
the skin was hanging right off.

I couldn't lower my arms from the pain.
I was like this...

Ohashi Kazuko was about a kilometer and a half from the hypocenter, working with her 500 classmates.

She remembers having to leave many of them behind.

There were dead bodies everywhere.
There wasn't even space to walk.

Their faces were swollen beyond recognition,
and they had no clothes on.

I repeated in my mind, "I'm sorry... I'm sorry..."
as I stepped on them to evacuate.

There was just this vast pile of dead bodies.

Some of them may still have been alive,
but there was no way out without stepping on them.

This is what I looked like
right after the bombing.

Nishioka Seigo escaped death that day.

He was sick and stayed back at his school two kilometers from the hypocenter.

He witnessed female students screaming, and people losing their minds from unbearable pain.

A group of four or five schoolgirls with burns all
over their bodies were holding out their hands.

They were crying, "It hurts!," "It burns!,"
"Teacher!," "Mommy!"

Then, other classmates in similar condition
joined the circle, all of them wailing together.

People were dying at the roadside.

Some with their eyeballs hanging out,
others with their guts visible.

Some of them were screaming,
"Kill me! Please kill me!"

Even among the students who narrowly survived that first day, most soon weakened and died over the following days and weeks.

The death toll continued to rise, reaching close to 5,000 two weeks on from the bombing.

Students began to show symptoms that would become recognized as unique to atomic bomb victims.

Acute radiation sickness is characterized by nausea, hair loss, continuous high fever and dark specks on the skin caused by internal bleeding.

The syndrome killed many students.

Kamada Nanao, a physician at Hiroshima University, showed us a copy of the medical chart of a first-year junior high student,

who was about a kilometer from the bomb's hypocenter.

White blood cell count was 210 on August 31st,
only a twentieth of the normal range.

The student's white blood cell count plummeted, severely depressing their immune system.

The records show how the student's condition kept deteriorating right up till their death on September 4th.

The red line indicates body temperature
above 40 degrees.

Humans can barely survive a week
in a state like that.

Even just breathing causes excruciating pain.

The student had to endure that till the very end.
It must have been so tough.

Even two weeks after the bombing, students were continuing to die.

About 5,300 of them passed away within the first month.

During this period, many parents traveled to the city daily, searching for their missing children.

We confirmed that at least 2,992 parents entered the city.

Yet high levels of residual radiation remained around Ground Zero.

Parents searched frantically for their children, oblivious to the danger.

Among them was Yamane Hatsue.

Her eldest son Hideo loved airplanes.

He was studying at a technical school in the city.

This is my mother, elder brother Hideo,
myself and my younger sister.

This was used for his application form
for the school entrance exam.

He chose it because he looked full of hope.
It was the school of his dreams.

Hideo woke up early that morning.

His mother Hatsue sent him off so he could catch one train earlier than usual.

He walked to the top of the hill,
and called out, "See you!"

I can still picture him on his way to school,
carrying his bag on his back.

Hideo headed for the Nakajima district, some 25 kilometers from his home.

In a diary discovered just two years ago, Hatsue wrote about how she looked for her son.

"August 7th.

When I asked about the first-year students, I was told they had all died.

I was so shocked, it felt like my blood flow reversed and my heart was about to burst.

I set off for the city right away to search for him.

But so far, no clues..."

She visited the temporary relief stations
day in, day out.

She searched all the relief stations,
but couldn't find him.

By the end, we were more worried about her.

A week later, on August 13th, Hatsue discovered something at the foot of a bridge near the blast center.

"I found Hideo's lunchbox.

As if drawn to it, I took it in my hands and looked inside.

I instantly knew it was his."

This is Hideo's lunchbox.

Hatsue found it among a pile of other abandoned lunch boxes.

The omelet and boiled spinach, which she had cooked on that morning, had survived the heat of the bomb.

"I remember being so full of hope as I lay breastfeeding you, 13 years ago.

My heart now aches at the memory.

If I'd let you stay at home that day, you wouldn't have had to die.

Please forgive your mother."

She was always saying, "If he'd taken
a later train he might not have died."

That scene of him turning to say goodbye
at the top of the hill, she would always talk about
how that image was burned into her mind.

After the war, Hatsue kept speaking of her regret.

She developed various illnesses, believed to have been caused by radiation exposure, including a thyroid disorder.

She eventually died just a decade later, at the age of 44.

Mutsuko, the girl who wrote in her diary every day.

Two weeks after the bombing, her name tag, which had been sewn into her clothes, was discovered.

It was found along a road connecting the Dobashi district, where she'd been working, to the south of the city where she lived.

I'm certain she was heading home.
She must have been desperate to get home, longing to see her mother and father.

Another item was found that gives us some more clues about Mutsuko's final day.

Her father discovered her mugwort-dyed uniform under the rubble at her worksite.

The jacket was folded neatly.

It was a hot day, so she must have taken it off before setting to work.

She was alive then.

But she went missing afterwards.

Her elder sister Noriko, who was at a munitions factory about two kilometers from the blast center, survived.

Under the spring hill, we sail towards
the shrine of Takeri...

She sang the school song of the school they attended together.

We, the little women of peacetime,
live up to our ideals...

Mutsuko continued to write about her daily life in her diary right till the very end.

"Sunday August 5th, Sunny.

I went for a swim with Konishi.

I felt embarrassed because everyone else swam like a fish, while I struggled in the water.

It was a good day.

I'm going to continue doing one good deed a day."

To this day, no one knows when or how Mutsuko died.

In total, some 6,000 students were deprived of their futures.

For too many, the details of how they died remain unknown.

Why did so many young students have to die?

We discovered a document shedding light on background facts concerning the mobilization of first-year junior high students.

This is about the meeting discussing mobilization.

Officials from the military, local government and schools met one month before the bombing.

A government official, who participated in the meeting, took the minutes.

In the meeting, the military stressed that the demolition of homes was running far behind schedule.

It called for mass mobilization of junior high students for what it called "the urgent task."

Hiroshima, a base critical to Japan's preparation for battle on home soil, housed a number of military facilities.

But school officials objected to the military's demands.

They stressed it would be extremely dangerous for children to work outside when air raids could strike at any moment.

With talks going round in circles, a senior military officer finally brought the discussion to a head.

"Holding his saber in his left hand, the lieutenant general banged the floor in irritation.

He insisted the student mobilization was essential to military operations.

He pressed the chairman to decide.

The chairman sank deep in thought.

Eventually a reluctant decision was made to mobilize the students."

The young students were soon dispatched to help press ahead with the war effort.

On August 6th, 8,000 of them, the largest number to date, were mobilized, an ill-fated decision that would lead to massive loss of life when the A-bomb struck that morning.

Exposed in the open with no chance to evacuate, a generation of children were largely obliterated.

Those students who survived were left deeply scarred.

Ohashi Kazuko was a kilometer and a half from Ground Zero when the bomb struck.

She had no choice but to leave her classmates behind.

The bomb left keloid scars on her left cheek.

In a later picture taken during high school, you can see that most of her face has been cut out of the photo.

Kazuko couldn't stop asking herself why she'd survived when everyone around her had died.

She attempted suicide five times during her teens.

She couldn't escape the memories of the day she fled without caring for her classmates.

Images of her deceased classmates come back to her every time she passes close to Peace Boulevard.

I can almost hear them saying,
"You're lucky to be alive."

I feel totally lost and apologize
to them over and over.

I get breathless as I remember
what I saw, heard and felt that day.

All the memories start flooding back.

It's utterly heart-wrenching.

The bomb left deep psychological scars in so many of the child survivors.

After the war, a US doctor undertook detailed research on their condition.

Psychiatrist Robert Lifton was already conducting research on the trauma of war at Yale University.

It was important that I perceived the depth of pain and loss that people experienced in Hiroshima.

Seventeen years after the bombing...

Lifton interviewed 75 survivors, including some of the first-year junior high students who'd been mobilized for demolition work.

Lifton's research focused on their struggle.

The effects of trauma were especially dire for survivors who experienced the bomb as children.

The account of one of his interviewees includes the following passages: "My mother pulled me out from under the rubble.

But she collapsed as we fled, so I went to get help, leaving her behind.

When I came back, she was floating face down in a water tank, dead.

Her cry for help still rings in my ears."

"I realized the bomb had changed my appearance when I looked in a mirror for the first time after the war.

It felt too cruel if that was what I got for working hard as the grownups had told me to."

Anything that causes us deep pain and threat early in life during childhood can be fairly severe.

The trauma and the... what I call the "Death Imprint."

Of course, it was extreme trauma.

Survivors continued to suffer from the bomb's impact on their physical and mental health.

Doctor Kamada monitored the health condition of 24 women who'd been junior high students at the time of the bombing, over a 40-year period.

He found that 9 of the 24 developed breast cancer, a much higher ratio than among the general public.

Rates of breast cancer were unbelievably high.

Cells dividing rapidly are
especially susceptible to radiation.

Cells in mammary glands cycle
fast in girls around puberty.

I suspect that's a big factor behind the high ratio.

Hisago Fumiko, who was about a kilometer from the blast center, has suffered various types of cancer, including breast cancer.

I had surgery for uterine cancer in 1985.

I had my gallbladder removed
in an endoscopic operation in 1997, and underwent breast cancer surgery in July 1998.

This is clearly abnormal.

But I assume it's my destiny.

Hiroshima recently marked 77 years since the bombing.

There's been talk about the possible
deployment of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

It's extremely sad.

We're asking for your support.

Ohashi is still tormented by memories of that day.

She finally decided it was time to write down everything she'd witnessed, and put pen to paper for the first time.

However...

I can't do this...

Whenever I start to write, I'm overwhelmed
with emotion and my heart starts to race.

That feeling has been deeply etched in my mind.

I've had to live with it all my life.

I'm just going to continue doing one good deed a day.

Takahashi was in the same grade as Mutsuko.

She just happened to be absent from school that day.

She's been offering flowers for her 223 deceased schoolmates every year.

What kind of mothers would Mutsuko and her
classmates have become if they were still alive?

What would they talk about with their children?

There's a big chestnut tree
by the memorial monument.

The young chestnuts remind me
of those girl's short lives.

It feels as if they're talking to me from above.

Nuclear weapons destroy life indiscriminately.

War robs children of their future, something immeasurably precious that needs to be protected at all cost.

We should take to heart the grave facts brought to light through the heartbreaking records of the young lives cut short 77 years ago,

facts that should serve as a warning to us here and now about the dire consequences of nuclear war.