Word: hiroshimas
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...shown visitors to the Peace Museum displays less sadness and horror than one would expect, in spite of the pictures of scorched children and hairless women lying listless in hospital beds. Far more affecting is a three-to-five-minute 16-mm movie in Kawamoto's possession that shows Hiroshima in 1936: men who still dressed in kimono; elegant women scooting rapidly through the streets of a shopping district; cherry blossoms; a fleeting glimpse of the Atomic Bomb Dome as it looked originally: fat, Victorian and official...
...ordinariness of the city that creates the sense of loss; what a normally pleasant city Hiroshima was before the bombing, what a normally pleasant city it is today. On any summer morning, the Hiroshima Carp take infield practice in the baseball stadium; fashionably dressed young men and women walk purposefully to work; traffic builds on the city's bridges. If you would picture the layout of the center of Hiroshima, which covers much of the ground of Kawamoto's story, place your right hand palm down on a flat surface with your fingers spread wide. Your fingers are rivers...
That morning had begun routinely for Kawamoto. At the time, he was living with his mother and his younger brother in Ono, now a growing suburb of 30,000, then a fishing village of fewer than 10,000, about 30 kilometers outside Hiroshima, across Hiroshima Bay. Mrs. Kawamoto had taken her two boys to Ono one year before, after her husband, an engineer, had been killed in a freak accident in an electrical factory. Until then the Kawamotos had been living in the nearby village of Kuba, where Yoshitaka and his friends swam out long distances in the bay. "They...
...morning routine was this: at 6, Kawamoto would rise, put on his school uniform, and walk down the hill to catch the train for Hiroshima. Monday, Aug. 6, was very hot, even that early in the day, and Kawamoto was tired. All the children his age had been conscripted by the military to clear firebreaks in Hiroshima, areas of escape or safety in case fires spread after bombing raids. Not that there had ever been major bombing raids on Hiroshima. While Tokyo and Osaka were being fire bombed by the Americans in March, Hiroshima was relatively untouched, save...
When the train arrived at the West Hiroshima station, Kawamoto and the other first-year boys gathered outside and, commanded by the senior boys, jogged in formation about two kilometers to the school. They jogged across the Shin Koi Bridge over the Ota River spillway, across a slim space of land to another bridge, which spanned the Tenma River, across another strip of land and the Nishi Heiwa Bridge over the Honkawa, finally crossing the Heiwa Bridge over the Motoyasu River. About 100 meters from the school gate, Kawamoto and his classmates were ordered to halt and march regimentally...