Word: kawamoto
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...began Kawamoto's morning, Aug. 6, 1945. Yoshitaka Kawamoto is 53 today, a small, solid man who dresses formally in blue or brown suits and carries himself with a quick-moving dignity. When he tells the story of what happened 40 years ago, however, he can become a 13-year-old on the spot--suddenly springing from a chair to strike a military pose, demonstrating a march step, or hunching down like a shortstop. In his office he sang the school song that was sung by his classmates the morning of the bombing. As he did, he rose automatically...
...which the doctor agreed, but said that he could not guarantee Kawamoto's life. Then he disinfected the wound. "I was not afraid now. I was sure I was going to live...
...Kawamoto got word to his mother from Taibi. He did so indirectly, by invoking the name of a relative, a principal of a military school who was a powerful man in the military. A soldier, impressed by the name, called the village hall in Ono, saying that Kawamoto was alive, though he did not mention Taibi. That was when Mrs. Kawamoto hired the boat and began her search of the islands. Meanwhile, Kawamoto returned to the tent and waited, not knowing whether his mother had received his message or not. He began to get some sleep on Aug. 9, sleeping...
...Buddhist graveyard at Kuba, Kawamoto walks among the block-shaped tombstones and looks down from the steep hill at Hiroshima Bay, where he swam as a child. This was the graveyard where he and the other boys used to test their courage: "In the daytime we would come up here and leave some personal belonging. In the night we would retrieve it, which would prove to the others that we were here...
Reading the names on the Buddhist tombstones, Kawamoto points out those of the families he knew. He keeps a plot of ground here for his own family. Living in Ono again, he is close to both the villages of his youth, though Kuba, like Ono, has grown considerably. The hill of the graveyard had to be cut away at the base to make way for a new high school. Growth is natural, Kawamoto says, but he regrets modern disconnections from the past. "Now the future is everything." Still, he believes that the world is in many ways better off than...