He was only three. Trapped under the debris, bleeding of broken glass and in the city itself reduced to the debris. He tried to scream, “Mom, help!” But his voice didn’t work out. It took decades for Kunihiko Iida to talk about what happened that morning in August 1945.
Now 83, Iida is one of the few remaining surviving atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after six decades of silence, he devotes his later years to tell the world what he has witnessed, in the hope that no one else will ever have to.
Eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many survivors, known in Japan as Hibakusha, violates its silence. As the nuclear threats grow again and global leaders seem more receiving atomic weapons, these survivors are determined to remind the world what they are trying to forget.
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Lida remembers
August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the uranium bomb over Hiroshima, Iida was only 900 meters from the hypocentre in the house of her mother’s family.
“It was as if I was fired from the building,” Iida said.
“Mom, help!” He tried to scream, but there was no sound.
He was buried under the debris, bleed and himself. In the end, his grandfather found him and saved him. But within a few weeks, his 25-year-old mother and four-year-old sister were dead-to what was later seen as a radiation exposition.
He also suffered nosebleeds, fatigue and skin problems over his early years, classic symptoms of radiation related to the disease.
Yet it was not until the age of 60, when he returned to Hiroshim’s peace park, and even because his older aunt asked him to accompany her. This visit opened something.
“I cried every time I tried to talk”
At first he could not bring himself to speak. “It was stunning,” he said. It took a few more years to share his story in public without breaking up.
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Now Iida volunteers as a guide in the Hiroshima Peace Park, often talk to foreign tourists. He is aware that many do not understand the human cost of bombing – and wants them.
In June this year he traveled to Paris, London and Warsaw to meet students as part of a peace program. He was afraid of his anti-jader news in nuclear armed countries. But to his surprise, the students listened – and applauded.
“The only way to peace is the abolition of nuclear weapons. There is no other way,” he said.
“If the train was on time I would die”
Fumiko Doi, 86, is another survivor that has been silent for decades. On August 9, 1945, it was to arrive at Nagasaki’s station Urakami around 11:00, but the train was late.
This delay saved her life.
She was six years old and five kilometers when she saw the lightning from the window. Glass broke. Passengers protected her when the shock wave was torn by train.
She saw people burn people on the streets, his faces blackened, clothes in the ruins.
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Like many Hibakusha, she maintained her experience in secret for years – she even wrote about it in private for her children, but never spoke openly.
About 100,000 surviving atomic bombings are still alive. Many have never spoken about what happened, either because of trauma or fear of discrimination that still exists in some parts of Japan.
DOI eventually married another survivor, but feared the transmission of radiation effects to his children. Her mother and two brothers died of cancer. Her father, who was entrusted with bombing after the bombing, also developed radiation symptoms. Later he became a teacher and captured his sadness in poetry.
She started talking only after the nuclear disaster Fukushima 2011. Now she regularly travels from her house in Fukuoka to participate in peace rallys.
“Some people forgot about the atomic bomb attacks … that’s sad,” Doi said.
“If more (nuclear weapons) are used all over the world, it’s the end of the country. That’s why I caught every chance to speak.”
After the 2023 G7 summit in Hiroshima and the Nobel Prize of Peace won by the Nihon Hidankyo survivor group, the global interest in bombings has emerged. Museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have seen an increase in foreign visitors.
One American mother visited Hiroshima said she had brought her children to understand what really happened.
“It’s a reminder of how much devastation can make one decision,” she said.
French tourist Melanie Gringoire met with Iida during her visit and was visibly moved.
“Even a short encounter with the survivors makes the tragedy more realistic,” she said.
“It’s like sharing a small history.”
Iida agrees. He often stops at the monument to children who died, surrounded by paper cranes, a Japanese symbol of peace sent from all over the world.
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