I had been a schoolteacher for eleven years. I taught mathematics to children aged nine to twelve at a primary school in the Nakajima district, perhaps 800 meters from what would later be called the hypocenter. I was walking to school on the morning of August 6th. I was early, which I usually was, because I liked the school when it was quiet before the children arrived. I was thinking about a lesson on fractions.
I was not thinking about the B-29s. We had heard them many times. The air raid warnings had come and gone all summer, and the city had been spared while other cities were destroyed, and there was among us a feeling — not spoken, superstitious, the thing you do not say aloud — that Hiroshima had been left alone for a reason, that something was protecting us. I know now what that reason was. They had been saving it.
The time was eight-fifteen in the morning.
The Light
There was a flash. There is no comparison I can give you that communicates what it was. The light was total — not bright as the sun is bright, not bright as a lamp is bright, but bright as the inside of brightness itself, as if the concept of light had become literal and removed everything else. I was facing slightly away from the direction of the blast. The light came from behind me and sideways, and I felt the heat of it on the back of my neck and arm before I understood that anything was happening.
I was on the ground before I heard the sound. I do not know how I got there. The sound came a second or two after the light — a sound without precedent, not an explosion in the ordinary sense but a pressure, a compression of the air that was also the buildings coming apart, all of them simultaneously, a sound that was the end of a city translated into noise.
I was on the ground with my arms over my head and the city was coming down around me.
It lasted perhaps three seconds. Then a silence, and then the rush of the fire wind moving back toward the center where the air pressure had collapsed, pulling debris with it, and I pressed myself flat against the ground and felt the wind pull at my clothes.
After
When I stood up, I did not understand what I was looking at.
I had walked this street every morning for eleven years. I knew every building, every shop, every wall. There were none of them. What remained was low: fragments of walls, the stumps of telephone poles, a fire burning in the direction of the center. The fire was orange against a sky that had become grey with dust and smoke. The dust moved in slow drifts, settling on everything.
There were people in the street. Moving people and unmoving people. The moving people looked wrong in a way I did not immediately understand, and then I understood: their clothing was torn away or burned away, and their skin, in many places, was wrong — hanging from their arms in pale sheets, like the skin of a fruit being peeled. They were moving slowly, with their arms held away from their bodies, not looking at anything.
I was not badly hurt. I had been facing away. My back was burned, my arm was bleeding from glass, but I was standing and I was conscious and I could see, which is more than many people in that street could say. This fact — that I was standing and they were not — has been with me every day since. Not guilt, exactly. Closer to an obligation. A weight that is also a responsibility.
The River
People were going to the river. The Ota River ran through the city, and in a fire the instinct is to go toward water, and so the banks of the river were filling with people who had been burned, lying in the shallows or on the banks. The river was warm. I did not understand why the river was warm until later.
I helped people move. This is the clearest thing I remember of that morning: moving people from one place to another, from more dangerous places to less dangerous places, which was not easy to determine because everywhere was dangerous and I could not tell which direction the fire was spreading or what was going to fall. I helped an old woman who could not see. I helped a man whose leg was broken. I helped a child who was alone and who had stopped crying, which was worse than crying.
I did not find my students. I went to where the school had been, and it was not there, and I did not find them.
What Remains
The sky over the center of the city was very strange that afternoon: a column of cloud, enormous, shaped like a stem with a broad flat top. I did not know then what it was. I know now that every person who saw it was looking at the shape of the weapon that had been used against them — the shape the weapon makes as it empties itself into the air.
By evening I was at a relief station in the eastern part of the city, which had been partially spared. Around me were hundreds of people in worse condition than I was, and the doctors and nurses who had survived were moving between them, tending what they could. There was not enough of anything — not bandages, not medicine, not water, not people to do the work. The people who had come to help were also people who had survived what everyone else had survived, and many of them were also injured and were working through their own injuries because there was no choice.
I have lived for many years since that morning. I have been a teacher again, and later a retired teacher, and now an old man. Every year on August 6th, I go to the Peace Memorial Park, which is built on the ground where the Nakajima district used to be, near the place where I was walking when the light came. I stand there for a while.
I go because the people who cannot go deserve someone to go in their place. I go because I was walking to teach fractions to children and the children are gone and the fractions are still true, and I have never entirely reconciled those two facts.
I go because witnessing, even long after, is the only thing left to do.
Narrator's note: Kenji Nakamura is a fictional figure. The physical description of the bombing — the light-before-sound, the heat flash, the blast wave, the characteristic cloud formation, the injuries, and the behavior of survivors — is drawn from John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946), which documents the experiences of six survivors, and from the testimony of Hibakusha recorded by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. This account is written with the greatest respect for those who experienced these events.