He worked there for the next 11 years.īy the time he was 23, Shoso met a girl and fell in love. Shoso was adopted the following month by a Mr Kawanaka, the owner of a soy sauce factory in a village called Tomo. In February 1946, Tokie died too, of an undiagnosed disease, probably leukaemia. Some were so hungry, he said, they died with stones in their mouths. Towards the end of 1945, Shoso saw many children die of starvation. Older children bullied younger children the only way the smaller ones could survive was by scraping the food left in the pans. A black market sprang up around the station where local women set up stalls to feed the orphaned children. It was here Shoso witnessed the way the orphans eked out survival. Unable to locate the rest of their family, the two took shelter in the remains of the station.Ī mother and her child in the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The next day she went to Miyoshi to find Shoso and bring him back. She had been working at Hiroshima train station when the bomb dropped, and was saved by its thick walls. So too was his 16-year-old sister, Tokie. While working in the fields on August 6, 1945, he noticed a white cloud rising in the sky over Hiroshima, but no one could tell them what had happened to the city. Shoso had been evacuated to Miyoshi, a neighbouring prefecture, along with other children from his school and lodged in a temple run by a Buddhist nun. His mother was related to the Asano, the once-powerful samurai lords of Hiroshima, and his father was a glass craftsman. He had two sisters and three brothers including an older one who’d had been mobilised as part of Japan’s colonial war effort in Manchuria. In This Corner of the World: a Japanese film caught between past and presentīorn in March 1934, Shoso was brought up in an area of Hiroshima now known as Kakomachi. Indeed all the hibakusha I interviewed for my study responded warmly to this question. The story that emerged over the following three years came out of a growing friendship with Shoso based on that simple enquiry. I wanted to hear about what his life was like as a child before the atomic bomb. When I first met Shoso in December 2012, I asked him to focus initially not on the horrific aftermath of the bomb, but on something different. Setting out to interview the hibakusha for my study The Last Survivors of Hiroshima I decided to take a different tack, which surprised them. Utter devastation in central Hiroshima, August 6 1945.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |