Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary (August 7, 1945)

Although World War II began in Europe, in 1941 the conflict engulfed the world as Japan and the United States entered the war on opposite sides. Despite initial successes, within a year the Japanese began to lose ground to the Allies’ formidable forces. Even so, they fought on, unwilling to surrender no matter what the material and human costs. This strategy prompted Allied leaders to make a fateful decision. On August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, adding tens of thousands to the war’s civilian death toll. Thousands more were wounded, including Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital. Made of reinforced concrete and located approximately 1,500 meters from the hypocenter of the bomb, the hospital escaped destruction and was soon packed with patients. Dr. Hachiya was among them. Bedridden for several weeks, he began a journal documenting his experiences. The excerpt that follows is drawn from his entry for the day after the bomb had been dropped, when he and other survivors struggled to make sense of the unprecedented scale of destruction and human suffering around them.

From Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary, trans. and ed. Warner Wells, M.D. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 13–17, 24–25.

Dr. Tabuchi, an old friend from Ushita, came in. His face and hands had been burned, though not badly, and after an exchange of greetings, I asked if he knew what had happened.

“I was in the back yard pruning some trees when it exploded,” he answered. “The first thing I knew, there was a blinding white flash of light, and a wave of intense heat struck my cheek. This was odd, I thought, when in the next instant there was a tremendous blast.

“The force of it knocked me clean over,” he continued, “but fortunately, it didn’t hurt me; and my wife wasn’t hurt either. But you should have seen our house! It didn’t topple over, it just inclined. I have never seen such a mess. Inside and out everything was simply ruined. Even so, we are happy to be alive, and what’s more Ryoji, our son, survived. I didn’t tell you that he had gone into the city on business that morning. About midnight, after we had given up all hope that he could possibly survive in the dreadful fire that followed the blast, he came home. “Listen!” he continued, “why don’t you come on home with me? My house is certainly nothing to look at now, but it is better than here.”

It was impossible for me to accept his kind offer, and I tried to decline in a way that would not hurt his feelings.

“Dr. Tabuchi,” I replied, “we are all grateful for your kind offer, but Dr. Katsube just warned me that I must lie perfectly still until my wounds are healed.”

Dr. Tabuchi accepted my explanation with some reluctance, and after a pause he made ready to go.

“Don’t go,” I said. “Please tell us more of what occurred yesterday.”

“It was a horrible sight,” said Dr. Tabuchi. “Hundreds of injured people who are trying to escape to the hills passed our house. The sight of them was almost unbearable. Their faces and hands were burnt and swollen; and great sheets of skin had peeled away from their tissues to hang down like rags on a scarecrow. They moved like a line of ants. All through the night, they went past our house, but this morning they had stopped. I found them lying on both sides of the road so thick that it was impossible to pass without stepping on them.”

I lay with my eyes shut while Dr. Tabuchi was talking, picturing in my mind the horror he was describing. I neither saw nor heard Mr. Katsutani when he came in. It was not until I heard someone sobbing that my attention was attracted, and I recognized my old friend. I had known Mr. Katsutani for many years and knew him to be an emotional person, but even so, to see him break down made tears come to my eyes. He had come all the way from Jigozen¹ to look for me, and now that he had found me, emotion overcame him.

He turned to Dr. Sasada and said brokenly: “Yesterday, it was impossible to enter Hiroshima, else I would have come. Even today fires are still burning in some places. You should see how the city has changed. When I reached the Misasa Bridge² this morning, everything before me was gone, even the castle. These buildings here are the only ones left anywhere around. The Communications Bureau seemed to loom right in front of me long before I got anywhere near here.”

Mr. Katsutani paused for a moment to catch his breath and went on: “I really walked along the railroad tracks to get here, but even they were littered with electric wires and broken railway cars, and the dead and wounded lay everywhere. When I reached the bridge, I saw a dreadful thing. It was unbelievable. There was a man, stone dead, sitting on his bicycle as it leaned against the bridge railing. It is hard to believe that such a thing could happen!”

He repeated himself two or three times as if to convince himself that what he said was true and then continued: “It seems that most of the dead people were either on the bridge or beneath it. You could tell that many had gone down to the river to get a drink of water and had died where they lay. I saw a few live people still in the water, knocking against the dead as they floated down the river. There must have been hundreds and thousands who fled to the river to escape the fire and then drowned.

“The sight of the soldiers, though, was more dreadful than the dead people floating down the river. I came onto I don’t know how many, burned from the hips up; and where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy. They must have been wearing their military caps because the black hair on top of their heads was not burned. It made them look like they were wearing black lacquer bowls.

“And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses, and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back. One soldier, whose features had been destroyed and was left with his white teeth sticking out, asked me for some water, but I didn’t have any. I clasped my hands and prayed for him. He didn’t say anything more. His plea for water must have been his last words. The way they were burned, I wonder if they didn’t have their coats off when the bomb exploded.”

It seemed to give Mr. Katsutani some relief to pour out his terrifying experiences on us; and there was no one who would have stopped him, so fascinating was his tale of horror. While he was talking, several people came in and stayed to listen. Somebody asked him what he was doing when the explosion occurred.

“I had just finished breakfast,” he replied, “and was getting ready to light a cigarette, when all of a sudden I saw a white flash. In a moment there was a tremendous blast. Not stopping to think, I let out a yell and jumped into an air-raid dugout. In a moment there was such a blast as I have never heard before. It was terrific! I jumped out of the dugout and pushed my wife into it. Realizing something terrible must have happened in Hiroshima, I climbed up onto the roof of my storehouse to have a look.”

Mr. Katsutani became more intense and, gesticulating wildly, went on: “Towards Hiroshima, I saw a big black cloud go billowing up, like a puffy summer cloud. Knowing for sure then that something terrible had happened in the city, I jumped down from my storehouse and ran as fast as I could to the military post at Hatsukaichi.³ I ran up to the officer in charge and told him what I had seen and begged him to send somebody to help in Hiroshima. But he didn’t even take me seriously. He looked at me for a moment with a threatening expression, and then do you know what he said? He said, ‘There isn’t much to worry about. One or two bombs won’t hurt Hiroshima.’ There was no use talking to that fool!

“I was the ranking officer in the local branch of the Ex-officer’s Association, but even I didn’t know what to do because that day the villagers under my command had been sent off to Miyajima⁴ for labor service. I looked all around to find someone to help me make a rescue squad, but I couldn’t find anybody. While I was still looking for help, wounded people began to stream into the village. I asked them what had happened, but all they could tell me was that Hiroshima had been destroyed and everybody was leaving the city. With that I got on my bicycle and rode as fast as I could towards Itsukaichi. By the time I got there, the road was jammed with people, and so was every path and byway.

“Again I tried to find out what had happened, but nobody could give me a clear answer. When I asked these people where they had come from, they would point towards Hiroshima and say, ‘This way.’ And when I asked where they were going, they would point toward Miyajima and say, ‘That way.’ Everybody said the same thing.

“I saw no badly wounded or burned people around Itsukaichi, but when I reached Kusatsu, nearly everybody was badly hurt. The nearer I got to Hiroshima the more I saw until by the time I had reached Koi,⁵ they were all so badly injured, I could not bear to look into their faces. They smelled like burning hair.”

Mr. Katsutani paused for a moment to take a deep breath and then continued: “The area around Koi station was not burned, but the station and the houses nearby were badly damaged. Every square inch of the station platform was packed with wounded people. Some were standing; others lying down. They were all pleading for water. Now and then you could hear a child calling for its mother. It was a living hell, I tell you. It was a living hell!”

All day I had listened to visitors telling me about the destruction of Hiroshima and the scenes of horror they had witnessed. I had seen my friends wounded, their families separated, their homes destroyed. I was aware of the problems our staff had to face, and I knew how bravely they struggled against superhuman odds. I knew what the patients had to endure and the trust they put in the doctors and nurses, who, could they know the truth, were as helpless as themselves.

By degrees my capacity to comprehend the magnitude of their sorrow, to share with them the pain, frustration, and horror became so dulled that I found myself accepting whatever was told me with equanimity and a detachment I would have never believed possible.

In two days I had become at home in this environment of chaos and despair.

I felt lonely, but it was an animal loneliness. I became part of the darkness of the night. There were no radios, no electric lights, not even a candle. The only light that came to me was reflected in flickering shadows made by the burning city. The only sounds were the groans and sobs of the patients. Now and then a patient in delirium would call for his mother, or the voice of one in pain would breathe out the word eraiyo—“the pain is unbearable; I cannot endure it!”

What kind of a bomb was it that had destroyed Hiroshima? What had my visitors told me earlier? Whatever it was, it did not make sense.

There could not have been more than a few planes. Even my memory would agree to that. Before the air-raid alarm there was the metallic sound of one plane and no more. Otherwise why did the alarm stop? Why was there no further alarm during the five or six minutes before the explosion occurred?

Reason as I would, I could not make the ends meet when I considered the destruction that followed. Perhaps it was a new weapon! More than one of my visitors spoke vaguely of a “new bomb,” a “secret weapon,” a “special bomb,” and someone even said that the bomb was suspended from two parachutes when it burst! Whatever it was, it was beyond my comprehension. Damage of this order could have no explanation! All we had were stories no more substantial than the clouds from which we had reached to snatch them.

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