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Hiroki Kobayashi
Jiro Mitsuda, 12, was on his way to school that fateful morning. With burned skin hanging from his body and wearing only these shorts, he arrived at home and found his mother collapsed at the entrance, covered in blood. He begged a neighbour, “I don’t care what happens to me. Just please help my mother!” He somehow put out a fire on the second floor of their home by himself. His mother was saved, but Jiro died on August 11.
Three-year-old Shinichi Tetsutani was riding this tricycle when the bomb fell. That night he died an excruciating death from burns, and he and his tricycle were buried together. Decades later, when Shinichi’s body was moved to the family grave, his father, Nobuo Tetsutani, donated the treasured toy to Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum.
The bomb's heat was so intense—millions of degrees at the detonation point—that it melted metal objects, including this statue of Buddha from a temple near ground zero.
Teruko Ueno, 90, rests at the base of a tree that survived the atomic bombing. Her oldest sister wasn’t so fortunate: She died of radiation sickness four or five years after the bombing. Like many hibakusha, or survivors, Ueno's sister and many firends suffered discrimation from other Japanese who shunned those exposed to radiation.
Naoe Takeshima was a nursing student when the bomb hit. For months she spent countless hours in an overcrowded Red Cross hospital, tending to the burned and dying, working through exhaustion and paying little mind to her own injured leg. Now 92, she is a retired school nurse living in a nursing home.
Hiroshima resident Masaaki Tanabe, now in his early 80s, was seven years old when the bomb incinerated his home near ground zero, killing his parents, brother, and some 135,000 others. His sorrow and anger lasted for years. But when his daughter married an American, he reconciled himself to a changed world.
Kuniko Watanabe, 39, has told and retold the story of Keiji Nakazawa, one of Hiroshima’s best known survivors, on film, in theatres and workshops, even on tram tours. Her grandmother, Teruko Ueno, is also a survivor, as is her mother, noted peace activist Tomoko Watanabe.
One of the few buildings left standing near ground zero, the Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall is a stark reminder of the devastation the city suffered. Now part of the Peace Memorial Park, it is the city’s most iconic and hallowed site, visited by pilgrims from around the world.
Victims of the bomb rest in peace in a hillside cemetery on the wooded ground of the eighth-century Mitaki Temple. Its name derives from three nearby waterfalls whose water is offered at the annual Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony.