Eighty years on from the destruction of the city, registered survivors of the blast – known as hibakusha – have fallen below 100,000. Among them is Yoshiko Niiyama, now 90, who recalls the horrors she witnessed after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
Niiyama was 10 years old when she entered the devastated city two days after the attack. “I remember that the air was filled with smoke and there were bodies everywhere … and it was so hot,” she says. “The faces of the survivors were so badly disfigured that I didn’t want to look at them. But I had to.”
She and her eldest sister had rushed to search for their father, Mitsugi, who worked in a bank just 1km from the hypocentre. They never found him or his remains. “My father was tall, so for a long time whenever I saw a tall man from behind, I would run up to him thinking it might be him,” she says. “But it never was.”
For decades, Niiyama kept silent about her trauma, fearing discrimination. It was only when her granddaughter, Kyoko, asked about her wartime experiences that she broke her silence. Kyoko, now 35, is one of a growing number of “family successors” – a local government initiative certifying descendants of hibakusha to record and pass on their experiences.
Last year, the hibakusha network Nihon Hidankyo won the Nobel Peace Prize for its campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons. But with survivors ageing, there is a race against time to preserve their message amid renewed nuclear brinkmanship, as the world’s nine nuclear states modernise their arsenals and leaders like Vladimir Putin refuse to rule out tactical nuclear use.
