From Overseas Press

My Japanese grandparents' silence over the A-bomb

By Yoko Kubota (Agencies)
Updated: 2010-08-06 16:50

But when she went outside, she witnessed scenes she still cannot forget to this day.

"I held a baby that someone had handed to me. The baby's back was dark gray from burns and there were many bubbles. When I touched the skin, it peeled off smoothly. The baby must have already been dead," she said.

"I cannot forget that feeling. It's impossible to express it in words."

Although her house was gone, she was re-united with her family several days later. After a while, she developed boils on her body, but a nurse treated her and she soon recovered.

My grandfather, a 27-year-old officer who was teaching plane maintenance at a military school near Tokyo, rushed back to Hiroshima a week after August 6, hearing that a "special type of bomb" had been dropped on his hometown.

There, he found the burnt remains of his parents and two sisters, who were at home that day, 400 metres (1,300 ft) from the epicentre, and exposed himself to radiation.

His father's printing company, in the same area, was destroyed and all its employees dead. Several months later, he also lost his younger brother, who had returned from Southeast Asia, to malaria.

"He (my grandfather) would talk a little, then shut his mouth. He must have not wanted to speak. Everything in his life changed with the bomb," my grandmother said.

My grandfather may have felt that he lost everything he had, but he gradually rebuilt his life. He re-started his father's printing company in 1946 and later married my grandmother, starting a family.

To me, my grandfather was a humorous man with a passion for baseball. He never talked about the bomb to me, or even to my mother, and died about 10 years ago in a traffic accident.

My family has been fortunate not to see health problems that affected many other hibakusha.

Yet when I asked my relatives about that day, I saw expressions of agony that I had never seen on their faces before.

Hearing all these stories, I was initially shocked to find I was in some way linked to this historic event.