[Front page] [Bound by the Bomb] [Sports] [Internet guide] [E-mail the Herald]
NAGASAKI - The little home is tucked away in an alley, so narrow neighbors
wait politely for each other to walk past.
Along the flagstone path and stairs leading to Akiko Sakita's home, cats
cluster and flowers flourish.
Sakita's father inherited the tiny plot of land and built a home on it that
later would be destroyed by atomic fire.
Today, Sakita's eldest son has been given that same piece of ground, on
which he has built a home now shared by three generations.
In 1945, from this small corner of the Zenza-machi district, Akiko Sakita
watched the atomic destruction of the city of his birth.
And at that location, he rebuilt his home and his life.
Sakita stood in a small but elegant room at his son's home one recent day
and cast his cane aside. With seeming ease, he lowered himself into a legless
chair and folded his knees under a table.
When he was settled, Sakita told his story:
By the summer of 1945, "Japan had already lost the war," he said.
But the war waged on as Japan's military leaders vowed to fight to the death
of the last man, woman and child.
On the last two days of July and again Aug. 1, bombs rained on Nagasaki.
Shrapnel from the last attack fell through the tile roof of Sakita's house.
"My father did not even attempt to repair the roof, claiming that the
number of air raids was only going to increase anyway."
Instead, his parents rented a small piece of land outside the city at the
foot of Mount Iwaya. They were there Aug. 9, 1945, building what they hoped
would be a safer shelter.
Back in the city, 16-year-old Sakita finished the graveyard shift at the
Mitsubishi arms factory and returned home. At that same factory four years
earlier, torpedoes were made to bomb Pearl Harbor in the sneak attack that
pushed the United States into the war.
Sakita recalled, "It was so hot, so humid when I got home that morning
... I couldn't sleep. I took off my shirt and went out into the backyard
to do wash and cool myself."
Through the open back door, he heard the clock chime 11 a.m.
"Almost at that moment, I heard the faint drone of airplane engines
in the sky above Mount Kompira behind my house.
" 'Oh no, not another air raid,' I thought. Then I remembered the alarm
had been lifted that morning, so I concluded the sound was coming from Japanese
aircraft.
"Suddenly, a loud full boom like the burst of an anti-aircraft shell
sounded in the direction in which the airplane would have passed, and just
as I looked up to see if it had been the enemy, a blinding flash of light
filled the sky and my body was showered in a wave of intense heat."
He felt a searing pain on his face and threw himself onto the ground with
his eyes shut. Sakita was about a mile south of the center of the blast.
The upper half of his body was badly burned. The family's home was pushed
over like a "flimsy match-stick toy" and Sakita was trapped by
debris.
He managed to squeeze free. The long row of houses along his street was
broken wood and rubble. Nearby factories were enveloped in flames, and thick
smoke churned into the darkening sky.
Directly north, Sakita could see hundreds of people stumbling through the
smoke toward the nearby mountains.
"I suddenly realized I, too, should flee for my life."
Barefoot and shirtless, skin peeling from the left side of his face, he
turned and ran toward a cave dug into the steep hillside behind his home.
That shelter was crammed with people hiding for their lives. Sakita could
not get inside.
He clawed his way up the burning hill behind the cave and came to a road
halfway up Mount Kompira.
"The ground was strewn with countless numbers of corpses. I could no
longer bear to walk among them. I jumped into a sweet potato patch, tripping
over the vines as I ran."
After two days of wandering, he made his way to a makeshift hospital. "Two
or three nurses were desperately trying to care for the injured, but they
were hopelessly outnumbered. It became obvious that however long I waited,
my turn was not going to come.
A nurse threw a small tin of petroleum jelly to him. "It was pointless
to wait for more. I left, and started home."
The road home was barred by civilian guards. He tried to get through. "My
parents and sister may be there. ... Please let me go look for them,"
he pleaded.
Guards turned him away, and Sakita wept. "I lamented over the fact
that I might never see my parents again and wondered how on Earth I would
be able to go on living alone. I did not know what to do."
He roamed aimlessly, looking for friends among the dead. He spent two days
and nights in the middle of a pine grove, hungry, bleeding, in pain and
in shock.
On the third day, he made his way to a relative's home and collapsed into
a coma.
Those relatives carried Sakita on a pull cart past the demolished arms factory
where he had worked to another temporary hospital set up in the nearby town
of Mogi.
With no doctors, nurses treated his wounds with mercurochrome and zinc ointment.
He regained consciousness at the end of August, his sores covered but festering.
He learned later his parents were walking home on the street in Nishima-chi
when the bomb exploded. They were carried to a makeshift hospital in Isahaya
City, where they spent a month recovering from their injuries.
They died several years later from what Sakita said were radiation-related
illnesses.
In the next four decades, Sakita, now 66, was hospitalized 14 times - the
longest period for 30 months - and underwent 10 operations. "Sometimes
I feel a great weariness."
When that happens, he turns for comfort to the large framed picture of his
dead wife that hangs over the doorway of his home.
Then he speaks of his two sons, three daughters, six grandchildren, and
he smiles.
"There must never be another Nagasaki. Your family and mine must all
be able to live in peace, without fear."