reflect on 70 Years since the Atomic Bomb

Within the framework of this exhibition at Born Centre Cultural-Ajuntament de Granollers
Casa Asia offers this talk with the purpose to reflect on the terrible destruction effects inflicted by nuclear weapons, an absolute evil able to lead the human race to its own extinction.
The session will included Yoshiko Kajimoto's witness, who was a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, taken place the dawn of the 6th of August 1945 and that caused more than 140.000 deaths that year. His thoughts will help to remember the consequences this event still has on millions of people and to raise awareness about the danger nuclear weapons have and the need to get rid of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8QY5gt1weE

26:00 to 26:00  and  48:10 to 49:20 to

On Aug. 6, 1945, Kajimoto was a 14-year old worker in a factory that produced propeller parts. When the atomic bomb detonated, the factory building collapsed. Kajimoto’s leg was crushed under the debris. When she managed to pull out her leg, much of the skin had been torn off. Looking around her, she found that many of her friends were already dead. She left the ruins of the city with her surviving friends.

Kajimoto, who was 14 and was working in a factory

when the bomb exploded, described the horrors of the bombing. 

As she carried a classmate on a stretcher away from the factory,

Kajimoto walked barefoot, her shoes lost in the blast.

"We had to carry the girls over areas where dead bodies were scattered,"

said Kajimoto. "We tried to step in between the corpses. We

were able not to step on the bodies, but we couldn’t avoid

stepping on the skin that had melted from their bones. 

The skin was wet, slimy. I’ll never forget that feeling."



Yoshiko Kajimoto and her 14- to 16-year-olds fellow workers 

in a factory in Misasa, 2.3 kilometres from the blast,

tried to get back into the partly destroyed factory

to rescue their friends, who were shouting beneath fallen walls and

beams. Nobody could find the first-aid kits, so the children tore off

their blouses and headbands and wrapped them around their friends'

wounds: 'Those headbands that everybody wore really saved a lot of

people!' she would recall.


They were called the hibakusha - literally, 'bomb-affected people' - a

neutral term that pointedly did not connote 'survivor' or 'victim'. For

years they existed in a nether world, the flotsam of official indifference

and the jetsam of American experimentation. To Japanese society,

they were untouchable, the people you did not employ or let your

son or daughter marry.

Seventy-seven year old Kajimoto is a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often classified into two groups—those who were in the city when the atomic bomb struck and those who went into the city following the explosion. Kajimoto belongs to the former.

Although over 60 years have passed since the bombing, Kajimoto did not tell her story to the public or to anyone outside of her family until eight years ago. Her husband was a survivor as well and talking about their experiences from Hiroshima had always been a private, intimate dialogue between the two.

When her husband passed away, it was Kajimoto’s granddaughter who encouraged her to tell her story publicly. At first, her fear of public speaking overcame her. Eventually, however, she discovered the impact of her own words.

Kajimoto’s father, who was not near the epicenter of the blast at the time, came into the city soon afterward to look for his daughter, rummaging through the rubble and corpses. He died 18 months later from radiation poisoning.

Kajimoto herself was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1999 and underwent a successful operation to remove two-thirds of her stomach. Several of her surviving friends, however, were less fortunate and succumbed to radiation poisoning by the 1990s, she said.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki film they didn't want us to see