(10 years ago Chris Steele-Perkins visited Hiroshima with writer Miyako Yamada to document the stories of Hibakusha - Japanese survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is the fifth of a series of posts in which we'll share their recollections of the horrifying events that occurred 70 years ago..)

Mr. Hiroshi Hara. Born in 1931. Exposed at age 13 in Hiroshima.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. I cross Heiwa Ohashi Bridge, walk past the white Peace Memorial Museum, and stand in front of the Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims. Incense wafts continually from the saddle-shaped concrete monument. Through the opening under the concrete saddle, beyond a faint mist, flickers the Flame of Peace. Beyond that I see a building of exposed iron frame and crumbling brick walls. Reflected in the river on which it stands, stands the former Hiroshima Industrial Promotion Hall, its novel design by Czech architect Jan Letzel, now become the A-bomb Dome, 150 meters from the hypocenter.
On clear days Hiroshi Hara can be found near the A-bomb Dome wielding a paint brush. He fills a small plastic water bottle with water from the Ota River, then mixes his colors to paint the A-bomb Dome. Depicting the Dome in soft colors that express the changing seasons, he determinedly recalls his sad memories of that day. On this day, holding a just-finished painting in his hands, he begins to speak.
“This is my 1,567th painting. For 20 years, I have been doing these in my own way and giving them away to be used to advance the cause of peace. As I paint, I am mourning the dead and praying for their peaceful repose. Depicting the spirit of the Dome has strengthened my desire for peace.”
August 6, sixty years ago. Hara was 13 years old and had a day off from school in exchange for having performed labor service the day before. Mobilized for the war effort, students at his school were working on demolition projects every day. But on August 6, his class, and only his class, was given a holiday. The night of August 5, his parents sent him to a relative’s home on Etajima Island to get food and spend the night. The next morning:
“I saw the mushroom cloud from the island. I had never seen anything of the kind. The shape of the cloud was extraordinary. Something like smoke was shooting up with incredible power and spreading over the whole sky. Everyone said, “A huge bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The city is burning.”
On the morning of the 7th, he headed from Etajima to Ujina by boat. As a student of Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial School he was obligated to report to his school that he was safe. No one knew that an atomic bomb had been dropped. By entering the city, he exposed himself to the bombing.
“When the boat docked at the pier, I saw victims for the first time. People so horribly burned I couldn’t even tell their gender. People whose melted ears were hanging from their heads. People staggering along pierced by hundreds of glass fragments…. I was so terrified my blood ran cold. I could not look at them. I got to the street that led to my school and saw a number of horrific scenes. Bodies still lay scattered about, even on the large bridges. In the river, corpses with bloated abdomens floated toward the sea. When I reached my school, the large building had collapsed, and the exposed iron frame of the science lab was bent. I heard three teachers and 287 students were dead, and that the faces of the corpses were burnt so black as to be unidentifiable. On the morning of the 7th, the army began cremating the corpses. Of the five students from my neighborhood who enrolled in school that spring, I was the only survivor.”
When the boy reached his own neighborhood, it was a burnt plain. Small fires were still smoldering. Soldiers were loading corpses into trucks to clear the streets. When three soldiers tried to lift one corpse, its skin came off in their hands. Teams of five formed to lift and toss each corpse into the truck. At first they wore thick cotton work gloves, but the gloves evidently failed to grip sufficiently, so they worked barehanded. Other soldiers made a pile of dozens of corpses, poured heavy oil on top, and used a fire hook to burn them. People were lying on the roadsides looked exactly like tree roots. The boy walked along looking down, trying to avoid stepping on them.
“Human dignity was utterly lost in this scene.”
Continuing to walk, he ran into a group distributing rice balls. He put his small hands out and received one. It was made of white rice. He had not tasted white rice in about two years. And yet, the boy could not eat because of the fearsome sights he had witnessed and the stench of burning bodies pervading the city. Holding the rice ball in both hands, the boy walked along in a daze.
“I cannot express what I felt. Not through art, not through music, not through a novel—that horror simply cannot be expressed. Why did innocent people have to be killed in this manner? I loathe the atomic bomb. I hate America for dropping it.”
When then Third Special Session on Disarmament was held in 1988, Hara visited the United States and told his A-bomb experience. He encountered people who whistled and jeered yelling, “We don’t want to hear your story. Go home!” He encountered audiences that protested by banging on their desks. According to a Gallup poll at that time, 85% of Americans felt the dropping of the atomic bombs was justified.
“I think Japan made a big mistake in rejecting the Potsdam Declaration. But that does not justify the U.S. action. After it conducted the world’s first A-bomb test in New Mexico, it still had two atomic bombs. One used uranium 235, the other plutonium. They wanted to see if the two bombs would perform differently. Hiroshima had not been attacked by conventional bombs. It was densely populated. It was open and flat, so it would be easy to see the damage the bomb inflicted. Hiroshima also had no prisoner of war camp. It was perfect. I believe the bombing was a human experiment. International law prohibits the massacre of citizens, so dropping the bombs was clearly a war crime.
Hara’s harsh words contrasted with the soft tones of his watercolor painting.