AMERICANA / AUGUST 6, 1945

A Japanese schoolteacher recorded his memories of the day the bomb dropped. 

GUEST BLOG / By Meg McAleer writing in the May/June 2024 issue of LCM Magazine. She is a former historian in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress, Washington DC--Haruo Shimizu, a Japanese schoolteacher, poet, human being survived the Allied Forces bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. 

 One year later, he wrote down his memories of that horrific day. Shimizu remembered boarding a trolley that morning to visit a friend before reporting to work at a munitions factory. 

 At approximately 8:15 a.m., his world exploded with “a silver-white flash, like that of magnesium powder used in taking a photograph, high up in the sky.” 

One B-29. bomber Enola Gay had dropped an atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy.” 

Torrential rain began to fall. Shimizu grew disoriented: “A tremendous clap of thunder went on and huge columns of brown clouds with dust and flame were making sheer screens all around.” 

The dead and dying surrounded him. 

“Some of them were carrying their wounded wives on their shoulders and some their dead children in their arms. They were all desperately shouting for help and calling aloud the names of their families.” 

 The next day, he saw another B-29 plane circling the city. His anger erupted: “What the hell do you think there is still left to be bombed in this devastated city?” 

Shimizu returned to his native Hokkaido. Though afflicted by radiation poisoning and trauma, he recovered enough to secure a job as an interpreter in an Otaru hotel that served as an American military club during the U.S. occupation. 

There he met and befriended Willard C. Floyd, a 19-year-old soldier from Bliss, Idaho. 

 The account of Hiroshima, written by Shimizu in flawless English, was created for Floyd so that he would understand the terror, devastation and loss hidden beneath the soaring mushroom cloud. 

 Writing about and sharing traumatic memories can lead to self-healing for some people. Shimizu was a Walt Whitman scholar who taught at Japanese colleges and published on Whitman’s poetry. 

 Like the poet, Shimizu captured the inhumanity of war in his writing, yet he retained his faith in humanity. 

Texts of his work are in the Library of Congress. Manuscript Division.