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ishibumi: a memorial to the atomic annihilation of 321 students of the Hiroshima Middle School
A documentary account of the deaths of 321 students and 4 teachers of the Hiroshima Middle School who had assembled for demolition work near ground zero on August 6th, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. Originally a television documentary, the book records the oral and written traces of the students final days as a memorial of their deaths and as a petition for the elimination of nuclear weapons of war.
- GenresJapan
238 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2016
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December 25, 2017
Ishibumi: A Memorial to the Atomic Annihilation of 321 Students of Hiroshima Middle School and a reflection on Memorial, a translation of the Iliad, by Alice Oswald.
The title Ishibumi means ‘stone monument’. It is the name of the cenotaph in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which commemorates the death of 321 students and four teachers of the Hiroshima Middle School, who were all killed by the atomic bomb called ‘Little Boy’ which was dropped on the city on the morning of August 6th, 1945.
The students and their teachers had assembled at 8.15am on the approach to the Shin-Ohasi bridge over the Honkawa River, in what is now the Peace Park, about 500 metres from ground zero. They were first year students in the school, aged 12 to 14, who had been rostered that day to clear debris from building demolitions instead of schoolwork. Hiroshima had escaped the firebomb attacks that devastated Tokyo and Osaka. The demolitions were intended to create firebreaks when the expected incendiary attacks on Hiroshima eventuated. Some of the children were facing the flightpath of the approaching B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother. They watched the release of the bomb during the seconds before it detonated 570 metres above the centre of the city. Those few who saw the flash were immediately blinded. A hundred or more of the students were probably killed instantly. Many of their bodies were never identified. Ishibumi is a documentary compilation of letters and oral testimony relating to the 226 children whose last hours or days were remembered by parents or other family members who survived the bombing of Hiroshima. These memorial records were originally collected for a 1969 documentary film made by the Hiroshima Television Corporation. The book is a more complete collection of those records. The producer of the documentary, Susikido Jun’ichirom, who had been a student at Hiroshima Middle School, writes in an Afterword that he saw the explosion from his workplace in an ammunition factory on the outskirts of Hiroshima. He hitched a lift back to the city on the evening of August 6th to discover what had happened to his friends and found the inner city still burning. More than 150,000 people were dead or dying.
The 226 children whose last hours were recorded secure a fleeting individuality in the records of the time and manner of their deaths. Some died instantly. Kawamoto Isuyoshi, class 6, must have seen the bomb falling. Someone called ‘Get down!’ and he dropped to the ground, face down in the air defence posture he had been taught, with his hands covering his eyes and ears. His body was found in that position. The last to die was ‘the youth Sakurabi Ichiro, class 5’, whose mother and father found him at a first aid station and carried him to a house owned by his father’s employer. On the morning of August 11th, five days after the bombing, he asked his father to sing a favourite military song and died listening to his father singing. Patriotism and devotion to the Emperor are recurring elements in the parents’ memories of the children who did not die immediately. In the Honkawa River, where some of the survivors had taken refuge in the immediate aftermath of the blast, one of the teachers led them in singing the national anthem and the old song Umi Yukuba, which was sung by Kamikaze pilots before take-off: ‘If I go away to the sea I shall be a corpse washed up. If I go away to the mountain, I shall be a corpse in the grass. But if I die for the Emperor it will not be a regret’. Others alternated between shouting Banzai! and crying for their mothers. (This may be more complex than it seems. Christopher Ross (Mishima’s Sword 2006) relates a conversation with a kamikaze pilot whose life was spared by the war’s end. The old man told Ross that the most common ‘last cry’ of the pilots was not Banzai! but ‘Ka San!’ – Mummy!)
The narrative of the parents’ search for bodies, the journeys by the burned children who managed to return to their homes and their inevitable deaths in the days that followed is blunt and direct. The original Japanese text was intended to be read by children as well as adults. The English translation by Yasuko Claremont and Roman Rosenbaum of the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Sydney preserves the simplicity of the original which has a stilted formality peculiarly appropriate to its memorial purpose. The children whose fate is known are almost always introduced by the prefatory title, ‘the youth’, their name, their place in the class roll and a class photograph. The ‘youth Sakurabi Ichiro, 5th class’ mentioned earlier in this review as the last to die, appears under that description in an account of the immediate aftermath of the bombing when, badly burned, he tells his friends that shouting aloud will only weaken them. Like some of the other burned children Sakurabi Ichiro then walked through the ruined city in an attempt to return to his home. It had been destroyed and he was taken to a first aid centre, where his parents eventually found him. The impersonal tone of the parent’s account of their children’s deaths is accentuated by the almost complete absence of any reference to the terrible pain that they must have suffered.
There is an unexpected parallel in the records of these children, who acquire a poignant individuality only in death, with the poet Alice Oswald’s translation of Homer’s Iliad. Oswald calls her translation Memorial – a fortuitous correspondence with Ishibumi, a stone memorial. Though Oswald calls her Homeric poem a ‘translation’, she omits all the familiar narrative elements of the Iliad, providing instead a stripped ‘oral cemetery’ or lamentation for the 218 Greeks and Trojans who died on the plains of Ilium. Memorial begins with the first to die, Protesilaus, who ‘died in mid-air jumping to be the first ashore’ and ends with Hector, killed when ‘a spear found out the little patch of white between the collarbone and the throat’. As in the annihilation of the 321 Middle School children in Hiroshima, many of the dead in the Iliad have no memorial beyond the bare record of their names. Others, like Melanpippus, die with only fleeting insignia of their identity: ‘Melanpippus was not really a fighter, more a farmer’. Others have a genealogy and epitaph. Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved, is remembered in brief and allusive reminiscence of his childhood before his battle scene, which ends when his spear snaps. his helmet goes spinning through the air and ‘the rare and immediate light of Apollo’ stops him in his tracks.
Oswald extends the fragmentary biographies of her soldiers with gorgeous similes, derived from the original Greek. Her Memorial is both a cemetery and a lament. Ishibumi, which is almost without simile or metaphor, relies instead for its effect on the bleak simplicity of the parents’ testimony as they recalled their attempts to find their children, the identification of their bodies and, among the minority who were found alive, what the children said before they died.
In Oswald’s Memorial, Greeks and Trojans are mingled together without discrimination in the same oral cemetery. The quarrels and conflicts of their war are transcended by the lamentation for their deaths. The same distanced perspective is pervasive in the stories of the dead children in Ishibumi. There is no discussion of the reasons why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen for destruction and no reference to the continuing debate on whether the resort to nuclear weapons to end the war can be justified. This memorial account of the 321 Hiroshima Middle School children who died is offered instead in support of the plea that nuclear armaments, so much more powerful now than they were in 1945, must never again be used as weapons of war.
The title Ishibumi means ‘stone monument’. It is the name of the cenotaph in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which commemorates the death of 321 students and four teachers of the Hiroshima Middle School, who were all killed by the atomic bomb called ‘Little Boy’ which was dropped on the city on the morning of August 6th, 1945.
The students and their teachers had assembled at 8.15am on the approach to the Shin-Ohasi bridge over the Honkawa River, in what is now the Peace Park, about 500 metres from ground zero. They were first year students in the school, aged 12 to 14, who had been rostered that day to clear debris from building demolitions instead of schoolwork. Hiroshima had escaped the firebomb attacks that devastated Tokyo and Osaka. The demolitions were intended to create firebreaks when the expected incendiary attacks on Hiroshima eventuated. Some of the children were facing the flightpath of the approaching B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother. They watched the release of the bomb during the seconds before it detonated 570 metres above the centre of the city. Those few who saw the flash were immediately blinded. A hundred or more of the students were probably killed instantly. Many of their bodies were never identified. Ishibumi is a documentary compilation of letters and oral testimony relating to the 226 children whose last hours or days were remembered by parents or other family members who survived the bombing of Hiroshima. These memorial records were originally collected for a 1969 documentary film made by the Hiroshima Television Corporation. The book is a more complete collection of those records. The producer of the documentary, Susikido Jun’ichirom, who had been a student at Hiroshima Middle School, writes in an Afterword that he saw the explosion from his workplace in an ammunition factory on the outskirts of Hiroshima. He hitched a lift back to the city on the evening of August 6th to discover what had happened to his friends and found the inner city still burning. More than 150,000 people were dead or dying.
The 226 children whose last hours were recorded secure a fleeting individuality in the records of the time and manner of their deaths. Some died instantly. Kawamoto Isuyoshi, class 6, must have seen the bomb falling. Someone called ‘Get down!’ and he dropped to the ground, face down in the air defence posture he had been taught, with his hands covering his eyes and ears. His body was found in that position. The last to die was ‘the youth Sakurabi Ichiro, class 5’, whose mother and father found him at a first aid station and carried him to a house owned by his father’s employer. On the morning of August 11th, five days after the bombing, he asked his father to sing a favourite military song and died listening to his father singing. Patriotism and devotion to the Emperor are recurring elements in the parents’ memories of the children who did not die immediately. In the Honkawa River, where some of the survivors had taken refuge in the immediate aftermath of the blast, one of the teachers led them in singing the national anthem and the old song Umi Yukuba, which was sung by Kamikaze pilots before take-off: ‘If I go away to the sea I shall be a corpse washed up. If I go away to the mountain, I shall be a corpse in the grass. But if I die for the Emperor it will not be a regret’. Others alternated between shouting Banzai! and crying for their mothers. (This may be more complex than it seems. Christopher Ross (Mishima’s Sword 2006) relates a conversation with a kamikaze pilot whose life was spared by the war’s end. The old man told Ross that the most common ‘last cry’ of the pilots was not Banzai! but ‘Ka San!’ – Mummy!)
The narrative of the parents’ search for bodies, the journeys by the burned children who managed to return to their homes and their inevitable deaths in the days that followed is blunt and direct. The original Japanese text was intended to be read by children as well as adults. The English translation by Yasuko Claremont and Roman Rosenbaum of the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Sydney preserves the simplicity of the original which has a stilted formality peculiarly appropriate to its memorial purpose. The children whose fate is known are almost always introduced by the prefatory title, ‘the youth’, their name, their place in the class roll and a class photograph. The ‘youth Sakurabi Ichiro, 5th class’ mentioned earlier in this review as the last to die, appears under that description in an account of the immediate aftermath of the bombing when, badly burned, he tells his friends that shouting aloud will only weaken them. Like some of the other burned children Sakurabi Ichiro then walked through the ruined city in an attempt to return to his home. It had been destroyed and he was taken to a first aid centre, where his parents eventually found him. The impersonal tone of the parent’s account of their children’s deaths is accentuated by the almost complete absence of any reference to the terrible pain that they must have suffered.
There is an unexpected parallel in the records of these children, who acquire a poignant individuality only in death, with the poet Alice Oswald’s translation of Homer’s Iliad. Oswald calls her translation Memorial – a fortuitous correspondence with Ishibumi, a stone memorial. Though Oswald calls her Homeric poem a ‘translation’, she omits all the familiar narrative elements of the Iliad, providing instead a stripped ‘oral cemetery’ or lamentation for the 218 Greeks and Trojans who died on the plains of Ilium. Memorial begins with the first to die, Protesilaus, who ‘died in mid-air jumping to be the first ashore’ and ends with Hector, killed when ‘a spear found out the little patch of white between the collarbone and the throat’. As in the annihilation of the 321 Middle School children in Hiroshima, many of the dead in the Iliad have no memorial beyond the bare record of their names. Others, like Melanpippus, die with only fleeting insignia of their identity: ‘Melanpippus was not really a fighter, more a farmer’. Others have a genealogy and epitaph. Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved, is remembered in brief and allusive reminiscence of his childhood before his battle scene, which ends when his spear snaps. his helmet goes spinning through the air and ‘the rare and immediate light of Apollo’ stops him in his tracks.
Oswald extends the fragmentary biographies of her soldiers with gorgeous similes, derived from the original Greek. Her Memorial is both a cemetery and a lament. Ishibumi, which is almost without simile or metaphor, relies instead for its effect on the bleak simplicity of the parents’ testimony as they recalled their attempts to find their children, the identification of their bodies and, among the minority who were found alive, what the children said before they died.
In Oswald’s Memorial, Greeks and Trojans are mingled together without discrimination in the same oral cemetery. The quarrels and conflicts of their war are transcended by the lamentation for their deaths. The same distanced perspective is pervasive in the stories of the dead children in Ishibumi. There is no discussion of the reasons why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen for destruction and no reference to the continuing debate on whether the resort to nuclear weapons to end the war can be justified. This memorial account of the 321 Hiroshima Middle School children who died is offered instead in support of the plea that nuclear armaments, so much more powerful now than they were in 1945, must never again be used as weapons of war.
December 31, 2022
Ishibumi: A Memorial to the Atomic Annihilation of 321 Students of the Hiroshima Middle School (2016) was book put out in English translated by Yasuko Claremont and Roman Rosenbaum to match the story told in a 1969 special documentary film by the Hiroshima Television Company. It is a powerful book. The focus of the original TV program and the book that accompanied it were the 321 first-year students and four teachers at Hiroshima Second Middle School who were engaged in demolition work only 500 meters from the hypocenter of the blast and died either on the spot or soon after. Their survivors gathered testimonies about their last words and actions that formed the basis of the book and program. It is heart wrenching to read about the final moments of these young children, some more detailed than others. After researching the family testimonials 226 deaths are know about to varying degrees. Some with detailed moments of death told by family members who were by the side of the boys others very little is known about except some second or third hand accounts, some ashes, some a little piece of personal belonging (lunch box, name tag, clothing, etc. ) For the remaining 94 deaths nothing was ever found or remained. The morning of August 6th 1945 started out as any other day. All the of the 321 first year students of Hiroshima Middle School began their morning commuting to school then to the work site they had been assigned. "That August the ferocious sun flashed above us. I cry from the depths of my being." None survived.
July 3, 2019
This is such an important story to tell and I thought the simple writing style made it easy to follow and allowed for the reality of the event to fully set in. Of course these books are never really enjoyable to read but I feel like I learned a lot from this book and I'd recommend it to anyone and everyone.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews