We might imagine the situation when the A-bomb dropped through listening to the stories of hibakusha or watching movies on the bombing. However, conditions in the city immediately after the bombing are impossible to convey adequately in words. People became ghosts or demons, their skin charred and dangling from their bodies, their flesh and even bones exposed. Mothers tried desperately to nurse charred babies. Babies clung desperately to the breasts of dead or dying mothers. Those who managed to survive had lost everything, even hope. That was a “living hell”. Created by each of a single A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I suspect most of us assume that the choice of life over death is instinctive, even under the most extreme conditions. In Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, however, atomic bombs created living hells in which no one could be criticized for choosing death. Many who survived sincerely envied the dead. In fact, we know from eyewitness accounts that many victims took their own lives as soon as they were fully conscious of having survived.

Even under those conditions, our hibakusha chose to exert all their remaining strength to live as civilized human beings. This was superhuman effort to remain human. They made the remarkable decision to choose life. That is why hibakusha have appealed that no one else should suffer the way they did. No one includes entire human beings even President Truman, who ordered the bomb dropped, the scientists who developed the bomb, and the military personnel who actually delivered it. The message of Hibakusha rejecting hatred and revenge in favor of reconciliation has started from such ideas.