In Partnership With Wcmu Public Media And The Traverse City Record-Eagle
On Aug. 6, 1945, 14-year-old Masayuki Nakano was at home when he heard a loud bang. Masayuki was living on an island in Japan called Hashira Island, or Hashirajima. Approximately 25 miles away, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
He lost friends among the 70,000 who instantly perished. Entire families, friend groups, office buildings, residences were wiped out on impact. Thousands of civilian lives and bloodlines that had futures were killed that day. The grandson he would have 80 years later, almost to the exact day, wouldn’t have been born if Masayuki had been just 20 miles north on that summer day.
However, that explosion also symbolized the end of the era for Imperial Japan. The Japanese government was almost completely replaced, and the emperor was stripped of much of his power.
And, after the new government was formed, reconstruction of Japanese culture and society accelerated.
After the war, Masayuki became a gym teacher. He actually swam from Hashirajima to mainland Japan every day to work, 20 miles, according to his daughter Yuko. Yuko was one of Masayuki’s two children, with the other being his son, Hiroyuki Nakano.
Yuko went to high school in Hiroshima, just a mile away, and 20 years after the bomb dropped. At that school, she said, there were memorials for all of the students who had lost their lives on that forsaken day. She said she knew many friends and acquaintances who became sick from the nuclear aftermath. She said, at the time, it was supposed to take 70 years for Hiroshima to be livable.
I visited Hiroshima 70 years after the bombing in 2015. My mom and I visited when I was 10 years old, so I wasn’t too informed about what had happened. We visited the site of the bombing and the peace memorial. During the presentations and the showings, I was informed, but I felt more pitiful than anything, according to my mom.
However, she got me a book that told stories about what was found in Hiroshima after the bombing. One example of what was found was someone’s shadow imprinted on their porch because of the bomb, which frightened me as a kid.
The story that really got to me was about a kid. He was around my age at the time, and all he wanted to do was ride his bike and hang out with his friends. Next to the story was a picture of a bike, charred black. That story made me cry, even after multiple tries to read past it.
The memorials and the stories are why those lives deserve to be remembered. If Masayuki were just 25 miles north, this story wouldn’t have been told, because I would not exist, as he is my late grandfather.
Even though in Traverse City the candle remembrance hosted by Mideast JustPeace and Veterans for Peace was canceled this year, people must remember those who’ve lost their lives, as the deceased cannot carry on to be the people or the grandparents they could have been.