Father Tadashi Hasegawa is a Catholic priest and pastor of Hiroshima's Misasa Catholic Church, which stands not far away from where he had been severely injured by the A-bomb in 1945. He sat with me in his rectory and, after serving iced coffee, told his story with animated gestures.
"I was with some 15 students on the river bank when the bomb dropped. I was 14 years old and a little over a mile from the hypocenter. At 7:30 that morning the air-raid warning had been lifted, and some of us students were taking a swim before reporting for our 8:30 work assignment at the nearby school. I was up on the bank. I heard a B-29 coming and those of us who were gathered there spotted it in the sky.…I fell face down on the ground. The bomb exploded and I was surrounded by yellow light. It was as though ping-pong balls of light were falling all around me. Tremendous heat burned fiercely into my back as well as into the back of my head, arms and legs. My clothing caught fire.
"The students who kept looking at the sky when the bomb exploded suffered burns all over the front of their bodies. They all died within two weeks of the bombing.
"Because my clothes were burning, I jumped into the river. When I hit the water, my whole body felt stabbed with sharp pain. When I got out of the river, my skin came off and hung down from my fingernails. I had to walk like a chimpanzee because of my hanging skin.
"All the houses in the area were flattened to the ground, and fires were beginning to spread. Burning debris sucked up into the blast was falling from the sky. Pieces of broken glass and tile were pelting down around me. To avoid the falling, flaming debris, I went into a small bomb shelter but had to leave when smoke began drifting in. As I started upstream, I saw thousands of dead bodies along the riverside and floating in the river. No doubt, they had fled from the burning houses. At times, I had to crawl over the bodies on my hands and knees. Eventually I arrived at a park. Around evening, I began vomiting blood and diarrhea started.
I was taken into someone's house. My father had located me and was searching in vain for a doctor. Finally, he went to a Jesuit monastery in the vicinity. It was filled with injured people, and there seemed to be no chance of finding help. But just as he was leaving, the Jesuit superior told him that he would come himself to visit me. The Jesuit was none other than Father Pedro Arrupe, a missionary in Hiroshima who would one day go to Rome as head of the whole Jesuit Order. Father Arrupe came to wash my wounds, which were encrusted and contaminated with ash and mud.
"I could not move. I was lying on wax paper placed over a mat. My condition was critical, and Father Arrupe tried to treat me for three or four days. That's all he could do. Infection set in, followed later by intestinal disease, and for weeks my life hung on a thread. By the time Father Arrupe came back on September 30, 1 was just skin and bones. He just looked at me and broke into tears.
"On that same day—after Father Arrope left—a German Jesuit showed up at my side quite mysteriously and providentially. My family and I were Buddhists at the time, but he used words like God, heaven, Jesus Christ, crucifixion. He asked my family to give him some water, and he baptized me. He then told my parents that I would sleep for one week and they should not touch me. My mother was very worried because my condition was horrible at the time. Thousands of maggots were in the wounds all over my body. Puss was oozing everywhere and I had a terrible bed rash.
"But I fell into a peaceful sleep for a whole week, My mother checked on me often, afraid she would find me dead. The priest checked on me about the third day and then came back after a week. He told my mom she could touch me. She began peeling the bandages off my arms and found that they came off easily, with no adhesion. She found dead maggots on the wounds, and the wounds were much better. They had healed on my back and all over.
"After my remarkable recovery my family became interested in the Catholic faith and were all baptized the following year. I went on to study for the priesthood and was ordained in 1965. I believe I was allowed to live and become a priest so that my prayers and Masses might help console the souls of those who died from the atomic bomb, In many cases, whole families were wiped out and no one was left to mourn for them. As a priest, I am able to remember them.
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