From Overseas Press
My Japanese grandparents' silence over the A-bomb
By Yoko Kubota (Agencies)
Updated: 2010-08-06 16:50
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I was 22 years old when my grandmother first told me about what she saw in Hiroshima as a survivor of the atomic bomb that levelled this city 65 years ago, and how it completely changed my grandparent's lives.
As a child growing up near Tokyo, I had visited them often around this time of the year, when the city hosts various events to commemorate the hundreds of thousands that died.
But they never talked about what happened on that day, 65 years ago, and it would be years before I would ask them.
Some survivors of the bomb chose to speak to their families about it, so that their painful legacy could live on.
But for my grandparents, like many other Japanese who lost families and homes to the bomb, the experience was just too cruel to recall. Another relative also raised concerns about discrimination against bomb survivors, their children and grandchildren, in getting jobs or getting married.
"When one is really, truly sad, it's difficult to go out there and speak about these things," my 82-year-old grandmother told me this week.
It was only after my grandfather, who had lost his parents and two sisters on August 6, 1945, died that I found out what he, as well as my grandmother, had seen.
MY GRANDPARENTS' SILENCE
I was a college student in the United States when I started to wonder what really happened to my grandparents in Hiroshima. One summer, I asked my relatives and found out that I am a third-generation "hibakusha," or atomic bomb survivor.
At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, my grandmother, aged 17, was working in a brick warehouse for a branch of the military that made clothes, when the bomb, nicknamed "Little Boy," fell.
The warehouse was about 3 km (2 miles) from the epicentre of the blast, and she was blown down the stairs by a strong wind.
The brick walls protected her from the explosion's heat, believed to have reached as high as 4,000 degrees Celsius (7,200 Fahrenheit), and she was only slightly hurt.