August 7, 2025
HIROSHIMA – Hiromi Komatsu was 11 years old when she survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. This year she attended the peace memorial ceremony in the city for the first time at the age of 91.
Komatsu, who now lives in Nasu-Karasuyama, Tochigi Prefecture, was accompanied by her granddaughter Sari, 35, and her great-grandsons Tao, 10 and Saya, 7.
Eighty years ago, Komatsu was a sixth grader in elementary school. She was staying in an evacuation home about 20 kilometers from ground zero. On Aug. 6, she saw a plane in the sky over Hiroshima and a white parachute-like object wafting down.
Just as she wondered, “What’s that?” she saw an intense flash of light and felt heat on her cheeks. Someone yelled, “The plane must have hit the sun.” The huge mushroom-shaped cloud looked unearthly.
A few days later, her mother Tokie came from Hiroshima to the place where Komatsu was staying. With burns all over her body, Tokie told her daughter: “Our house collapsed. I can’t find your father. Komatsu’s grandmother and other relatives had died under the rubble of the house.
A week after the atomic bombing, Komatsu was exposed to residual radiation when she went to Hiroshima to look for her father. He had been working near the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Hall, a building known today as Genbaku Dome (Atomic Bomb Dome).
As they walked in central Hiroshima, Komatsu and her mother saw charred bodies and people with terrible burns moaning, “Water, water” in first-aid tents. Komatsu cried and begged her mother, “I don’t want to look for Daddy anymore.”
Ultimately, they were unable to find even his bones.
After the war, Komatsu began living in her mother’s hometown in Tochigi Prefecture. “Never tell anyone that you’re a hibakusha. You won’t be able to get married if you do,” Tokie told her. Komatsu followed her mother’s instructions and told no one about what she had gone through.
A turning point came in 1995, half a century after the end of the war, when Komatsu read in the newspaper that Tochigi Prefecture was calling for people to send in stories about their experiences in the war. She was in two minds, but her mother encouraged her to “write what you feel.” So Komatsu wrote about her experience as a hibakusha for the first time.
Sari heard Komatsu’s story about the atomic bombing for the first time in 2014.
“Grandma’s story was very shocking, and I became aware that I’m a third-generation hibakusha,” she said. “The atomic bombing, which I used to feel was something from a different world, felt close to me, and I really feel the importance of valuing life.”
Komatsu decided to attend this year’s ceremony after Nihon Hidankyo (Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024. Her acquaintances expressed their happiness, and she felt the prize was given to every hibakusha.
The number of survivors is dwindling, and Komatsu wanted to travel to Hiroshima on her own for the 80th anniversary that she became a hibakusha. Her mother passed away in 2003 at the age of 93.
She decided to take her two great-grandsons with her because she thought it was a good opportunity. She has not told them what she experienced, thinking it is too horrible a story for elementary school students, but her great-grandson Tao has told her that he wants to hear her story someday.
“We hibakusha don’t have much time left, but I hope people from younger generations, who have never experienced war, will take over telling our experiences,” she said.