Hiroshima atomic bomb attack still raw, 75 years on

Seventy-five years ago, US warplane Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb obliterating Hiroshima and killing about 140,000 of the city’s 350,000 residents.

‘If I die without telling anyone, how will people know?’: Hiroshima survivor Teri Teramoto in her Sydney home this week. Picture: Jane Dempster

At 8.15am on August 6, 1945, six-year-old Teri Teramoto was cooking with her mother when the US unleashed the world’s first atomic bomb attack on the city of Hiroshima, vaporising thousands of lives and destroying Japan’s ability to wage war.

“I was helping mother make soybeans that we would turn into powder,” she says, recounting the moments before the bomb flashed over Hiroshima. “The air was just so, so hot.”

Ms Teramoto, 81, is one of the last Japanese-Australian witness­es to that horror and feels a growing urgenc­y — a responsibility even — to share her story.

Occasionally, she says, the “nasty” images seared into her memory will bubble to the ­surface, briefly shattering the peaceful life she now lives in Chatswood, in Sydney’s north.

She can still vividly recall the overpowering stench of burning flesh that lingered in the air in the days after the blast, the smell so pungent it was as if the dead had clung to her clothing. “Whole human bodies were just burning,” Ms Teramoto recalls.

Ms Teramoto with her mother, younger brother and sister, and her aunt and cousins, days before the blast.

“People were being burnt alive, and some were just dying on the road. Never, ever can you imagine­ the smell.”

Seventy-five years ago on Thursday, US warplane Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy, obliterating Hiroshima and killing about 140,000 of the city’s 350,000 residents.

Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the US dropped a second atomic bomb, dubbed Fat Man, on Nagasaki, about 420km to the south of Hiroshima, wiping out more than 75,000 lives. It was the first time nuclear weapons had been used in warfare: as a result of the blasts, Japan surrendered on August 15, ending World War II.

Ms Teramoto enjoyed a long career as a Qantas flight attendant after moving to Australia in the 1960s, but for most of her life she kept her past as a Hiroshima survivor a tightly-held secret, desperate to forget the trauma

“After I turned 60, I realised I had to tell people about what had happened,” she says.

“Not many people remember the war, so if I die without telling anyone, how will people know?”

After the bombing, Ms Teramoto and her family were evacuated from their home, about 40km from the epicentre of the blast, and forced onto a train overflowing with refugees.

When the train broke down, Ms Teramoto, her mother, younger­ brother and 18-month-old sister walked for two days through the ruins of Hiroshima, breathing in the radioactive air.

“People were calling for water, begging for water, and they would just collapse on the street, their skin still burning,” she says.

She clung to her mother’s hand as they picked their way through the dead and dying, dodging the few structures that still stood. “People were just dying on the road. You could see all the way out to the horizon and just nothing — no houses, no buildings, just dying people.”

Thousands more died later of injuries and radiation-related illnesses, including Ms Teramoto’s mother, who died from cancer at 70. Ms Teramoto was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer at 50, while her brother, aged 79, has survived leukaemia, one of the most common cancers among atomic bomb survivors.