My daughter Fumie was then a second grader at the Hiroshima Prefectural Second Girl's Junior High School. I myself had been searching around the area from the early in the morning of the day following the atomic bombing of August 7th, trying to find out about my daughter's safety, and hardly arrived at my daughter's school at approx. 2:00 pm.

I immediately asked whether my daughter was safe, and was led to the Etiquette Classroom, and told,

"This is Miss Honji."

Looking in the direction pointed, I found her laying down badly wounded and burned, without a slightest sign of her usual self to identify that she was my own daughter. Then I cautiously tried to call,

"Are you Fumie?"

And, as hard as it is to believe, a thin voice came,

"Maaam...maaa........!"

She answered back in a wheedling manner as much as she could, for which I helplessly responded, simply,

"You've changed."
Then, crushed with grief, I just burst into tears after tears.

After that, my daughter had a wash with our help and drank water from a canteen with relish. However, only 14 hours later, around 4 in the morning of August 8th, following the mother-daughter's bare reunion, she passed away forlornly calling her mother for the last time in vain,

"Okaaa-chaan........Okaa-chaan...........!"

I was exposed to the bomb's radiation in a lower place of Miyuki Bridge and suffered burns on my face and hands. At that time my daughter Sachiko was on the staff of the Hiroshima Prefectural First Girl's Junior High School. So, I felt anxiety for her safety and inquired around the city all day long throughout Aug. 7th and 8th, but she was not to be found in anywhere.

However, on Aug. 11th at last, she made a sudden comeback to her home town Sera County and we celebrated our reunion each other.

My daughter said she was exposed to the bomb's radiation during the morning assembly and pinned under the collapsed school building, though apparently she wasn't suffering a traumatic injury.

In reality, she was exposed to heavy radiations. Despite the fact that she was seriously suffering from diarrhea, a fever over 42° and spasmodic fit, she wrote in pencil commendably, "So far I most abhorred and dreaded of death, but now I am prepared to die in peace, Good-bye my mother!" before she passed away on August 17th.

I inscribed an epitaph on the gravestone as follows to commemorate my late daughter:

What a pity !
That My daughter fell prey to the ravages of war,
To die in buds just before blooming........Mother's mind.

At that time, my son Toshihiko was a third grader at the Hiroshima Prefectural First Industrial School and had been mobilized in Fukoku Oil Refinery in Funairi-honmachi. On his way to the mobilization site, he was caught in the atomic bombing in a train at "Taka-no-bashi" station.

In the evening of August 8th, he returned home in Saijo to reciprocate a joy between mother and child, saying, "How nice you've come back alive."

Later, he was badly afflicted, and at last drifted off into an eternal sleep in the evening of Aug. 21.

Nowadays, as a narrator of the A-bomb calamities, I am committed to making young people aware that we should never have another war, showing them the first-hand witness of the cruelty of atomic bombing and hence importance of peace.