Hiroshima survivor who broke her silence at 70 seeks ‘blue sky’ of peace through her art
- Toshiko Tanaka was six when the atom bomb detonated in Hiroshima. She did not speak of it for decades, instead expressing herself in her art
Toshiko Tanaka was six years old and waiting under a cherry blossom tree for a school friend in Hiroshima’s hilly Ushida neighbourhood when an atomic bomb dropped by the United States detonated in the sky just 2.3 kilometres (1.4 miles) away on August 6, 1945.
“Someone shouted ‘An enemy plane’! and I looked up to see one flying over. Suddenly, there was a great light, and I instinctively covered my face with my arm. My right arm, my head and the back of my neck were burned,” the now 85-year-old recalls from her home a few hundred metres from the same spot.
“I was crying in the darkness after the flash and not knowing where to go among all the dust. I don’t know how long it took me to get home, but the house was in a terrible state.”
Once inside, she quickly developed a fever and lost consciousness for about a week. Her mother did not believe Tanaka would pull through.
When she eventually did open her eyes in the wrecked house, it was the sight of a blue summer sky that greeted her, visible through a gap in the damaged roof.
“It was the same blue sky as the day before the bomb, even though it was a different world to before,” she said. “When I thought about it again later, it made me think that there is still a tomorrow, and that feeling encouraged me.”
