Paul Ham - Yokos Diary

She was just like you or any other twelve-year-old child who got up every morning and went to school. She loved her mum and dad. She laughed at some of her teachers. She worked hard. She enjoyed school and her friends and holidays. But Yoko Moriwaki was unlike you in that she lived in Japan, not far from the southern Japanese city of Hiroshima, during the worst war the world has ever known.

Yoko and her family lived on the lovely mountainous island of Miyajima, home to one of the most beautiful religious shrines in Japan. They shared a small house made of traditional Japanese paper. Her father was a music teacher.

Until 1941, when the war broke out, her life was fairly typical of most Japanese girls. She went to school, learned the piano, was cared for by her family, she performed her ceremonial duties. She was taught to believe in a religion called Shinto, the ancient Japanese faith. At the heart of Shinto in the mid-twentieth century was a belief in, and worship of, the Emperor as a living god.

When the war came, Yokos life changed completely. Slowly the towns began to lose their young men, as brothers and fathers left to fight in the Pacific. In 1944 Yokos father was called up. As Japan began to lose the war, food started running out, and by 1945 even rice, the Japanese staple diet, grew scarce. She and her family ate sweet potatoes and berries and anything they could find in the forests.

Her school uniform changed too. Japanese girls loved their sailor-suit uniforms, but due to wartime austerity, junior students had to go without them. In some places the authorities believed the white uniforms made children visible to enemy planes, and banned them. Instead girls had to make their own uniforms. Many happily sewed their own clothes, often during class time. Yokos mother found an old kimono, took it apart and sewed it into a small dress for Yoko. As the war worsened and Yoko and her classmates were mobilised to work as labourers, she was compelled to wear the drab grey trousers and shirt called monpe .

Towards the end of the war, Yoko worked as a student labourer on one of the house demolition sites. She was one of about 7500 student workers in Hiroshima aged between twelve and eighteen. One of her jobs was to clear debris from demolished homes to create firebreaks and thus prevent fires from spreading after a bombing attack. By mid-1945 most big Japanese cities had been heavily bombed and reduced to ashes. The people of Hiroshima were warned to expect the same. But as late as July 1945, Hiroshima and four other Japanese cities remained eerily untouched. In fact the American forces had set them aside as targets for the atomic bomb.

On the night of 5 August, Yoko prepared for another day as a mobilised student worker: From tomorrow morning we are joining the home demolition groups. I am going to do my best, she wrote.

The next morning she got up early, travelled to the city, reached the demolition site, took off her dress, and put on her monpe . At 8.15am a plane flew overhead. A large object fell out. It was the first atomic bomb ever to be dropped on human life. Suddenly there was a great flash and the temperature shot up to many times that of the surface of the sun. Then a tremendous shockwave convulsed the city and blew apart most of the buildings. Anyone standing within a 2-kilometre radius of the blast was horribly burned or struck by flying debris. Yoko stood 700 metres away, in the open air, without any protection. Her little body was blown into the air and dreadfully burned. But astonishingly, she survived the immediate blow. She began crawling on her hands and knees to a place of safety. An army truck picked her up and drove her out of the city centre. A volunteer housewife found her near lifeless body in a village school that was doubling as a relief centre near Hiroshima, and tried to ease her agony.

I came across the story of Yoko while researching my book on the atomic bomb, Hiroshima Nagasaki . In 2010, I stayed in Hiroshima and met Yokos half-brother, Kohji Hosokawa, now in his eighties (Yoko and Kohji had the same mother, but different fathers). I recall him holding up Yokos handwritten notebook. This is her diary, he told me, his voice still shaking at the memory of his little sister. You can see that it begins from the day she entered school and how happy and proud she is to become a student.

Yokos brother, Kohji, showed me the pen Yoko used to write her diary. It has an old-fashioned nib, which she would dip into an inkpot. He pointed to a black trace and said, The ink remaining on the pen is the ink she was using on 5 August. I dont touch that part of the pen. And he showed me photos: of a little girl sitting at the piano; of the same girl in a pretty dress wearing a hat.