Hiroshima survivor recounts years of silence: 'It could be seen as shameful to talk about it, for the person or their family'

Toshiko Tanaka was 6 years old the day she saw the sky disappear in a flash of white between the branches of the cherry tree where she was waiting for a friend to go to school. "Then everything went black," she recalls. The United States had just dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people, on August 6, 1945, a few days before bombing the city of Nagasaki, which would kill 70,000. With her mouth full of dust and burns on her face, neck, and right arm, the little girl managed to return home, but almost lost her life that day.

For sixty-five years, she withdrew into silence and carried the memory of August 6 alone, never confiding it to anyone, not even her children. "I tried to forget that day," says Toshiko, 86, a few days before the commemoration of the bombings, which took place eighty years ago.

Today, Toshiko Tanaka, who has suffered from chronic radiation fatigue since childhood, tells her story on every continent and advocates for a world free of nuclear weapons. In New Zealand, the United States, and Japan, she shares her memories, accompanied by her daughter, Reiko Tashiro, 60, who works in intercultural management in Kobe and translates her mother's questions from English to Japanese. "Reiko's support has strengthened our relationship," observes Toshiko Tanaka. questioned, like her daughter, by videoconference.

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