It's a pleasure to take part in the Blogtour The Children of Hiroshima: The True Story of How I Searched for my Family in the Ruins of the City by Sadako Teiko Okuda. Published by Monoray, 8th of May 2025.
Born in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, in 1914, Okuda was teaching sewing on a small island some 35 miles off Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. Even from that distance, both her sight and hearing on her right side were permanently damaged. From 1960 and until her retirement, she taught home economics at a non-traditional high school in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan.
About the book
‘The little boy did not cry or speak. He just stood there and stared at me intensely. With great effort I stood up and tested to see if I could walk with my injured foot. When I did, he came to stand even closer to me and, without saying a word, grabbed my little finger very tightly.’
Sadako Teiko Okuda was living in Osaki-shimo, an island off the mainland of Japan, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945. There was a blinding flash and the window next to Sadako smashed, a shard of glass leaving a painful burn on her neck. Soon, news came that her niece and nephew who lived in Hiroshima were missing. There was only one thing she could do - leave the relative safety of the island and set off into the city to find them.
Over the following seven days Sadako roamed the ruins of the city, desperately searching for her family and coming across dozens of displaced children. With only water and a little medicine, she provided care, compassion and tenderness in the face of unprecedented tragedy. And in turn, they helped her to find hope in the very darkest of times.
Told simply and powerfully in daily diary entries, The Children of Hiroshima is an extraordinary and deeply moving human story of loss, innocence and hope.
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A story retold using snippets from diary entries, memories noted, painful reminders, but equally an important historical reference from an eyewitness that needs to be remembered. These brief moments and encounters only graze the cusp of the tragedy and trauma Sadako must have seen and experienced. Indeed instead of drawing the focus to the physical horror there is an emphasis on human connection, the fragility of said connections and how one moment can make a difference.
To comfort, care and lay aside personal priorities - finding her relatives - to ensure strangers feel safer in their last minutes or hours. It speaks volumes of the compassion Sadako exhibited, but in equal measures of the lack of hope, the senseless destruction and the magnitude a nuclear event has on humanity.
Not spoken about as frequently as the Holocaust, however the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 are not only one of the biggest tragedies of that time period, but also one that should also be noted as a key warning.
There is no real way to reconstruct, evaluate and recount the actual devastation that was caused by the nuclear bombs the US dropped on Japan. Without a doubt there is no way to justify what in reality was a test in real time on real victims or that the perceived threat justified dropping not one but two bombs of that magnitude.
The decades of destructive aftermath, consequences on an entire population. The result being the surrender of the Japanese and yet the taste of something akin to a war crime lingers. There is simply no justification then or now for using nuclear weapons. This was eighty years ago, one can only imagine the horror of a 21st century evolved nuclear event. Our political leaders and self-appointed dangerous dictators at the end of the switch, they are a danger to us all.
This book is not only a story that should be remembered, it's also a reminder of how violence and destruction is committed with such ease and a lack of foresight, especially when the perpetrator/s have zero repercussions and their country is so far away that they never encounter or suffer from the aftermath of these decisions.
Buy The Children of Hiroshima at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: Monoray; pub date 8th May 2025 | Paperback | £8.99. Buy at Amazon.com.
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