In this series, The Asahi Shimbun traces the impact on children of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Their stories are told through interviews with their families, and from the memoirs of survivors and records compiled by Hiroshima city. The photos were provided by the bereaved families. Some of the images were colorized using artificial intelligence technology with the help of Hiroshi Ishikawa, professor at Waseda University’s Faculty of Science and Engineering, whose team developed the technology.

This is the fifth and final installment in the series.

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On a train bound for Nagasaki, just two days after the atomic bombing of the city, a man discussed the devastation of the blast, including the death of a 14-year-old boy, with a stranger.

He did not know that the stranger was the dead boy’s father.

More than six decades after the war ended, that man’s recollections of his encounter with the father helped the bereaved family gain a sense of closure, something that the families of many other young victims of the atomic bombing have been denied.

LETTERS FROM NAGASAKI

The boy, Kazuyuki Kamochi, was born in Arita, Saga Prefecture, to parents who ran a traditional Japanese clothing store.

Kazuyuki moved to Nagasaki with his classmates at age 14 for mobilization at Mitsubishi’s weapons factories as part of Japan’s war effort.

“I’m working hard every day while enduring the severe cold,” Kazuyuki said in a letter to his family.

His frequent letters inquired about his older brother’s entrance exam results, expressed delight about the good grades achieved by his younger sister, and encouraged his younger brother in his studies.

The war situation kept worsening for Japan.

One of Kazuyuki’s letters, apparently sent in April 1945, said damage from a U.S. air raid in central Nagasaki was “beyond imagination.”

Then, at 11:02 a.m. on Aug. 9, 1945, the U.S. military dropped the “Fat Man” atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Kazuyuki was working at an elementary school about 500 meters from ground zero.

Two days later, in the morning, his father arrived at crowded Isahaya Station in Nagasaki Prefecture.

He asked a man where he could find a train bound for Nagasaki Station, located more than 20 kilometers to the southwest.

“I’m going to Shiroyama elementary school,” the father said to the man, who was surprised because they were heading to the same destination.

The man was working in the payroll department of a Mitsubishi weapons factory located in a vacant classroom of the elementary school. He said he had survived the atomic bombing in a shelter.

“Do you know Kazuyuki Kamochi in the payroll department?” the father asked.

“Ah, he died,” the man replied.

After learning that the fellow passenger was Kazuyuki’s father, the man took the grieving parent to the place where the boy’s body was kept.

Years later, the man wrote a memoir about what happened at the time.

“The father repeatedly filled an iron helmet with water to clean his son’s body. He applied medicine to the wounds and wrapped them in bandages,” the memoir said. “Then, he dressed his son in a yukata and quietly laid the body under a large tree.”

The father returned to Saga Prefecture and came back to Nagasaki with a coffin on a three-wheel truck to bring his son’s body home.

SISTER’S VISIT

In August 2008, Kazuyuki’s younger sister, Nobuko, visited the elementary school in Nagasaki for the first time in 55 years.

She had been there just once, eight years after the bombing. But for more than half a century, she avoided the place where her brother died.

Nobuko decided to visit again because “I became old.” She was 75 during her 2008 visit.

When she went to the Peace Memorial Hall next to the school, she found that her brother’s name was not enshrined on the list of people whose deaths were confirmed in the bombing.

She sought to add Kazuyuki’s name, but she had no proof that he had been exposed to blast from the atomic bomb.

Nobuko consulted with Kazuyuki’s friends and came across a booklet containing memoirs from her brother’s classmates. It was compiled by Kazuyuki’s best friend, Etsuji Tokuhisa.

Tokuhisa had also been mobilized to Nagasaki, but he was at home due to illness when the atomic bomb exploded.

At least 77 of the students from Kazuyuki’s school in Saga Prefecture who were mobilized to Nagasaki were exposed to radiation from the bombing. Thirteen of them died as a result.

However, the school’s records about the young victims were vague.

Unsatisfied, Tokuhisa spent six years producing the booklet titled “Nagasaki 50 Years.”

One of the contributors was the man who had taken Kazuyuki’s father to his son’s body that day.

Based on the man’s memoirs and other evidence, Kazuyuki’s name was finally added to the list in December 2008, 63 years after his death.

Both Nobuko and Tokuhisa have since died, but they got to see Kazuyuki’s name enshrined on the list.

Many others are still waiting.

An estimated 1,500 students were enrolled at Shiroyama elementary school when Kazuyuki died.

School attendance had been suspended since July 1945 because of the U.S. air raids.

But it is believed that more than 90 percent of the students, or around 1,400 children, died at their homes or elsewhere in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

Of them, the names of only about 860 are enshrined on the list of atomic bomb victims.

The reasons for the omissions include destruction of school registers in the blast, the deaths of most of the school’s teachers, and the lack of surviving family members able to provide records.

Even 78 years after the atomic bombing of the city, many children who were killed in the blast remain unlisted.