'I’m So Lucky': 75 Years After Hiroshima, One California Woman's Survival Story

Sumiko Yoshida was just 9 years old when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Seventy-five years ago this week, Yoshida somehow emerged unharmed from the rubble of her school, which was just one mile from the bomb’s epicenter. In the days that followed, she tried to rebuild her life with her family.

Yoshida eventually made her way to California but, at 84, she still remembers many of the details of Aug. 6, 1945. Yoshida recently sat down with her grandson, John Wenstrand, at her home in Atherton to share her story.

‘Our Air Was Burning’

Yoshida was at school when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. She ran outside to see a Boeing B-29 flying overhead. Then, another.

“I saw lightning,” Yoshida said. “After that, I don’t know. I (was) unconscious. Maybe I was crying.”

From underneath the collapsed building, Yoshida recalled hearing the sound of someone coming to rescue her. She reemerged to find the city around her burning.

“Our air was burning. Burning, burning, burning,” she said. “But then the lady (who rescued me) said, ‘Run away. Run. Run.’ ”

Yoshida fled to look for her family. She found her siblings unharmed at home, but her mother — who had been in an alley holding her infant brother during the blast — was badly hurt.

“My mother burned half her body,” Yoshida remembered. “I saw my mother’s skin was peeling off. And then rain — black rain — started (pouring). Everybody got so wet.”

That black rain was the nuclear fallout from the explosion, which rained down on Hiroshima and caused many to contract radiation-related illnesses.

Eventually, Yoshida and her family fled to the mountains where they thought they would be safer. There, they would have access to fresh clothes and food. Yoshida remembered her grandmother urged her not to look out the window. She peeked anyway.

“I saw so many people dead,” Yoshida said. “Dead bodies and horses.”

At that time, Yoshida’s father worked at a tobacco company. He was biking home far from the epicenter at the time of the blast. Yoshida remembered waiting for him by the door until he returned.

“Good thing he was (not) injured,” Yoshida said. “He was strong. Otherwise we wouldn’t know what to do.”

Yoshida’s father looked for a doctor to treat her baby brother, but no one was able to help.

The baby died the next day.

Yoshida remembers her father brought the baby’s body to a nearby temple, but they didn’t have the opportunity to hold a proper funeral service. Then, on Sept. 17, 1945, Hiroshima was struck by the Makurazaki Typhoon.

“The temple was washed out,” Yoshida said. The only thing they were able to salvage was the baby’s little kimono. “That’s all,” she said. “Nothing.”

After the baby’s death, Yoshida’s father took her mother to a temple in the countryside to treat her burns. Nine-year-old Sumiko was the oldest and left to care for her younger siblings while her parents were away.

“I don’t know what we (ate) or what we did,” she said. “I don’t remember how many days after my father came back to pick us up. And then we all went to the countryside. My mother was there.”

Yoshida remembered seeing her mother lying on a straw cot in the temple. Worms crawled all over the wounded.

“So many people,” she recalled of the crowded temple. “It was hot, summer.”

The sick had no access to medicine. Yoshida’s mother was desperate for water, but the rivers had been poisoned with radiation. Yoshida said some people suffered from such intense heat that they jumped in the rivers and drowned.

In the days that followed the bombing, more members of Yoshida’s own family continued to die.

“Grandma died,” she said. She passed away Aug. 13, 1945, just one day before the war ended. Though she had no physical injuries, she had been close to the epicenter and died of radiation.

“I had (an) auntie, my mother’s younger sister. She was so beautiful,” Yoshida continued. “She was a nurse, so she was right in the middle. She never came back.”

Moving to California

In the years that followed, Yoshida’s mother opened a pawn shop to keep the family afloat. Yoshida said she felt fear for many years after — she was scared to be alone and experienced trouble sleeping.

The fear lasted for years, even after Yoshida moved to Southern California in 1956. At 20 years old, she left her family behind in Hiroshima to join her cousins who had settled in California before World War II. Yoshida worked while attending school and helping care for her cousin’s baby.

“Oh, and I met James!” she said, laughing.

Yoshida met her husband James while he was a graduate student at the University of Southern California. He was the chairman of the Visiting International Students Association, and they met at a convention at Disneyland. The three-day event was capped off with a dance.

“She had on a Japanese kimono,” he said. “(She was) very obviously from Japan and very new in this country. So I offered to dance.”

James also offered his phone number. Months later, they went fishing on their first date.

“He was so poor,” Yoshida said, laughing again. “And then my cousin said, ‘Oh, he has an education. So it’s OK.’ My cousin convinced my father to understand.”

Yoshida and her husband have traveled the world, living in Germany, Tokyo — where they had the chance to be closer to Yoshida’s family — and now, California. She has shared her story with their children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. When Yoshida’s grandson John Wenstrand asked what she wants her descendants to learn about her experience with the atomic bomb, she had a simple answer: Spread kindness.

“(Be) nice to everybody. Always nice,” she said, remembering the kindness others had shown her family. “I’m so lucky.”