New York Times: After his speech in Hiroshima on Friday, President Obama exchanged an emotional embrace with a bomb survivor who spent decades researching the American prisoners of war who were killed when the city was bombed.
Shigeaki Mori was 8 when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945.
I interviewed Mr. Mori, now 79, this week at his home in Hiroshima. He told me how he was walking to school when the bomb exploded, knocking him off a bridge and into a small, shallow river. He was lucky: The river protected him from the firestorm that followed. He remembered searching for food and water in the ensuing days but finding piles of charred bodies instead.
“Their mouths were open, because people had tried to identify them by their tooth fillings,” he said.
When he grew up, Mr. Mori worked at a brokerage house and, later, at a piano manufacturer. “But I’d always wanted to be a historian,” he said.
He spent his weekends researching the aftermath of the bombing, double-checking official histories with contemporary newspaper reports and his own interviews with fellow survivors.
“There were so many mistakes in the histories,” he said.
One day, a local university professor gave him a list of names that the professor had found in a government archive. They were the names of American airmen who had been shot down in bombing raids over the area, some of whom had been held in a detention center in Hiroshima. They were killed when their fellow airmen dropped the bomb, and their deaths had gone unrecognized. Both the Japanese and American governments kept the P.O.W.s presence in Hiroshima quiet after the war.
Mr. Mori interviewed residents who had seen the downed planes. He scoured American phone books he found at libraries, looking for people who might have been family members of the crewmen. “I made calls for three years before I found anyone,” he said.
Eventually, in the 1970s, declassified American documents backed up his findings. The name of the first airman was added to the peace memorial in Hiroshima in 2004; an additional 11 were added five years later.
On Friday, Mr. Mori was one of two bomb survivors who spoke briefly with Mr. Obama after his speech. First, the president shook hands with Sunao Tsuboi, 91, who was burned from head to toe in the bombing 71 years ago. Mr. Obama nodded, smiled and even laughed while he listened to Mr. Tsuboi and held his hand.
“He was holding my hands until the end,” Mr. Tsuboi told The Associated Press. “I was almost about to ask him to stop holding my hands, but he wouldn’t. I think he is such an earnest person, or has the heart to feel for others so strongly.”
Mr. Obama then moved on to shake hands with Mr. Mori, who had tears in his eyes. The president gave him a hug, which Mr. Mori returned.
“It was emotional,” Mr. Mori told television reporters afterward. “I don’t even remember what I said.”
