Akihiro Takahashi; bore witness to Hiroshima attack

AKIHIRO TAKAHASHI Paul Sakuma/AP/file 1995/03/1995

WASHINGTON - It was a Monday morning when Akihiro Takahashi heard the faint drone of airplane propellers in the sky above him. He and his fellow junior high classmates had gathered on their school playground, pointing at the plane’s glistening silver body.

At precisely 8:15 a.m., a tremendous roar pierced Mr. Takahashi’s ears. Everything went black.

By his reckoning, Mr. Takahashi should have died that day - Aug. 6, 1945 - when the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, dropped the “Little Boy’’ atomic bomb over his hometown, Hiroshima, Japan.

Instead, Mr. Takahashi, who died Nov. 1 at age 80, spent his life speaking out against nuclear weapons and acting as Hiroshima’s ambassador for peace.

He visited Pope John Paul II and hugged the Dalai Lama. On a trip to Washington, he met Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets Jr. and held his hand.

As a witness to the Hiroshima attack, Mr. Takahashi retold his story hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

Born in Hiroshima in 1931, he had dreamed of joining the military and becoming a pilot. He was 14 when his hopes were dashed. He was about a mile from where the bomb exploded, and the blast knocked him 30 feet from where he stood.

His back, legs, and arms were severely burned. His ears nearly melted off. Remembering his teachers’ bomb survival instructions, the boy rose to his feet and walked toward a nearby river, mainly to cool his body.

Along the way, he encountered a woman with her eyeball hanging by her cheek. He saw a man staggering by with shards of glass poking out of his chest.

“They looked like ghosts walking in procession,’’ he told the London Daily Telegraph in 2005.

He told Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch in 2005 that he passed “a baby wailing beside its mother who had burned to a charred lump.’’

Once he reached the river, he waded in the water as corpses bobbed beside him.

As many as 85,000 people in the city died the second the bomb struck. Tens of thousands more died in the years after from injuries and radiation exposure. Of Mr. Takahashi’s 60 junior high classmates, 14 lived to adulthood.

He spent 18 months in hospitals for treatment of his burns. Some of his wounds were permanent. He could not bend one arm. The stiff fingers on his right hand made writing legibly a difficult task. He had chronic liver problems.

Mr. Takahashi served four years as director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, located almost directly underneath where the bomb exploded. He gave tours to visiting dignitaries, including Nobel Peace Prize recipients, and spoke to schoolchildren.

On a trip to Washington in 1980, Mr. Takahashi met Tibbets, an encounter that is thought to have marked the first time an Enola Gay crew member had met a Hiroshima survivor.

“He expressed to Tibbets that he didn’t hold him personally responsible for such a terrible thing,’’ Greg Mitchell, coauthor of the 1995 book “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial,’’ said in an interview. Mitchell said Mr. Takahashi recalled seeing a tear roll down Tibbets’s cheek during their conversation.

Tibbets died in 2007. Mr. Takahashi’s death from a heart ailment was announced by the Hiroshima government.