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Keeping the message of Hiroshima alive

Takudou Yamamoto feels a family duty to hand down a message against the tragedy of war. He is the keeper of a legendary flame which his late father lit after the Hiroshima nuclear attack.

Tatsuo Yamamoto, a wartime soldier, carefully preserved a small fire from the world’s first nuclear bombing — doing so in complete silence until the late 1960s when local media first reported his unusual story.

He died four years ago but the “nuclear bomb flame” is still alight under a glass shield at a peace monument on a park looking out on his secluded village of Hoshino, some 200km from Hiroshima.

“Yes, it’s a symbol. A symbol for peace,” said Takudou Yamamoto, 58, a monk and ceramic artist and Tatsuo’s second son.

“But it would be merely a fire if there weren’t any message,” he said, wearing a monk’s navy blue kimono in his workshop near the top of the mountain village.

“I have to hand down my father’s spirit to later generations,” he said. “That’s what our family must do. I’m his son. I have to understand why the man brought it back here and kept it day after day.”

The story of the flame started on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, as Tatsuo, commuting to a military camp near Hiroshima by train, survived the bomb that flattened the city instantly and killed thousands.

He tried to find his uncle Yasuke, who was running a bookstore there, but his search ended in vain. Instead he decided to ignite a portable warmer — the sort commonly used in those days for heating — with a still flickering flame at Yasuke’s destroyed shop.

Tatsuo brought it back all the way to his village as a memento of his uncle and an embodiment of his anger at war.

Without telling anyone but his family, Tatsuo used it as a stove or charcoal blazer day and night for 23 years, during which Japan was swiftly rebuilding into the world’s second-largest economy.

“He used to say: ‘Since everyone is losing memories [of the war], I will be the one who will never forget,” his son said. “The flame has become public but still carries my father’s soul.”

The flame’s fire was later spread to 14 peace monuments across Japan. It traveled overseas once for a protest against nuclear weapons during a 1988 UN disarmament conference in New York.

A Japanese nongovernmental organization plans to take a flame lit from the original next year to Cuba, whose revolutionary leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had both paid respects in Hiroshima.

The Hiroshima bombing killed about 140,000 people either instantly or in the months that followed from radiation injuries or horrific burns.

Three days later, an even more powerful nuclear bomb flattened Nagasaki, killing another 70,000 people. Japan surrendered six days afterward, ending World War II.

While he was reticent in life, Tatsuo Yamamoto did not conceal his resentment when Japan sent troops to Iraq after the 2003 invasion, the first time since World War II that Tokyo dispatched to a country where fighting was underway.

Tatsuo, who suffered radiation sickness for years, died at age 88 leaving the dying words — “It’s time to end the foolish practice of killing one another.”

Takudou now gives a dozen lectures a year on his father’s story and the tragedy of war, mainly to children, and helps organize peace memorial concerts.

As he does every year, Takudou plans to offer a prayer in Hiroshima on Aug. 6 at 8:15am, the moment that the US bomb codenamed “Little Boy” was dropped from the Enola Gay B-29.

“War will never end just because such a flame has been lit,” Takudou said. “I have to tell people about my father’s heart and let them think by themselves.”

And Tatsuo’s message is now being handed down to his grandchildren.

“My son told me the other day, ‘Dad, it’s the duty of the Yamamoto family, isn’t it?’” a smiling Takudou, who does not belong to a temple, said. “I haven’t even once told them what to do, but they naturally understood what I’m thinking about.”
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