In 1945, Keijiro Matsushima sat in math class in Hiroshima. In 2005, an English class in Amsterdam was reading a novel about Hiroshima. They’re the same age as Matsushima was 60 years ago.

“I’m afraid the memory of Hiroshima is being lost among younger generations,” says seventy-six year old retired English teacher Keijiro Matsushima. “Sixty years is a long time.”

Matsushima was in Middle School when World War II began. His two older brothers were soldiers and when schools were suspended, he worked in a factory. His father died in the spring of 1945 and his mother decided to move to the countryside north of Hiroshima. So Matsushima was alone in the city when his school reopened at the beginning of August and he could return to his engineering studies.

At 8.15 on August 6th, he looked up from his math book and through the second story classroom window saw two American bombers high in the clear blue sky. Suddenly there was a blinding flash and his world was torn apart. “It’s very difficult to transmit our experience to the next generation,” he explains in a soft voice. “But we have to try.”

World literature

At the International School Amsterdam, English teacher Kevin Hogan was very interested in having his 11th grade World Literature class hear Mr. Matsushima’s story. They had just begun reading Masuji Ibuse’s 1966 novel ‘Black Rain.’

The story of a young woman caught in the radioactive “black rain” which fell after the bombing, Ibuse used real-life journals and interviews with survivors to tell his tale. The students in Mr. Hogan’s class have been keeping their own journals throughout the class year. “I like to bring that full circle,”  says Hogan. “After their own journal writing they see how Ibuse used journal writing at a literary level. I think it gives more richness to their own ideas.”

“The people in the street by the shrine grounds were all covered over their heads and shoulders with something resembling dust or ash. There was not one of them who was not bleeding… One woman, her cheeks so swollen that they drooped on either side in heavy pouches, walked with her arms stretched out before her, hands drooping forlornly, like a ghost.”     -from ‘Black Rain’ by Masuji Ibuse

Procession of ghosts 

Some sequences in the novel contained exact words or phrases expressed by Mr. Matsushima. “Hundreds of people were coming along the railroad from the central area,” he recalls. “Those wounded people, without exceptions, were all heavily burned from head to feet… Their bodies had swollen up and skin was peeling… They all held out their hands stretched forward… a long line slowly walking like a procession of ghosts…” 

When the students listened to his story, what seemed to affect them most was the fact that Mr. Matsushima was the same age then as they were now. “I was him for a while,” said one teenager. Another mused philosophically, “Without this taste of the past, we cannot go on as full human beings.”

Never again

Mr. Hogan asked his class, “If we could transport Mr. Matsushima here today, what would you like to ask him?”  One student wanted to know what he thought about war and the future. Mr. Matsushima’s answer was on tape for them:

“Mankind is not so clever. We repeat war in history and each time the killing machine is improved. And finally the worst thing was invented in the 20th century. It was used two times. That’s enough. The lives and victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a very valuable sacrifice for peace. We just hope these things are never used again on any place, on any nation.”