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Standing on the ruins of his home, wearing someone else's clothes, he thought of the beautiful photographs taken by his father, a professional photographer. The thought hit him "like another atomic blast", he says. Holding the watch in his hands, he suddenly sensed he would never see his father again. "It had stopped working at the very moment of the blast, forever marking that moment in time." The watch had recorded the moment Shinji's world had been blown apart - 08:15.
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It was enough to clearly see the exact moment the watch stopped." The unimaginable intense heat that reached several thousand degrees Fahrenheit from the blast had fused the shadows of the hands into the face of the timepiece, slightly displaced, leaving distinct marks where the hands had been at the moment of the explosion. The glass had been blown off, as had the watch hands. I recognised our house key chained to it. I clasped my hand around the metal mass and lifted my father's pocket watch from the debris. It was 16 August, a week after a second atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. One morning, Shinji awoke to an unusual sight - the soldiers at the hospital were no longer wearing their swords. "She was also an angel who rescued me from the depths of my own judgmental anger." "She was an angel who had returned to rescue me from my worst pain," he says. He became determined never to make that mistake again.
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"How could I have been so hateful in my thoughts?" "The moment I saw her, my anger turned to shame," he says. But she did come back, late in the evening, with the promised pillows - she had been unavoidably delayed. "I felt hatred for this woman who had betrayed me so cruelly," he remembers. The hope he felt at her promise soon turned to anger and despair as he waited all day for her return. One morning, a hospital volunteer noticed him wincing, and promised she would bring him some pillows from home. His greatest pain, however, came from bed sores caused by days of lying on the ground. When Shinji arrived in the hospital, the wounds on his leg were now badly infected and needed draining of pus and maggots. Crossing that bridge, and leaving all those wounded people behind to die," Shinji says. Every step or so, I would unintentionally hit an arm or a leg and hear the person below me wince in pain. Walking was agony, not only because of his burned flesh, but because of the large numbers of dead and dying bodies on the ground. This new world was hard to understand, but once the fire and tornado had died down, Shinji and his father set off across a bridge in search of shelter. As it approached, people clung to whatever they could for safety. It picked up and threw down parts of collapsed houses, furniture, even water from the river. The many fires across the city had created storm-force winds which now combined in a tornado - "a dark monster", remembers Shinji - that sucked up everything in its path. While there, as bodies floated past face-down, they soon witnessed another strange and terrifying phenomenon. Shinji and Fukuichi headed through the unfamiliar post-nuclear landscape to the river. The ruined city was now on fire and they had to take refuge. There was no time to stand and talk, though. "I guess they saved us some labour." He laughed his throaty laugh. "They have demolished all the houses for us," he said. Had the sun exploded? His father guessed the real cause immediately. Shinji couldn't understand what had happened. The city around them had disappeared, reduced to ash and rubble. "My father and I looked at each other, frozen," Shinji says. The raw flesh underneath was a strange yellow colour, like the surface of a sweet cake his mother used to make.
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"My skin hung off my body in pieces like ragged clothes," he says. Shinji's chest and the right side of his body were completely burned. Although he was 63 years old, Fukuichi was strong - he pulled his son from under the rubble and put out the flames that were licking his body. He became aware of his father's voice calling, coming closer. Shinji was thrown into darkness as he was buried under the house. It was as if a bucket of boiling water had been dumped over my body and scoured my skin." In that instant, I felt a searing pain that spread through my entire body. It was the sound of the universe exploding. I was surrounded by the loudest thunder I had ever heard. It was hurtling directly towards me, a powerful flame that was a remarkable pale yellow, almost the colour of white." It was at least five times bigger and 10 times brighter than the sun. Suddenly I was facing a gigantic fireball.