Entrevistas

1. Nisei Parents

2. His family Traveled to Japan in 1940

3. His Memory of August 6, 1945

4. Immediately after the bombing

5. Escape from Hiroshima

6. Other family members not as lucky

7. Returning to Hiroshima in ruins

8. His parents had little hope that he had survived the atomic bomb

9. Reuniting with parents in America

10. Adjustment to American life

11. The moment he realized he identified as an American

12. Overcoming trauma and speaking about his A-Bomb experience

13. On telling his wife he had radiation sickness and his son’s cancer

14. His views on nuclear weapons

Kakita,Howard

(n. 1938) Japonés estadounidense. Sobreviviente de la bomba atómica de Hiroshima

Escape from Hiroshima

Now, I always tell people that I think I had three traumatic event[s] in my life. Certainly, this was one of them, the first one. When we got to the road, there were, I don’t know, 50, 100, lots of people, many people severely injured with injuries that you could not believe, broken limbs. Okay there were people with such terrible burn[s] that their skin would be dripping from their body. Some people, or at least one person I saw had guts hanging out from their tummy, holding on. Some of them had already fallen on the ground begging for water. They say that usually just before you die you get extremely thirsty. So people said, “Don’t give them water because they will die,” but they would have died anyway. By that time, the streets were already linedwith corpses.

So we went through the sea of carnage and finally, I don't know how long it took, it may have been 30 minutes, it may have been an hour, it might have been hours. But I don't know how long it took, but we finally got away from the city that was burning, and away from many of the people with severe injuries, and we got to a train station that was functional. I remember riding on the train and going to a relative who lived in the area called Kabe—they're distant relatives there. We stayed there until the end of the war.

bomba atómica sobrevivientes de la bomba atómica hibakusha Hiroshima (ciudad) prefectura de Hiroshima Japón trauma Segunda Guerra Mundial

Fecha: September 3, 2019

Zona: California, US

Entrevista: Masako Miki

País: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Entrevista

Howard Kakita nació en 1938 en el este de Los Ángeles, California. Su familia lo llevó a Japón en 1940. Sus padres y su hermano menor regresaron a los Estados Unidos en 1940 para ocuparse de su negocio, pero Howard y su hermano mayor, Kenny, se quedaron en Japón.

Cuando la guerra empezó, su familia en los Estados Unidos fue encarcelada en Poston, AZ. El 6 de agosto de 1945, la bomba atómica cayó sobre Hiroshima. Howard estaba a 0.8 millas del hipocentro y sobrevivió. Él y Kenny regresaron a los Estados Unidos y se reunieron con su familia en 1948.

Howard siguió una carrera en ingeniería informática. Después de su retiro, se unió a la Sociedad Americana de Sobrevivientes de la Bomba Atómica Hiroshima-Nagasaki (ASA) y ha estado compartiendo su experiencia con la bomba atómica. (Septiembre 2019)

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