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SALT LAKE CITY — For Captain Toshiyuki Nekomoto, Aug. 6, 1945, started off badly,
Nekomoto was the commander of the Japanese 5th Army Engineering Regiment stationed in Hiroshima. He and his troops were building and strengthening fortifications along southern Japan. The country was bracing for a seemingly imminent ground invasion by American forces.
But that morning he was running late. The private who was supposed to bring a horse to his house never showed up. After waiting for a half an hour, Nekomoto jumped on his bike and peddled toward army headquarters, but the front tire quickly went flat.
"He pushed the bicycle back home, and he was very, very frustrated," said Nekomoto's son, Toshiharu Kano. "He told my mother 'I'm going to go ahead and walk to the barracks.'
"There's something unsettling this morning," his father told his mother when he returned home, Kano remember from the account told by his parents.
Kano said before his father started back toward headquarters, he warned his mother to make sure their daughter didn't follow him out into the street, and for everyone to stay in the house.
Kano's father had just walked out from underneath a railroad overpass when he heard planes.
"He would never forget that sound because it's a deep, humming sound," said Kano. "He looked up and there were three of them coming in. Two veered off and one came straight into the city."
Kano said at this moment a group of three junior high girls were walking toward his father.
"He told these girls, 'see those B-29s? You guys better watch yourselves. Be ready,'" Kano recalled.
Within seconds, an intense flash of white light came followed by a deafening roar.
Tens of thousands of people were killed in an instant. Somehow Kano's father survived.
"He got burned severely on the neck, but the rest of him was not burned at all," said Kano. "But he got thrown 300 yards into a drainage ditch. He managed to climb out on his hands and knees and tried to see, but there was too much debris. He couldn't see a thing. He had lost his very thick glasses."
Kano said his father was desperate trying to see.
"He touched something that was burning," said Kano. "He put his face next to it and it was one of those girls — melting away, burning way. He was absolutely shocked."
Less than a half-mile from the bomb's epicenter stood the Nekomoto home. Kano's mother, Shizue, was watching his two older siblings. She was three months pregnant with Kano.
Kano said, "she was nursing my older brother and my sister was playing next to her when the bomb exploded. She said the first thing she saw was this white light and all the sudden the force came from underneath. It uplifted the house and a split second later, the force came from the top. So, it (the bomb's force) smashed the house like a sandwich."
A falling support beam knocked Kano's mother out. She had no idea how long she was unconscious.
"When she opened her eyes, everything was just absolutely red and she could feel the heat on her face," Kano said. "She thought the house was burning, but then realized she had an open gash in her forehead, and the blood was running into her eyes; everything looked red."
Flying debris left Kano's brother and sister injured but alive. Fearing fire, his mother grabbed her children and headed out.
"She looked for the main entry and it was intact," he said. "Not a single pane of glass was broken. She was able to get on her hands and knees and with the two kids (she) got out."
Everything was wiped out, said Kano. People were crawling out of the damage trying to get loved ones out from underneath collapsed homes and buildings. Kano's mother heard one of their neighbors pleading for help.
"She must have been outside the house," said Kano. "It collapsed on top of her, and she was trapped from the waist down. My mother tried to help her get out, but there was no way she could pull her out of there."
If one of those blows up, instead of a third-of-a-mile vaporization, we're talking 330 miles — total vaporization. We can't afford to use that. It's unthinkable. I firmly believe that it is my mission to make sure we never repeat the same thing we went through.
–Toshiharu Kano
Kano's mother carried her injured children to her husband's headquarters. She found him on horseback, already organizing a first response with the few troops who survived.
"He asked one of his men to take her to the first aid station he had set up in a bunker," Kano said. "That's how she was saved that day."
In the months to come, thousands of people died from the radiation.
"Being one of the only high-ranking civil engineering officers left, they gave my father the responsibility of cleaning up the city," Kano said. "Every day, he went back to the city to open roads and picked up bodies and took them to the river for cremation."
Kano said his father was exposed to a heavy amount of radiation.
"(In) about two weeks' time he got really sick," Kano said. "Though he never lost a hair, he started to bleed through his gums."
He eventually recovered.
But the radiation sickness proved too much for Kano's brother Toshio. He died two months after the explosion.
"He was simply too young," said Kano. "He was only about 16 months old. He suffered massive internal injuries. He was recovering from that, but towards the end, he got radiation sickness."
Six months after the blast, Kano was born healthy with one notable exception.
"I was very, very weak," he said. "I didn't have any immune system to speak of. I wound up with mumps. I wound up with tuberculosis. The only two childhood diseases I have never gotten were diphtheria and polio."
Kano's family stayed in Hiroshima five more years before moving to Tokyo and then to Salt Lake City in 1961.
Eventually, his father couldn't escape the radiation. He died in 1976 just six months after doctors diagnosed him with cancer. He was 62 years old.
Kano's mother died in 2007 at age 93.
Kano says his sister, Yorie, lives in California and seems to be doing well all these years later.
Today, he says he doesn't hold any animosity toward anyone or any government for what happened.
"I do not want to talk about whether it was the right or wrong decision," said Kano.
He fears the lessons of Hiroshima will be forgotten.
"Today, we have a 50-million-ton TNT equivalent bomb," said Kano. "If one of those blows up, instead of a third-of-a-mile vaporization, we're talking 330 miles — total vaporization. We can't afford to use that. It's unthinkable. I firmly believe that it is my mission to make sure we never repeat the same thing we went through."
