For Japanese media, August is traditionally the month of war and remembrance, since Japan gave up the fight on August 15, six days after the U.S. dropped its second atomic bomb on a Japanese city. Regardless of your opinion as to whether the bombs ended the war or if they were necessary to do so, in the minds of many Japanese people the juxtaposition of the bombings and the surrender are irrevocable, and over the years every possible approach to how matters played out during the first two weeks of August 1945 have been explored, usually from a personal point of view, meaning by those who lived through it.

This year marks another milestone: the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice. A series of articles in the Asahi Shimbun recounted the story of Tsunehiro Tomoda, who was born in Hiroshima in 1935 and lived through both the first atomic bombing and the Korean War, thus making his story doubly illustrative of the total chaos that many Japanese and Koreans, who prior to Japan’s surrender were subjects of the emperor owing to Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula, lived through in the years just after the war. 

Tomoda was not Korean, but there were many living in and around Hiroshima during the war, mostly working in factories making munitions and such. He and a younger brother were raised by a single mother, since his father died when he was very young. His mother worked as a seamstress, and they were poor. In 1945, Tomoda was in 4th grade, and at the time the bomb exploded he was in the basement of his school just taking his shoes off. There was a very bright flash of light and he was thrown against the wall. His school was only 460 meters from the epicenter of the blast. The school building stood but was otherwise destroyed, and somehow he survived without much harm. When he emerged he saw burnt bodies everywhere. One of them might have been his brother but there were no features left to distinguish any of the bodies. 

He managed to make it with other survivors to a mountain a few kilometers away. From there he could see the entire city in ruins, still burning in spots. Some military personnel gave him bread and water, and eventually he left the evacuation area to look for his mother, but when he got to where his house was there was nothing there. He camped out at city hall, where he happened to run into a man named Saburo Kaneyama, a Korean who had rented a room from his family. He was a shoemaker. Tomoda had always gotten along well with him, and they moved together into an army barracks that had been repurposed as refugee quarters. Kaneyama would somehow procure food for the two. After some time, Tomoda made his way to his grandparents’ house north of Hiroshima Station. After a while it was clear his grandparents didn’t want him around, so he returned to the barracks and Kaneyama, who, now that the war was officially over, decided to return to Korea. Tomoda felt anxious because except for Kaneyama he had no one. Kaneyama talked to the police about bringing Tomoda to Korea with him but the police forbade it, since Tomoda was Japanese. 

In the middle of September, Hiroshima was hit by a powerful typhoon that partially destroyed Kaneyama’s dwelling. Tomoda clung to the older man as they made their way through the storm to the home of another Korean man named Kaneda, whose wife welcomed Tomoda and told him that he should go with Kaneyama to Korea. Despite the police’s warning, Kaneyama felt responsible for the boy and agreed to take him to Korea. On the day of departure they left together for the port, where hundreds of Koreans were boarding ships back to the peninsula. Kaneyama instructed Tomoda to not talk at all lest the authorities realize he wasn’t Korean. 

The ship arrived in Busan and Kaneyama and Tomoda made their way to Seoul to stay with Kaneyama’s brother. However, the brother’s wife couldn’t stand the idea of a Japanese boy in their house. At the time, almost all the Japanese in Korea were either leaving or had left. Tomoda felt uncomfortable but he had nowhere to go. Eventually, Kaneyama himself married and Tomoda came to live with him and his new wife, but after she gave birth to a baby boy, Tomoda’s feelings of discomfort returned. Kaneyama’s wife clearly did not want him around and was always saying things that made him feel guilty, so one day after she accused him of keeping some change after running an errand to the store, he ran away. 

At first, he just wandered around the marketplaces of Seoul, doing odd jobs for merchants in exchange for food. He slept under the eaves of houses. The winters were harsh, and he lost one toe to frostbite. Gradually, he picked up the Korean language from other street kids. One day, one of these children, a girl who sold American cigarettes on the street, invited Tomoda to her house where she lived with her single mother and three siblings. Though the mother was welcoming, the other children wouldn’t talk to him, so after a month he left and returned to the streets.

Tomoda was 14 when North Korean forces invaded Seoul in 1950. He knew war had come because he heard the shells exploding over the Han River and saw the tracers at night. Whatever authority was in charge evacuated residents of Seoul to the south, but Tomoda preferred the city to the country, so he left the evacuation camp and made his way back to Seoul, which was now occupied by the North Korean army, whose soldiers would share food with him. They tried to recruit him, in fact, telling him he should return with them when they went back north, but he didn’t trust them. In any case, Seoul changed hands a number of times: One day there were Chinese soldiers in the city, shooting crows for food; another day the soldiers were American. One G.I. helped him get treatment for his maimed foot and brought him to a facility where he lived with Korean children orphaned by the war. 

It was at this stage that Tomoda decided he wanted to return to Japan at any cost, but it wasn’t until the ceasefire on July 27, 1953, that he saw his chance. He sought out Kaneyama’s brother’s house, where he once lived, but the brother told him that Kaneyama had “returned” with his family to North Korea, where their mother now lived. Tomoda found a job in a bakery and through his work reconnected with the woman who had once taken him in years before. She could write Japanese, and wrote letters to the proper authorities telling them that Tomoda wanted to return home. She wrote dozens of them, and finally, she received a reply from the city of Hiroshima, which said it would facilitate Tomoda’s reentry into Japan. 

It was 1960, 15 years after he had first arrived in Busan. Tomoda was 24 years old. He flew to Hiroshima, and was shocked at how different it looked, completely rebuilt since the end of the war, with new streetcars everywhere. However, he didn’t stay long. Through a connection he had made in Seoul, he got a job in Osaka, where he worked at a gas station owned by a zainichi Korean. He eventually married, and had three children. He worked at a small factory in Osaka until finally retiring in his mid-70s. “I can survive anything,” he told the Asahi, not out of pride, but seemingly out of a sense of wonder.

At one point he returned to Korea in order to thank the woman who had helped him get back to Japan, but she had died. He also wanted to thank Kaneyama for basically saving his life, but he assumed that if he were alive he would still be in North Korea. And despite the physical changes he observed in Seoul, nothing had really changed in his mind because, technically, North and South Korea were still at war, a war, it should be noted, that probably wouldn’t have happened if Japan had not colonized the Korean Peninsula. It was all related. Now when he reads about the war in Ukraine, Tomoda’s memories about Hiroshima and the Korean War come back to him vividly. War, to those who experienced it directly, is never-ending.