On August 8, 1945, about two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a large number of corpses from the area were collected and cremated in the schoolyard of the Honkawa National School, located across the river from the hypocenter. From the next day, August 7, the school building, whose outer walls were still burned, became a temporary aid station and was filled with A-bomb survivors. In the schoolyard, many bodies that had been identified were cremated. The crematorium was photographed by a member of the Hiroshima Prefectural Police Department's photography team. The burned-out school building was used as a first aid station for A-bomb survivors, and a pile of dead bodies was built in the schoolyard.
The Honkawa National School in Hiroshima City was the closest elementary school to the hypocenter of the atomic bombing. It is located across the Aioi Bridge from the Atomic Bomb Dome. As the closest elementary school to the hypocenter, only about 410 meters away, Honkawa National School (now Honkawa Elementary School) was severely damaged. The school building was destroyed by fire, leaving only the outside, and miraculously only one teacher and one student out of the principal, ten other teachers, and about 400 children in the first and second grades survived. Only one teacher and one student were miraculously saved. Six teachers and 218 children, including the principal, were killed instantly.
Classes resumed the following year, in February 1946, in a school building that had been minimally repaired in order to rebuild it. The A-bombed school building was repeatedly repaired and renovated, and in April 1988, when the new school building was completed, it was demolished, leaving only a part of the A-bombed school building and the basement. In April 1988, when the new school building was completed, only a part of the A-bombed school building and the basement were left, and they were preserved as the Peace Museum, which opened in May 1988. Burned-out remains from that time still remain, mainly in the basement. The damage caused by the atomic bomb was preserved as proof of the atomic bombing. Many of the items on display were collected from the A-bombed area by former teachers of the school.
Mr. Nakazawa was six years old when he was exposed to the atomic bomb near the school gate on his way to Kanzaki National School, about 1.2 km from the hypocenter. Based on his own experience of the atomic bombing, he depicted a young boy living strongly in Hiroshima, and on March 18, 1975, the evening edition of the Asahi Shimbun carried an article titled "A-bomb gekiga to be published in book form. About two months later, in May, Shiobunsha published a four-volume book of the story. The article and the book attracted a great deal of attention to Barefoot Gen. The author died of lung cancer on December 19, 2012. Barefoot Gen has been translated into 18 languages, and its total circulation has exceeded 10 million copies.
