Nagasaki.

Seventy-seven years have passed since the atom bomb was unleashed on this city.

For survivors, the horrors they witnessed remain deeply engraved in their hearts to this day.

First I thought they were swimming.

Then I heard they were already dead
and just floating on the surface.

I was so terrified I started trembling all over.

The cremations continued from dusk till dawn.

The stench was truly awful.

In 2021, NHK and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum asked survivors to create pictures of their memories,

to help ensure their experiences would not be forgotten.

In all, more than 180 drawings and paintings were sent in.

For the majority of contributors, it marked the first time they'd ever tried to express those memories in picture form...

Memories they alone had been holding onto ever since that day.

It could be like holding a memorial service,
and my heart might feel lighter after.

For some it gave a chance to finally open up after so many years.

I felt so helpless, because
there was nothing I could do.

To this day I lament the fact
I wasn't able to save her.

Now more than ever, many felt the need to leave a personal record of those events.

I hope my daughter, and my grandchildren,
will be able to take a good look...

because I never want them to have to
experience what I did.

The drawings and paintings of those still living with the memories of Nagasaki

provide a window into the devastating reality of nuclear weapons.

April 2021.

Almost as soon as the call was put out, survivors' pictures of the bombing began pouring in.

It's the first picture I've painted in 80 years.

The painting being delivered by hand today depicts the atom bomb mushroom cloud as seen from the town of Sasebo.

It was utterly white. Pure white.

I'd never seen such a beautiful
hue of white before.

My wife told me to keep on painting,
so I painted with all my heart.

It's a picture of us wearing air raid hoods.

I was only three at the time,
but I still remember it clearly.

On August 9th 1945, a plutonium fission bomb exploded some 500 meters above Nagasaki's Urakami District.

The resulting blast wave, heat rays and radioactive fallout

are believed to have led to some seventy thousand deaths within just the first year.

However, apart from photographs taken largely by a single photographer the day following the bombing,

relatively little documentation previously existed to give us a full picture of the immediate aftermath.

In 1974, NHK launched an initiative that asked residents of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki

to create a visual record of the scenes they'd witnessed at the time of the bombings.

If you have a burning memory of the A-bomb
aftermath, please draw and send in a picture.

It doesn't matter at all how
good or bad at drawing you are.

The 1974 call for survivors' pictures was repeated once again in 2002.

More than 700 drawings and paintings from survivors of the nuclear attack on Nagasaki

were donated to the city's Atomic Bomb Museum.

Now, some two more decades on, the call for pictures of the bombings was being made yet again.

This time, 188 pictures were sent in.

The vast majority of those who had taken brush or pencil to paper were now over 85 years old.

There's limited time left to pass on the
experiences of A-bomb survivors directly.

76 years on, we've been seeing some survivors
finally able to express themselves.

That's really significant.

I believe the message is, "We want you
to know about this and never forget."

The city of Unzen's Minamikushiyama district lies some 30 kilometers southeast of the Nagasaki bomb blast hypocenter.

Takeshita Chiwoyo is 94 years old.

A local government employee at the time, on August 9th 1945,

she was in charge of her village's public address system.

There was a microphone for making
official air raid warnings.

A split second after I made the announcement,
there was a huge bang.

And along with the noise there was
a bright flash of light that burst through.

Stepping outside, in the sky above Nagasaki, Chiwoyo saw a sight the like of which she had never seen before.

Rising high up into the sky was a bright red ball of fire.

It mushroomed up from below, and the flames
inside made the top part bright red.

It was utterly terrifying. It felt like
it could all come crashing down on us.

All I could do was watch, speechless.

Tsutsumi Hiroko experienced the blast from Urakami district, close to the hypocenter itself.

She painted a picture of what she saw that day for the very first time.

What still haunts her memory to this day, is how the surrounding mountains looked right after the blast.

Before the bomb was dropped,
the mountains were a beautiful green.

But in just a split second they were reduced
to a scorched, reddish-brown expanse.

It was shocking.

The Ana Koubou inner temple sanctum is located a little over a kilometer from the bomb's hypocenter.

Hiroko was born and brought up in the temple, and on the day of the bombing she was playing with her cousin.

Here it is. This is where the two of us
were playing house that day.

We were laying out and arranging
leaves as we played.

At that moment, her mother noticed the deep drone of an airplane,

and cried out to them to seek shelter, which they immediately did.

The place Hiroko fled to was a cave they regularly used as a bomb shelter.

Then, just seconds after making it inside...

There was a tremendous whoosh
as the blast wave hit.

If we'd been caught in that blast
we'd have been finished.

Mom called out to us to escape
with such a big voice.

It's thanks to her we survived.

Hiroko was saved by a single word from her mother.

The picture she painted was the scene she was met with when she emerged from that cave.

Over there, you can see how green
the mountain is, right?

That whole mountain had been
turned completely red.

For this latest round of survivors' pictures, the vast majority were just kids at the time of the bombing.

The drawings and paintings submitted depict vividly how the innocence of their daily lives

was robbed from these young children in an instant.

Suddenly a brightly flashing blade of light
stabbed my chest, and I screamed in pain.

The first sign something was wrong was
in my third year of Junior High.

I would suffer terrible anemia, and
often had to stay home sick.

I just couldn't seem to recover.

I always blamed that painful blade-like
beam of light that had stabbed my chest.

Everything went black in an instant.
Seconds or minutes later, the light finally returned.

The four of us found ourselves standing
in the ruins of our house.

Looking at our little brother in her arms,
our mother exclaimed, "He's dead!"

But wiping off the dust coating his face,
there was some slight movement.

So she cried, "He's alive!"

Within a 2km radius of the hypocenter, the heat and force of the blast

caused many to die instantly, and left many more with serious injuries.

91-year-old Kodama Teruyuki was working at a munitions factory at the time of the bombing.

Ours was a metal casting factory,
so we would mold parts for torpedoes.

We just did what we were told, molding
whatever parts were put in front of us.

14 years old at the time, Teruyuki's workplace, the Mitsubishi Arms Factory's Ohashi plant,

was just 1.3 kilometers from the bomb blast's hypocenter.

There was a bright flash of light.

Then a tremendous booming blast
that sent me flying.

It was no ordinary bomb blast, and
I wasn't just swept back across the floor.

Rather I was thrown violently up into the air.

I must have been smashed up against
one of the factory's pillars.

I remember the impact,
but after that it's a blank.

Teruyuki's drawing is of what he saw inside the factory the moment he regained consciousness that day.

I heard a voice crying out for help.

When I looked up, the factory building
we had been in was gone.

All that was left was the twisted
wreck of the factory's steel frame.

97-year-old Yamashita Masahide was working in Mitsubishi's Saiwaimachi Shipbuilding factory at the time.

Despite his young age, Masahide worked in a leadership role, assisting the factory manager.

On the morning of August 9th 1945, Masahide was in his factory, some 1.7 kilometers from the hypocenter.

As soon as he heard the air raid siren, he ran to take shelter in a thicket of trees across the river from his factory.

Protected by the tree canopy,
none of us there were injured.

Then the factory manager appeared,
shouting out my name.

He told me to bring volunteers
willing to risk their lives.

So I took five people with me
and went to help.

Masahide's drawing shows him and the others returning to the factory after the blast to help their coworkers.

Emerging from the trees, we saw someone frantically
waving a pole with a handkerchief tied to it.

So we swam across the river
to where he was.

As they crossed the river, they saw the factory was surrounded by a sea of flames.

Masahide noticed a woman standing alone at the water's edge.

The woman's clothes and skin were burnt right through.

The woman pleaded for help, so Masahide went to look for a stretcher to carry her,

but when he returned, she was nowhere to be seen.

Standing there by myself, not being
able to do anything to help her...

If only I'd just carried her instead of
looking for that stretcher.

The fact I failed to save her still fills me
with regret to this day.

When morning broke on August 10th, a scene of utter devastation was revealed throughout the entire Urakami area.

There's apple juice in here so please
take it and drink some.

Ishimoto Kawo is 91 years old.

On that day, Kawo went with her neighbors to the area of the bomb's hypocenter, to find out if family members had survived.

We came across a cart whose horse and driver
had been totally crushed in the blast.

The horse's stomach was severed
and its guts were hanging out.

It was so terrifying I couldn't look for long,
so this is all I could draw.

Even today that's the image
I can never forget.

Kawo also painted a picture of a scene she witnessed at the Urakami river, just a kilometer from the hypocenter.

At first, I thought they were swimming.

But then I heard people saying they were
already dead, and just floating on the surface,

carried along by the current.

I only managed a brief glance, but I was
so terrified, I started trembling all over.

This scene she could only bear to look at for a brief moment would stay with Kawo for her entire life.

But there was also one memory she simply couldn't bring herself to draw.

There were these steps at the corner
of a stone wall used as a shortcut.

There a little boy was sat in his
school uniform and wearing a hat.

He was just sat there dead,
with his arms crossed.

I just couldn't bring myself to draw that.

It makes me want to hold
my hands in prayer.

From the depths of my heart
it makes me want to pray.

Many of those injured in the nuclear blast were taken by train

to a place called Isahaya, some 20 kilometers from the hypocenter.

Among survivors' pictures of the bombing there are also detailed depictions of the relief operation in Isahaya.

A steam train pulled into the station
carrying the injured from Nagasaki.

All of them had totally charred faces,
and their bodies were entirely red with blood.

Their skin and clothes were burnt to a crisp
and were peeled off and hanging right down,

dragging behind them as they
headed toward the underpass.

Three people were lying on the platform
and crying out for water.

Seeing them, one soldier filled his steel
helmet with water to let them drink.

It must have tasted so good to them.

Most of the injured were taken from the station to special emergency centers, set up at local schools, to receive treatment.

Former Isahaya Elementary School.

Removing maggots from wounds
and applying charcoal.

Light application of iodine solution.
Requests for water.

The cries of relatives.

Isahaya High School lobby.
First aid station headquarters.

A man hobbling around naked
and charred black all over.

The next morning he's lying dead
under a pine tree.

In Kawatana, even further out from the site of the bomb blast than Isahaya, urgent relief efforts were underway.

Nakamizo Takako was 4 years old at the time.

She remembers many of the injured being brought to the hospital where her father worked as a doctor.

There was this constant sound of groaning.

The injured had to sleep in a storage room
at the hospital in Kawatana.

That night the groans I heard were too much
even for a four-year-old to get any sleep.

Family members of Takako's who she was particularly close to were also brought into the hospital but eventually passed away.

She drew a picture of her memories of saying goodbye.

When my aunt and uncle died
we went to pay our respects.

But when we got there, they were so swollen
they looked like steamed buns.

As a little girl I couldn't understand
what had happened.

Why had they ended up like this?

This is a drawing showing the Urakami area right near the hypocenter two months after the bombing.

It depicts a sweet potato field as seen by a researcher who came to investigate the effects of bomb radiation on crops.

The whole area was sweet potato fields,
the leaves and stems burnt in the bombing.

But the roots survived, growing
new leaves and shoots,

that grew to cover up the skeletons of victims.

76 years on, survivors' memories of the atomic bomb's aftermath live with them as clearly as ever.

Each image represents a time capsule, a moment frozen in history, quietly carried even long after the war's end.

For Kodama Teruyuki too, those indelible memories have followed him throughout his life.

Over a career that's taken him right across the globe, he's often spent time contemplating the nature of war.

I got this in Iran.

I constructed this model ship myself.
It's a Chilean naval training vessel.

I've sailed to pretty much
all the ports in the world.

After the war, Teruyuki worked as a crew member on cargo ships and oil tankers, traveling to ports across the globe.

But deep in his heart a feeling of resentment borne from his wartime experience lingered.

When I went to New York,
I had fantasies of taking revenge.

Thoughts of how many hundreds
I might kill if I blew myself up there.

Those were the kind of thoughts that went
through my mind as an atomic bomb survivor.

Eventually though, Teruyuki would find a way to let go of that hatred he still felt.

One year, when he was passing through immigration at a US port, there was an incident that would touch him deeply.

An official who heard he was a Nagasaki bomb survivor, asked Teruyuki what he thought of the US.

I answered him in Japanese
with the words, "I hate you."

I think he understood clearly
what I'd said.

Even though he was an important official,

he actually apologized and said, "I'm sorry."

The fact he apologized to a private individual
like me, left me feeling bad about what I'd said.

Another experience Teruyuki had on his travels,

thrust the consequences of Japan's own war record into the spotlight.

This time it was an encounter with children in a port in South East Asia that would change his perspective.

In the Philippines, people hadn't forgotten
about the cruelty inflicted on them in the war.

They would tell me things like a Japanese captain
forced my sister to do this or that.

Japanese soldiers stationed there in the war
taking liberties with people's daughters...

That kind of abuse of power is something
I could well believe happened.

As a sailor, coming into contact with people from all over the world,

Teruyuki had no choice but to face up to the harsh reality of what had happened during the war.

Now in his nineties, taking up pen and paper marked a final chance

to communicate his life lessons and experiences to new generations.

The word "war" is written with the Chinese
characters for "battle" and "fight."

But the cruelty that war brings with it
knows no limits.

I truly detest war.

For some, it is specific encounters with others that have remained with them for the 76 years since the A-bomb was dropped.

At 86 years old, Ogawa Chizue took up paper and pen for the first time to draw her experiences.

Aged 9 at the time of the bombing, Chizue experienced the blast at home in the Tomachi area,

some 5 kilometers from the hypocenter, escaping any serious injury.

The encounter she could never forget happened at a nearby air raid shelter.

It was there that she saw the couple.

They were grilling sardines. Fanning the flames,
the smoke wafted against the husband's back.

Curious, I looked more closely, and realized there
were hundreds of maggots crawling in his back.

The wife was trying to use the heat and smoke of the fire

to drive out the countless maggots afflicting her husband's wounds.

Chizue explains that she felt so helpless in that moment.

Being just a kid I was scared, and
didn't feel I could tell anyone.

I think it was the day the war ended
that I finally told my mother.

She said, "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

She handed me a sweet potato
and told me to go look for them.

But I couldn't find them anywhere.

I could never stop wondering
what had happened to them.

After the war Chizue began working for a local bus company, got married and had a child of her own.

She lived a happy life.

But whenever she had a quiet moment, the memories of that couple in the shelter would come flooding back.

I often wonder if they are alive and well,
or if they passed away in that state.

Whenever I told people about it, they would
tell me off for spoiling their appetite.

But my thoughts stayed really stuck on it.

To help herself draw a line under these thoughts that had weighed on her mind all these decades,

Chizue decided to take out crayons and paper and draw what she remembered.

I thought if it could be a bit like holding
a memorial service for them,

then my heart might feel a little lighter
and freer after.

As I was drawing, I was thinking,
"I'm sorry. Please let me draw your picture."

With all those maggots munching at
the same time you could literally hear it.

That couple must have been trying anything
they could to get rid of the maggots.

It must have been so sad for the wife,
trying her best like that.

Even covered in dirt, she was a beautiful
woman, but she just looked so sad.

I can never forget her expression.

Today, Chizue is on her way to find the place depicted in her drawing.

But the spot that once used to be an air raid shelter has long since been filled in.

I said to them, we're living well and happily,
but I want you to be at peace too.

I have the feeling I will feel
a little lighter after this.

I sometimes even think all of this
might be thanks to that couple.

One of the pictures of the bombing's aftermath was made with

the artist's sincere wish to pass on those memories to a particular person.

89-year-old Suo Isamu lives in Tokyo.

His artwork depicts a scorched field with the charred figure of a mother embracing her child.

At the time, Isamu was a 1st year junior high student.

That day, he was on his way home from school,

some one and a half kilometers from the hypocenter, when the bomb was dropped.

He sustained serious injuries all over his body.

Four days later, while being carried on his brother's back on the way

to seek medical treatment, Isamu met with a heartbreaking sight.

At first glance, it looked like a tree stump.
From a distance, I really couldn't tell.

Only when we passed close by could
I finally see what it was.

It was a mother, turned to charcoal
as she hugged her infant child.

After the war, Isamu graduated from junior high school

and apprenticed as an engraver at a precious metal store in downtown Nagasaki.

At the age of 23 he moved to Tokyo, eventually getting married.

But the trauma of the atomic bomb continued to cast a shadow on his otherwise happy life.

When he was 31, Isamu and his wife were blessed with a child.

But he became plagued by worries that their baby might be carrying

the effects of the nuclear bomb blast he'd been so directly exposed to.

The night before our first son was born,

I drank an entire bottle of whiskey.
But I couldn't even get drunk.

I carried cyanide in my pocket and told myself
that if there was anything wrong with our child,

I would kill him, and kill myself too.

But when I went to the hospital, he was a
perfectly healthy 3800g baby!

It was such an incredible relief.

Isamu and his wife would go on to have 3 children, and now 4 grandchildren too.

Over time though, he began to recall the scene of the burnt mother and child with increasing frequency.

I'd been blessed with children and grandchildren,
but I just couldn't forget that awful scene.

My daughter would bring our grandchildren
to visit, and she'd be holding them.

So, I'd want to take a photo...
but each time I simply couldn't.

Just imagine if that burnt mother and child
had been your own daughter and grandchild...

Isamu realized he needed to communicate the harsh reality of the atom bomb that he'd witnessed.

Last year, he started on preparatory work for his picture.

To reproduce the scene accurately, he used a burner from his work to char meat, which he then mixed with paint.

Flesh has a particular way of burning.

I want to convey what I saw accurately,
for my daughter and her children.

I want them to understand what
the atom bomb was really like.

So, I tried to represent it
as faithfully as possible.

Isamu feels a responsibility to pass on his memories of that day for the sake of future generations.

I really want my daughter, my grandchildren,
to take a good look at this.

I'm sure it will move something inside them.

My youngest grandchild will be
starting school this spring.

Looking at Japan today, it's quite possible
something bad could happen within the next decade.

I really don't want them to have to
experience what I went through.

188 paintings and drawings of the atomic blast,

crafted by the hands of those who witnessed the horrors of that historic event first hand.

They all represent a cry for peace from the hearts of those who have carried the scars of Nagasaki for all this time.