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Diverging Reports Breakdown
In Hiroshima, search for remains keeps war alive for lone volunteer
Rebun Kayo is a researcher at Hiroshima University’s Center for Peace. He is on a mission to uncover the remains of those killed by the atomic bomb 80 years ago. Kayo’s motivation is partly personal – he has relatives whose remains were never found. He plans to take the fragments to a Buddhist temple to be enshrined. “Even if you drop an atomic bomb, you can recover,” he says. “There will always be people who try to justify it in a way that suits them”
Rebun Kayo, a researcher at Hiroshima University’s Center for Peace, is on a mission to uncover them.
For him, every fragment on Ninoshima is a reminder that World War Two’s impact persists – buried, forgotten and unresolved.
“All I can say is that these are fragments of bone. Everything that I’ve found here so far has been human bone, so I would guess that this is probably the same.”
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After the United States dropped the atomic bomb over Japan’s Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Ninoshima became a field hospital.
Thousands of victims, dead and alive, were ferried across the water.
Many died soon after, and, due to overwhelming numbers, people were buried in mass graves.
Kayo’s motivation is partly personal.
Born in Okinawa, where some of the war’s bloodiest battles were fought, he has relatives whose remains were never found.
While many remains were unearthed in the decades following the war, witness accounts suggest there were more burial grounds.
In 2014, the son of a resident informed Kayo about one area on the island’s northwestern coast.
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From there, he saved up funds and started digging – spending time and his own money on his solo excavations.
Earlier this year, he found pieces of a young child’s jaw and tooth.
“That child was killed by the bomb, knowing nothing about the world” he said “I couldn’t come to terms with it for a while, and that feeling still lingers.”
Eventually, he plans to take the fragments to a Buddhist temple to be enshrined.
“People today, who don’t know about the war, focus only on the recovery, and they move the conversation forward while forgetting about these people here. In the end, it becomes like, ‘Even if you drop an atomic bomb, you can recover.’ That’s why there will be people who think it’s okay to drop the bomb again. There will always be people who try to justify it in a way that suits them.”