Atsuko Semones 80 survivor of Hiroshima bombing recounts the day

This week marked 70 years since the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. As survivors of the bombing get older, the average age now 80, many want to tell their stories so the world will never forget. One such survivor lives and works in Norfolk.

The sound of a sewing machine has filled Atsuko Semones days for the past 40 years. She sits quietly at her sewing station at Davis Interiors, making tablecloths and chair covers for U.S. military ships. It’s ironic, considering the machine guns firing was the sound of her childhood during World War II in Japan.

“Every night, everyday, the airplanes come and they put machine gun, just scare us, blow up all over,” she said.

Semones’ life hung by a thread. For nearly a year, she slept in a dark tunnel buried deep inside a mountain. “Raining days, the water drops, stuff like that, but that’s safer than you sleeping in a bed,” she said.

As an 8-year-old school girl, Semones watched daily for the airplane carrying the urgent warning sign to take cover! But on August 6, 1945 she said there was no such warning.

“The sky get so bright, bright light, and I said, ‘What happened?’ And next thing you know, the mushroom cloud come up,” she recounted.

They called it the monster cloud: “Ooh, that’s monster cloud! And we look around and teachers start screaming just like crazy, ‘Go home! Go home! Go home!'”

Semones grabbed her little brothers by the hand and ran. They were lucky — no burns or lingering health effects — but the fear is etched in her memory.

“I don’t like watching war movie and the news much. When I see that story about children, it doesn’t matter which way, which one you know, I feel for them, I can feel myself,” she said.

That is why Semones tells her story. So that adults, like those currently debating the Iran nuclear deal, will consider the children. In her experience, the children always suffer the most.