A sense of shame, taboo still clings to stories of Hiroshima's survivors

Today, much has been done to publish the testimonies of Hiroshima's survivors

At 84, Shoso Kawamoto is one of the few surviving hibakusha – the Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors – orphans, still telling his story. When I first interviewed Kawamoto for my work in 2012, I hadn’t come across tales of orphans in Hiroshima.

The bomb, dropped by the US on August 6 1945, made orphans of around 2,000 children, mostly from central Hiroshima, who survived because they had been evacuated to the countryside. When they returned after Japan surrendered on August 15, they found their parents gone and their city razed to the ground.