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This article is a compilation of information found at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum web site.

Shigeru Orimen was a first-year student at Second Hiroshima Prefectural Junior High School. Shigeru went into the city with the rest of his classmates to perform volunteer work on August 6, 1945, helping with the demolition of buildings for use as fire lanes.

Taking the lunch his mother had prepared, he left home early in the morning. Because of the general shortages during wartime, that lunch contained only a mix of rice, barley, soybeans and some sauteed potatoes and daikon. The contents were simple, but it was a lunch his mother had made with love. That morning, he is said to have taken it very happily.

The place where Shigeru and his classmates were working was only 600 meters from the hypocenter of the Atom Bomb, in Nakajima-shin-machi (near what is now Peace Memorial Park). Shigeru was exposed to the bomb and killed instantly, with the contents of his lunch box being burned to coal.

A few days after the A-Bomb fell, the child's mother, Shigeko, searched for him desperately through the devastated city, but failed to find him. On August 9, she carefully examined the skeletal remains of about 50 bodies placed in two lines about a yard apart, and instinctively stopped at one.

Shigeko was convinced that these were the remains of her son. When she touched the bones, an object revealed itself-- it was her son's lunch box, clutched to the abdomen. "Orimen" was carved on the charred box and the exact lunch Shigeko had prepared for her son days before was still inside.

Shigeru's lunch box sits in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Shigeru had worked diligently in place of his father and brother who were away at the front. He plowed the field and cultivated gardens on the mountain and in a bamboo grove. His lunch that day was made from the first harvest from his new field, which he had brought home so happily. Shigeko's grief deepened when she realized that Shigeru never got a chance to eat the lunch he had been so eagerly anticipating.

In war, good may last to triumph over evil, but the innocent victims we are destined to lose forever.

Credits: Shigeru Orimen photograph courtesy of Chugoku Shimbun. Additional information courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

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