Tamiki Hara

Tamiki Hara (原 民喜) was a Japanese author. He was born in Hiroshima in 1905 and died in Tokyo in 1951 when he threw himself in front of an oncoming train. Hara was a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and this experience, and the memory of his dead wife, became central to his work.

Hara's best-known work, Summer Flowers, was published in June, 1947. In this work, Hara describes and relates his experience of the atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

His final work, The Land of Heart's Desire (1951), could be read as being Hara's suicide note.

Monument to Hara Tamiki
"If I should lose my wife, I would live only one year to leave a collection of sad and beautiful poems behind," said poet Tamiki Hara.

It was, however, an irony of fate that on August 6, 1945, just before the first anniversary of his beloved wife's Sadae's death, Hara was exposed to the A-bomb at his parents' home in Motoymachi, but escaped death. His survival struck on a sudden sinful inspiration - "What is the meaning of my life without her?" - and he started to think seriously that he must write something about his stricken grief.

Summer Flowers was the novel he wrote in a documentary style, based on this experience, of his wife and the A-bombing.

Following this novel, he continued to produce several novels, but on March 13, 1951, in response to the break out of the Korean War, he committed suicide by throwing himself in front of an on-coming train in Tokyo, feeling a presentiment of a dark future in history.

The epitaph to Tamki Hara was originally built by his friends at the site of Hiroshima Castle. But it became a target for thoughtless people to throw stones at, the ceramic plate on its front damaged and the copper plate on the back ripped off. So it was remodeled and moved to the present site.

On the monument is inscribed the poem in his last piece of writing, which reads:


 * Engraved in stone long ago,
 * Lost in the shifting sand,
 * In the midst of a crumbling world,
 * The vision of one flower.