“I’m no longer so confident about remembering the past,” said Hidetada Yoshida, 95, in the peaceful village of Hirata in Fukushima Prefecture's countryside.

Memories of his childhood, when he suffered from poverty as a result of World War II, are growing hazy.

Near the end of the war, Yoshida, as a student, engaged in the mining of ores, including uranium, in the neighboring town of Ishikawa for use in Japan’s research into the development of atomic bombs, known as the Ni-Go Project.

Although his memories of the actual experience are becoming vague, he still vividly remembers the fear he felt when he later learned that he had been mobilized, without knowing, to engage in work to produce an "evil" weapon.

As this year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, he feels the need to convey the terrors of the war that ruined many people’s lives.

Yoshida was born in 1930 as the eldest son of a farmer in Hirata. His father joined the Imperial Japanese Army and was sent to Harbin in Manchuria, in what is now northeastern China, in 1938.

The following year, Yoshida moved to Harbin along with his mother, his younger brother and his baby sister.

In the same year, his father died in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol and the family returned to Hirata. Young as he was, Yoshida spent his days farming in order to support his family.

In 1945, during the closing days of the war, Yoshida, then a third-year student at what was then a junior high school in Ishikawa, started to engage in uranium ore mining as part of student mobilization.

He worked from morning till late afternoon almost every day for the Riken institute, which had been extracting ores in Ishikawa since April that year for the Ni-Go Project under the orders of the Imperial Japanese Army.

The students worked in pairs, digging on the slopes of a mountain in the town using pickaxes and carrying rocks in rope baskets day after day.

They couldn’t identify by themselves whether the rocks they dug were the ores they were looking for, so they kept digging and showing the rocks to officials in charge for confirmation.

Yoshida suffered an injury to his right arm while mining that, to this day, he still uses pain relief patches for. He and his classmate were trying to lever up and remove a large rock that got in their way by using a rod. The rod slipped and hit his arm hard. Even decades after the incident, the pain continues, sometimes disrupting his sleep.

The students initially didn’t know the purpose of their work, but one of them told him that a site manager had been saying that what they dug out “would be turned into a bomb that could destroy a big city (if set off) with a box of matches.”

Yoshida said he didn’t feel guilty. “I was pure and obedient. As a child taught about kichiku beiei (brutal American and British beasts), I felt reassured when I heard about it.”

Their work continued until the war ended. Then he learned of the devastation caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“I was horrified when I realized that I had been engaged in the work to try to create an evil weapon,” he said.

Yoshida, who loved steam locomotives, had a dream of becoming a locomotive operator.

However, since he was the only one in the family to earn a living, he quit school after the war.

His English teacher came to his home and suggested to his mother that he go back to school, but she did not accept the teacher’s proposal.

He gave up on his dream and worked as a farmer for many years.

Recently, Yoshida has been having more bad days — periods when he doesn't feel well.

“I don’t have much energy left to pass down” the horrors of war, he said. “And there are few classmates left who can speak.”

According to Etsuo Hashimoto, a 76-year-old resident of Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, who has long been researching the history of Ishikawa as a mining region and the atomic bomb research project, most of the students who had been engaged in mining ores for the project have now died.

Yoshida is believed to be the only one still living in Fukushima Prefecture, along with two others in the Kansai and Kanto regions.

“To hand down the history, the only way is for people like us to just keep recording,” Hashimoto said.

This section features topics and issues covered by the Fukushima Minpo, the prefecture’s largest newspaper. The original article was published Aug. 14.