Yuriko Furubayashi was born in 1927 in Waimea, Hawaii, as one of the ten children of the family. Her father had come to Hawaii from Hiroshima in the mid-1910s as a contract worker on a pineapple plantation. He grew vegetables and kept chickens around the house to help feed the family. Her mother cooked Japanese food only in part because meat was hard to come by. Many of their co-workers on the plantation were Japanese, and Yuriko used to go to the after-school school at Hongan-ji with these co-workers' children. Her peers at the public school included Filipinos, Chinese, Polynesians, Portuguese, and Haoles. When she was ten years old, her uncle and aunt in Los Angeles, who had been successful owners of Olympic Hotel, took her to Japan. They were childless, so their plan was to make Yuriko the family's heir. Yuriko quickly adjusted to the life in Japan and graduated from high school. She was working in an airplane factory when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Although she was not injured, she was irradiated because she walked through the city on the day after to look for her aunt and uncle. The entire city was still on fire. She saw many corpses and people with severe nuclear burns. She lost one of her uncles to the bomb. She also visited her friend working at an orphanage, and was struck by how many children had lost their parents to the bomb. In 1948, she went to Hawaii to see her parents, thanks to the arrangement made by her brother who had come to Japan as part of the U.S. occupation force. She decided that she did not want to go back to Hiroshima where memories of the destruction "depressed" her. She studied to regain her English and worked at her sister's bakery near Kahoku. She married a baker, and they became successful owners of another bakery named after their oldest son. Yuriko was somewhat worried about radiation effect when she was pregnant with her first child. She gained hibakusha techō (certificate of survivorhood) issued by the Japanese government in the 1960s. She also regularly attends the biannual health checkups conducted by Japanese physicians for American survivors.
Read
