DNA testing identifies teenage Hiroshima bombing victim using hair, ashes

ISTANBUL

A 13-year-old girl who was a victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II has been identified through DNA testing through hair and ashes kept at Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, according to local officials and media.

This marked the first successful case of atomic bomb victim identification using this method, the Hiroshima city government said Monday, according to Kyodo News.

Hair and ashes stored at the Peace Memorial Park were found to belong to Hatsue Kajiyama, who went missing after the US bombing of the city on Aug. 6, 1945, near the end of the war.

The hair had been preserved, along with ashes, listed under the name Michiko Kajiyama in the burial registry for unclaimed remains.

However, Hatsue’s 60-year-old nephew, Shuji, notified the city that the name might have been recorded incorrectly and asked for the information to be verified.

Between late November and earlier this month, Kanagawa Dental University extracted DNA from the hair and compared it with the DNA of Hatsue’s 91-year-old sister, confirming that the remains belonged to Hatsue.

The unclaimed ashes of 70,000 victims are kept in a memorial mound, with hair samples preserved in urns for approximately 10 of them.

In the future, the city plans to conduct DNA testing on hair samples if requested by the victims’ families.