[3] Mr. Kitagawa and his students listen to a radio documentary on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of the pilot on the Enola Gay.

Kitagawa sees students pass around a book containing letters from youths in East and West Germany, and later finds them by Michiko's bedside reading that the Japanese were used as "guinea pigs" to test the nuclear bomb because of their race.

A neighbor tells them their mother and brother were killed, and takes them to see their father in hospital, but Yukio's sister runs away in fear and is not seen again.

He is confronted by Kitagawa, and admits that he quit his job at the factory after it switched to manufacturing artillery shells, realizing that if war broke out again, he would be among those who would be forced to fight and that more atomic attacks would take place.

[3][4] In addition, the film was not satisfactory to the hibakusha community, who "had greatly anticipated an unadulterated treatment of the subject once the Allied Occupation censorship was lifted"[5] JTU commissioned Hideo Sekigawa to direct another adaptation of Children of the A-Bomb that would better address the union's agenda.

[3] Hiroshima-born lead actress Yumeji Tsukioka appealed to the production company with whom she was under contract, Shochiku, to let her act in the film without payment.

[8] In late August, stills from the film were displayed by JTU representatives at the World Conference of Organizations of the Teaching Profession at Oxford.

attacking the film and its themes as anti-British and anti-American, and especially insulting in light of the benefits Japan received during the Korean War.

However, in November, the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture reversed its resolution approving the release of Hiroshima, stating the film was "too anti-American to endorse school children’s viewing."

[13][3] Kinema Junpo organized a special "Round Table" for Hiroshima in its December 1953 edition, with critics raising issues such as the duration of the post-explosion scenes and the idea of being able to fully represent the experience of hibakusha.

[3] In regard to controversy surrounding the film, Christopher Howard writes that "whilst some readings of Japanese 1950s or 1960s science-fiction or horror films [...] view them as Japan’s way of dealing with the unrepresentable ‘trauma’ of the atomic bombing, the outpour of international criticism over Hiroshima, for instance, also suggests an alternative history in which a representable trauma is too much, not for domestic audiences but for overseas onlookers.