City and prefectural leaders selected additional sites for emergency relief stations, and more than 280 doctors and nurses were in place to execute the city’s crisis relief plan—though some doctors were young, not-yet-fully-trained medical students who had received their degrees early to fill in for physicians drafted into the military. Concrete buildings in the city and surrounding villages served as emergency evacuation sites. Clothing, medicines, and large stores of rice, noodles, soy sauce, condensed milk, dried sardines, salt, corn, and soybeans were stockpiled inside Urakami Church and other buildings believed to be safe from attack. To hinder enemy vision of potential targets, the city implemented mandatory blackouts: Families were forbidden to use lights after dark, and factories operating overnight were ordered to cover their windows to eliminate any seepage of light. From inside their homes and air raid shelters, children listened to and glanced up at Allied planes overhead; some learned to identify each type of aircraft by the sound of its engines.
Heeding the national government’s call to evacuate their children to rural areas outside the city, in late 1944, Nagano’s parents sent Kuniko, thirteen, and Seiji, nine, to live with Nagano’s grandparents in Kagoshima, at the southern tip of Kyushu. Nagano’s older brother was drafted and sent outside the city for training, so Nagano, mandated to serve as a mobilized student worker, remained in Nagasaki with her parents. “Up until then, we were an ordinary family.”
Her loneliness was unbearable, and in the spring of 1945, she begged her parents to let Kuniko and Sei-chan come home. After much discussion, her mother finally gave in and agreed to let Nagano go to Kagoshima to retrieve them, but she was adamant that Nagano could bring them home only if they wanted to come. Otherwise, Nagano could not bring them back.
Nagano eagerly agreed. She rode the train to Kagoshima alone, and when she got there, her brother and sister insisted that they had made good friends there and did not yet want to return home. When Nagano pressed them with different reasons they should come back, Kuniko and Seiji began to cry. “You shouldn’t force them,” Nagano’s grandparents scolded her. But Nagano didn’t listen. During Kuniko and Seiji’s school break, she took them by train back to Nagasaki.
Four months later, on the morning of August 9, Nagano and her family completed their calisthenics. By this time, people across the city were awake, and everyone, including Nagano, was hungry. Mothers, grandmothers, and daughters scraped together meals out of acorns, sawdust, soybean grinds, potato stems, peanut shells, and pumpkin gruel, with protein sources from bugs, worms, rodent flesh, and snakes. One girl Nagano’s age was so thin that her friends called her Senko (incense stick). Others fought lethargy resulting from a combination of malnutrition and lack of sleep.
A citywide air raid alarm wailed across loudspeakers and radios, prompting formulaic responses. Factories stopped production. Hospital staff carried their patients to their designated shelters. People across the city pulled on their air raid hoods, and parents yelled to their children to run for cover in the holes beneath their houses or in nearby air raid shelters. Thousands of people—including Nagano and her family—huddled in these dark, damp caves. Mothers, aunts, and eldest sisters stayed behind to fight anticipated fires in their homes.
After a long wait, the all-clear sounded. Nagano returned home and prepared herself for work. She had received a ration of new white running shoes, a rare treasure in the summer of 1945. But she wanted to protect them from becoming soiled, so she chose instead to wear geta—raised wooden sandals. The city was bright in the morning sun when she departed for work, leaving her mother and younger sister and brother behind.
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Fifteen-year-old Do-oh Mineko was, in her own words, a bit of a “wild child.” Her boisterous energy and strong competitiveness worried her mother, who warned Do-oh that the gods were watching her and would become angry if she didn’t demonstrate more feminine behaviors. “But I couldn’t see the gods, so I thought that maybe they didn’t exist,” Do-oh explained. “In Japanese, we have a word wanpaku [impertinent]. That was me.”
Do-oh’s family followed traditional Japanese gender roles, giving higher esteem and priority to men and boys. Her father, who had served in Manchuria, now worked as a high-level employee at Mitsubishi Shipyard. At home, he was a strict authoritarian who demanded absolute obedience from his children, including two hours of study a night. At dinner, he sat at a separate table in the front of the room, and even during the most dire wartime deprivation, he was given an extra serving of food. Do-oh thought men were pretty lucky.
Her mother, in contrast, was gentle, patient, and obedient without complaint. Her elegant beauty was evident even during the war, when she wore no makeup and tied her hair back with a kerchief. Before strict rationing was implemented, she had sold fish to supplement the family income: Pulling a two-wheeled cart to the fish market, she would load up her purchases, return home, and repack the fish into two baskets. She then hung them from either end of a pole across her shoulders and walked from house to house peddling her merchandise. Do-oh, the fourth of seven children, had inherited her mother’s beauty—large almond eyes, smooth skin, and articulated round lips. In addition to helping look after her younger siblings, Do-oh had two daily chores: hauling water from a nearby community well back to her house for dishes, baths, and laundry; and cleaning rice or other grains for family meals the next day. On winter nights, the tips of her fingers froze as she washed the rice, but Do-oh persevered because of her father’s strict policy: “No work, no food.”
Do-oh and her family lived on Mount Inasa, just west of Nagasaki’s port. As a young girl, she had played hide-and-seek, jumped rope, and drawn chalk pictures on stones with her friends. At Inasa Elementary School, Do-oh had a hundred percent attendance record and above-average grades. But Do-oh was a tomboy, not the genteel young woman her parents and teachers would have wanted. She was captain of the dodgeball team, placed first or second in many of her school races on sports days, and even represented her school in a citywide running competition. At recess, she ignored the other girls and ran around the playground.
In December 1941, her country’s attack on Pearl Harbor initiated numerous changes in Do-oh’s life. “All the students were gathered in the assembly room,” she recalled. “We bowed to the emperor’s photo, then the principal talked with us about Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy and told us that we were now at war with the United States and England. He said we needed to study hard and build physical strength. . . . The teachers’ faces looked worried and tense.” The following year, twelve-year-old Do-oh and her family evacuated for safety farther inland to a rural area in the northwestern corner of the city. Do-oh passed the admissions exam for Keiho Girls’ High School, a two-hour walk from her home.
During her first year there, classes were held as usual, and after school, Do-oh studied flower arranging, tea ceremony, koto, and Japanese archery. Gradually, however, students were required to plant potato sprouts on the school grounds during their physical education classes and after school, and Do-oh’s academic instruction became increasingly focused on militaristic indoctrination. She and her classmates recited the Imperial Rescript on Education, commanding total adoration and loyalty to the emperor and the nation under his rule. “Should emergency arise,” one line read, “offer yourselves courageously to the State.” Do-oh, however, did not expect her country to lose. “We were taught that Japan was God’s chosen country, and because of this, Japan would definitely win the war.” Japanese soldiers had become an elite class, and Do-oh and her young friends daydreamed of becoming their wives.
Do-oh’s oldest brother received a “red paper” in 1942, signifying his immediate military conscription. He was twenty-three. Like many new recruits, he prepared his last will and testament, sealing it in an envelope with fingernail and hair clippings as physical remembrances in the event of his death. On the day he left for war, Do-oh’s mother rose early and used food she had se
cretly stashed away for the occasion to make ohagi—sticky rice balls covered with sweetened adzuki beans. “Eat until your stomach is full,” she told her son. Members of the tonarigumi arrived to bid him farewell; as they sang a patriotic song, Do-oh’s brother saluted and told the crowd that he would work hard for the sake of the country. Not long after, Do-oh’s second-oldest brother was also drafted. Two years later, her eldest brother died in a naval battle near Guam. Her father traveled by train to Sasebo, fifty miles north of Nagasaki, to collect his ashes—but the white box he received was empty, so Do-oh’s parents placed their son’s fingernail and hair clippings inside the box in his memory. Her mother cried for months.
In 1944, fourteen-year-old Do-oh was just starting to dream about her future when she was forced to leave school to work full-time for the war effort. With thousands of other students, she was assigned to the Mitsubishi Arms Factory Ohashi Plant, where the aerial-launched torpedoes used in the Pearl Harbor attack had been manufactured. Do-oh’s job was to inspect the bolts of newly made torpedoes as they came off the assembly line. Once a month, students returned to their schools for “attendance day,” where they were required to do military drills under the command of an officer. One of Do-oh’s only surviving photos was taken by a friend on one of these days. In order to look nice, Do-oh had defied school rules and worn street clothes—a dark skirt and white cotton blouse—instead of her school uniform. “I was fashion-conscious.” She shrugged. “I had my own image.”
To “undermine the morale of the Japanese people,” in early March 1945, the United States initiated an unrelenting firebombing campaign of Japanese cities. Over the next four months, enormous industrial and residential sections of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and nearly every major Japanese city burned to the ground, killing, wounding, and displacing vast civilian populations.
Do-oh Mineko, age fourteen, ca. 1944. (Courtesy of Okada Ikuyo)
Nagasaki went into high alert, feverishly reinforcing its air raid defense systems, emergency stockpiles, and evacuation sites. Employees and mobilized student workers moved large Mitsubishi machinery, precision instruments, and administrative departments to schools and underground shelters. Others blasted and dug six parallel, interconnected tunnels into a hillside in the northwest sector of the city. Inside the tunnels, Mitsubishi constructed a makeshift factory to continue its round-the-clock production of torpedo parts. Between mandated evictions for fire prevention purposes and voluntary evacuations of children, the elderly, and pregnant family members, an estimated fifty thousand people moved—either to the perceived-to-be-safer Urakami Valley, areas outside the city, or nearby islands. Elementary schools relocated their classes to shrines, private homes, and other temporary locations.
At Nagasaki Medical College, students now kept helmets and medical supplies near their desks. High school students and community volunteers formed emergency relief squads and carried kits containing hydrogen peroxide, iodine, bandages, scissors, aspirin, tissues, tweezers, and handkerchiefs. Every tonarigumi was equipped with a water tank, small manual pump, stretcher, and an appropriate number of ladders based on population. In addition to their required belowground shelters, every household was mandated to have at least two waterproof buckets, a shovel, a pickax, and fire-smothering equipment. In the event of a bomb attack, “we students were told to kneel down, bend over, and use thumbs to plug our ears and our fingers to cover our eyes,” Do-oh remembered, “to prevent our eardrums from getting damaged and our eyeballs from popping out. We practiced this over and over.”
Nagasaki was bombed a second time in April 1945, leaving 129 dead. Occasionally, American planes approached the city, turned their engines off to avoid detection, and flew low over the shipyards, pelting them with machine-gun fire. Other Allied planes dropped leaflets warning of Nagasaki’s destruction by fire and urging people to leave—though by Japanese law, citizens could not read or discuss the leaflets, and they faced arrest unless they immediately handed them over to the police. Day after day through the spring and early summer, however, no additional conventional or incendiary bombs fell on Nagasaki, even as other Japanese cities collapsed in flames. Rumors circulated—or perhaps they were hopeful speculations—that the Americans were treating Nagasaki differently because of its history of international trade, renowned beauty, Christian population, or the Allied POWs interned there.
That spring, news arrived that Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, had surrendered. By that time, however, many people’s profound weariness overwhelmed any previous nationalistic fervor. Chronic hunger now outweighed fear of punishment for illegally fleeing Japan’s cities. Tuberculosis claimed the lives of many babies and young adults, mortality rates spiked among children under seven suffering with diarrhea, and thousands were affected by beriberi, a serious condition resulting from malnutrition. Women and girls slept in their work clothes, and men and boys wore gaiters (protective leg coverings) around the clock to be ready for nightly air raid alarms. “We had no time to take a bath,” one boy remembered, “so we had a hard time removing fleas and lice all over our bodies.” Japan’s diminishing raw materials and disabled transportation systems had resulted in sharp decreases in factory production levels, but adults and mobilized students were still required to work long shifts, if only to demolish buildings and dig shelters or sit silently and do no work at all. Schoolchildren collected pine sap in the woods to help make fuel for Japanese fighter planes. With nearly three million soldiers and civilians killed in battle or Allied bombings at home—more than 3 percent of Japan’s population—the atmosphere in families and work communities was heavy as people waited for news of another soldier’s death.
Even without accurate media reports, most people could now surmise the gravity of Japan’s military losses in the Pacific and the devastating impact of Allied firebombing attacks, which by August had incinerated all or part of sixty-four Japanese cities. According to postwar surveys, by July 1945, public trust in the country’s leaders had reached an all-time low, with two-thirds of the Japanese people certain that the nation’s defeat was inevitable. “Even as kids we understood we were losing the war,” a Nagasaki man recalled. “Any fool could see it. We needed everything. We didn’t even have shoes. How could we win the war?”
Some Japanese Cabinet members had recognized as early as the spring of 1944 the urgency of their country’s losses and its certain defeat. Right-wing promilitary Cabinet members, however, seemed ready to sacrifice their citizens in what they saw as their nation’s ultimate battle. As Allied troops advanced toward Japan’s main islands, these two factions heatedly deliberated over Japan’s terms of surrender. Consensus, mandated by Japan’s constitution, could not be achieved—and without it, the Japanese people could do nothing but brace for invasion.
The government redeployed its already-weakened troops from China and Manchuria to Kyushu and Honshu, Japan’s largest home islands. In Nagasaki, officials set up heavy artillery in bunkers on nearby islands and ordered mines to be placed in the waters leading up to the bay. Workers at Mitsubishi Shipyard constructed several models of special attack boats, including an estimated six hundred shinyo—one-man plywood motorboats with bombs in the hull, designed to emerge from hidden coves on Nagasaki’s coastline and surrounding islands and strike enemy ships after their mobilized student drivers had jumped into the sea. Approximately one hundred kaiten—individually manned suicide torpedoes launched from a submarine or ship—were also deployed.
While imperial portraits were removed from schools and government offices and hidden in locations outside the city, all men ages fifteen to sixty and women seventeen to forty were drafted into the National Volunteer Fighting Corps and emboldened to die “like shattered jewels” for their emperor—that is, to give their lives in battle or commit suicide rather than dishonor the emperor’s name by surrendering. Every household had a bamboo spear posted near the door, and Do-oh, her classmates, and thousands of other students participated in co
mbat training on how to use these spears to attack enemy soldiers, despite how ridiculous this seemed to those who understood that they would be shot before they could even get close.
In their house five miles inland, Do-oh and her family were safe when, in late July and early August, Allied attacks bombarded Nagasaki three more times with over two hundred tons of conventional bombs. Parts of the Mitsubishi and Kawanami shipyards and dozens of houses were destroyed, and the Mitsubishi steelworks factory and Nagasaki Medical College suffered minor damages. More than two hundred people were killed, including a young family inside their home, twelve in an air raid shelter that collapsed, and thirty-two more who drowned when the wall of their air raid shelter cracked, causing water to flood in.
On the morning of August 9, Do-oh put on her hated wartime attire—loose-fitting trousers, a long-sleeved work blouse, and split-toed heavy cloth footwear. Her blouse had a tag sewn into it providing her name, address, and blood type, and she wore an armband with the name of her school on it. Crisscrossed over her shoulders and chest were straps holding a first-aid kit and a padded cotton hood to protect her ears from loud explosions during an air raid, or—if soaked in water—from fire. Do-oh had not let go of her vision of a future after the war. “I loved fashion,” she said. “That was my dream.”
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Unbeknownst to the people of Nagasaki, Japan, or the United States, in the months leading up to the morning of August 9, leaders of the United States, the USSR, and Japan played out a series of mostly covert political maneuvers and military operations to end the war and attain, from each nation’s perspective, optimum postwar goals. In the early 1940s, the United States had established the Manhattan Project and hired world-renowned scientists to create the world’s first atomic bomb. After years of top-secret development, the scientists were close to achieving their objective: to split the nucleus of an atom, manipulate and harness the forces that hold it together, and unleash an explosive power greater than any human had ever generated.
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