CHAPTER 3
EMBERS
Approximately thirty minutes after the bomb detonated over the Urakami Valley, Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War received its first news of the Nagasaki bombing, an abbreviated account of Governor Nagano’s initial perceptions that damages and casualties were minimal. Council members had been in the middle of a heated debate over the Soviets’ entry into the war the night before, the impact of the Hiroshima bombing, and the fate of their nation. Most particularly, they argued over whether and under what conditions to surrender and how to protect the emperor’s postwar sovereignty. As Nagasaki burned, the announcement of Japan’s second atomic bombing had no apparent impact on council members’ deliberations, which proceeded without further mention of the Nagasaki attack.
Through the rest of the day, the Big Six remained deadlocked over surrender terms. Peace faction members Prime Minister Suzuki, Foreign Minister Togo, and Navy Minister Yonai argued for a single condition that would maintain the emperor as imperial leader of Japan, while Army Minister Anami, Army Chief of Staff Umezu, and Navy Chief of Staff Toyoda held out for three additional conditions—self-disarmament, Japanese control over war-crimes trials, and no U.S. occupation of the Japanese homeland. Eventually they were joined by the full Japanese Cabinet. Debates continued late into the night of the Nagasaki bombing, but no agreement could be reached.
Just after eleven p.m., the Big Six and four Cabinet members were summoned to the obunko annex, an underground complex next to the imperial library where the emperor and empress lived in the final years of the war. Inside, the Japanese leaders waited in a hot, dismal chamber until Emperor Hirohito entered at ten minutes before midnight. For the next two hours, each of the ministers stated his position on surrender terms before the emperor. When they were finished, Prime Minister Suzuki stood and asked Hirohito to make a decision on behalf of the nation. The emperor responded by sanctioning Japan’s surrender with the sole condition that he remain in his position as imperial leader so that Japan could maintain kokutai—its national essence under the supreme guidance of a divine emperor. Within the hour, Hirohito’s decision was ratified by the full Cabinet. Many of Japan’s leaders wept out loud.
In the early morning hours of August 10, government workers rushed to draft the official surrender offer, and Japan’s Foreign Ministry sent telegrams to U.S., British, Chinese, and Soviet leaders via officials in Switzerland and Sweden, initiating the first legitimate surrender negotiations between Japan and the Allied powers. Due to the slow process of diplomatic communications, however, the United States would not receive Japan’s surrender offer for nearly fifteen hours.
Later that morning (Japan time), President Truman addressed the American people by radio to report on the Potsdam Conference. Most of the speech outlined a political and economic framework for postwar Europe. Truman mentioned the atomic bombing of Hiroshima only once, calling the city a military base chosen “because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” He also made a short statement about the United States’ duty with regard to atomic weapons: “We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force—to prevent its misuse, and to turn it into the channels of service to mankind,” he said. “It is an awful responsibility which has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” Twenty-four hours had passed since the second atomic bombing, but nowhere in his address did Truman mention Nagasaki.
Once the United States received Japan’s official surrender offer, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson recommended halting all air and naval actions against Japan. Unsure that Japan and the Allies would come to an agreement on surrender terms, Truman rejected the proposal. For five more days, Allied and Japanese troops in the Pacific continued to fight, and U.S. Air Force B-29s carried out bombing raids over Japanese cities. Truman did agree to curtail U.S. plans for a third atomic bomb attack on Japan unless the outcome of surrender negotiations failed. Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace noted that “[Truman] said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’” Truman’s statement contradicted the U.S. government’s position that the atomic bombs were delivered on Japanese military targets.
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Nagasaki mayor Okada Jukichi had spent the night of August 9 atop a hill on the eastern border of the Urakami Valley, waiting in a panic for the fires below to diminish. At three a.m. on August 10, he made his way down the hill. In darkness lit only by scattered embers, he stumbled through debris and bodies to the place where his house had stood the day before, just a few hundred feet from the hypocenter. The soles of Okada’s shoes burned as he frantically combed through the hot ashes for his wife and children. Finding no trace of them, he hurried to the air raid shelter beneath his house to discover at least ten dead bodies, including those of his entire family. Simultaneously crazed and clearheaded, he proceeded to the next neighborhood over, where he identified the deceased family members of his deputy mayor.
Okada was one of the earliest witnesses to the still-smoldering hypocenter area, which had been totally unreachable the day before. Covered in soot, he ran across the low southeastern mountains bordering the Urakami Valley to the air raid shelter of the Nagasaki Prefecture Air Defense Headquarters near Suwa Shrine. The mayor reported what he had seen to Governor Nagano, estimating the death toll at fifty thousand people—far higher than Governor Nagano could have imagined. Stunned, the governor decided to request regular updates from police chiefs in each region of the city and to dispatch reports to Japan’s home minister in Tokyo every half hour with updated damages and fatality estimates from what he still called the new-type bomb.
While Okada was searching for his family in the middle of the night, a three-man documentary crew—veteran war photographer Yamahata Yosuke, writer Higashi Jun, and painter Yamada Eiji—arrived at Michino-o Station, in the rural outskirts of Nagasaki two miles north of the hypocenter. The team, sent by Japan’s News and Information Bureau—the government’s military propaganda organization—had been given orders to record Nagasaki’s damages for use in anti-U.S. propaganda campaigns. Due to Nagasaki’s damaged tracks, Michino-o Station was as far south as the train could go.
After their eleven-hour journey, the men stepped off into the cool night air and began walking toward the city to report to the military police headquarters in southern Nagasaki. Their path took them along hillsides near where Taniguchi lay. From the top of a small mountain at Nagasaki’s northern edge, the vast atomic plain lay before them, dotted by small fires still burning in the ruins. Layers of smoke wafted overhead.
“We made our first steps into this macabre domain,” Higashi later wrote, “as though embarking on a journey into a different world.” With only the light of the crescent moon and the scattered fires to help them see, the men reached the main prefectural road running north-south through the Urakami Valley, barely detectable beneath layers of ashen rubble. The air was hot. They stumbled over bodies and passed people lying on the ground begging for water. A mother, dazed and confused, held her dead child in her arms and whimpered for help. The men offered the victims kind and encouraging words, but there was little else they could do. Higashi, however, was aghast when he stepped on something “soft and spongy” and discovered that he was standing on the corpse of a horse—and he was terrified when a person suddenly surfaced from a hole in the ground and grabbed his leg, begging for help.
The men walked for two hours, past the areas where Yoshida lay on the ground and Nagano and her father huddled in a crowded air raid shelter. They finally reached the military police headquarters, damaged but still standing. After reporting in, the team walked to the hills to wait for the morning light.
• • •
The sun broke over
the horizon at 5:42 a.m., barely penetrating the smoky haze that blanketed the city. In the dim light, the massive expanse of atomic destruction gradually became visible to Yamahata, his colleagues, and the thousands of people who emerged from air raid shelters or descended from the hills where they had hidden during the night. Those who could move wandered aimlessly through the remains of the city or stumbled and crawled to flee the devastated region. “Even their eyes were burned,” Yamahata remembered. “The backs of the eyelids were red and swollen as though they had been turned inside out, and the edges of the eyes were yellow like the fat of chicken. Blinded, people groped their way forward with both hands extended in front of them.” As the team began its journey north, past the flattened Nagasaki Station and into the barren Urakami Valley, Yamahata focused solely on his task to photograph what one survivor called a “monochromatic, soundless hell.”
A muscular human thigh protruded from a disheveled mound of wreckage. A girl, perhaps eighteen, stood next to a skeleton on the ground and stared out into the vast destruction. An old woman dressed in a kimono crawled through the wreckage; a small figure against the backdrop of a crushed and mangled factory. Adults, children, and babies lay dead on the ground, their bodies scorched. Some of their mouths were open as if calling for help, others died with their arms extended, “grasping at the air,” Higashi wrote, “a last expression of their extreme distress in the sea of fire.” A boy, perhaps ten years old, carried his younger brother on his back, his face streaked with vertical lines of dried perspiration or tears. The smaller boy gripped his brother’s arms and pressed his chin into his shoulder, his round face covered with blood and dirt as he peered into the camera.
Police and rescue teams from nearby towns and villages worked alongside civilian volunteers, using doors, wood scraps, and stretchers to carry the wounded from the bombed-out region. Emergency crews used hand tools to begin clearing small portions of the main north-south route through the city. Family members poured into and through the city from every direction and searched for anything, near or far, that could orient them in the atomic plain. Two men argued loudly over a woman’s scorched body found between their houses, each claiming that she was his wife. Another man pulled his still-breathing pregnant wife from under the ruins of their house, but she died as he placed her on a wooden plank. A young girl found her mother’s ring in the ashes but not her mother; another identified a corpse with no eyes as her mother based on a gold tooth in her mouth. A sixteen-year-old boy rushed into his neighborhood to the site of his former house and dug through the rubble to find the bodies of his older sister, grandfather, and uncle. He reached down to take a tortoiseshell clip from his sister’s hair, a final keepsake. The scorched earth burned through the soles and tips of people’s shoes, and their hands blistered from burrowing through the still-hot remains of their homes. A seven-year-old boy crouched on the ground, his tears dropping into the ashes of his brother and sister. “The places where the tears fell turned black,” the boy remembered. “The sheet of ashes soon became dotted with black spots.”
In the less-damaged areas of the old city and over the mountains from the Urakami Valley, people gathered in small groups to exchange stories about what had happened to them the day before, telling one another how overwhelmingly relieved they were when family members had come home, or how terrified they were of the fates of those still missing. Trying to understand what was still incomprehensible, a rumor circulated through the city that the bomb’s intended target was the Urakami Branch of Nagasaki Prison, a few hundred yards from the hypocenter.
Though their home near Suwa Shrine was slightly damaged, Yoshida’s parents and four siblings were all safe, but when Yoshida didn’t return home, his mother and father were fraught with fear that their son had died. On the morning of August 10, however, the parents of Tabuchi—Yoshida’s injured friend who had left the group the night before—suddenly arrived at their house to tell them that Tabuchi had made it in darkness out of the Urakami Valley and across the mountains to his home. Tabuchi’s parents quickly reported that, at least until late the night before, Yoshida was still alive. Yoshida’s parents rushed from their house to find him.
Earlier that morning, members of a relief team had placed Yoshida, partially conscious, on a wooden stretcher and carried him to a temporary relief station inside an air raid shelter. Someone bandaged his face and entire body and carried him to the dirt school yard of the gutted Nagasaki Commercial School, where hundreds of injured adults and children lay in rows. When they heard airplanes overhead, the volunteers fled to air raid shelters, leaving Yoshida feeling alone and vulnerable. The heat of the sun bore down on him, he remembered, “like a slow execution.” Eventually, he fell unconscious.
Yoshida’s mother and father made their way into the hypocenter area, stifling their shock and despair at the number of corpses to press on through the blistering ashes. They stopped only to douse their feet in trickles of water from broken pipes, a meager attempt to relieve the excruciating pain. When they reached the ruins of the school where Yoshida lay, rows and rows of burned, swollen, and bandaged bodies stretched out before them, each person as unrecognizable as the next, many groaning and calling out the names of their family members.
“My parents were ira-ira [desperate] to find me,” Yoshida said. “They called out my name—‘Katsuji! Katsuji!’—but the voices that called back to them all sounded the same. ‘We will never be able to find him!’ my mother told my father. ‘If that’s the case,’ he answered, ‘then we need to lean in close to their ears and say his name in a small voice.’” They leaned into dozens of victims and whispered Katsuji’s name. When they finally came to Yoshida’s burned body, they knew he was their son. They lifted him up, placed him into an ubaguruma (baby carriage), and pushed him nearly four and a half miles through the smoldering rubble and over the mountains to their home. Yoshida cried and mumbled deliriously, begging for water, moaning about how hot he felt, and muttering that he missed his okaachan (mommy). Along the way, he blacked out and didn’t regain consciousness until mid-December, four months later.
• • •
By late morning, Yamahata, Higashi, and Yamada had moved north past the tangled steel wreckage of Mitsubishi factories that lined the Urakami River. Under the cloudless sky, Yamahata shot panoramic views of the flattened Urakami Valley. Blackened factory smokestacks stood tall and desolate, wreathed by smoke wafting upward from the smoldering debris. Most electrical poles and trees lay on the ground, snapped in pieces, though some remained standing at varying angles, their wires swooping down and dragging along the ground. A charred mother and infant lay dead next to each other on a damaged streetcar platform. Inside mangled streetcars, scorched bodies of passengers were seated as they had been at the moment of the blast. Men, women, and children still trapped beneath buildings or lying injured in the ruins moaned, wailed, and whimpered for help and water. Yamahata later reflected on his state of mind that day—what he considered to be unforgivable detachment in a situation of such extreme suffering—confessing that “perhaps it was just too much, too enormous to absorb.”
Pathway through the ruins near the hypocenter on August 10, 1945, between one and two p.m. To the left, Yamada Eiji is sketching the scene before him. At center, the opening to an air raid shelter is visible, and in the distance are Mitsubishi factory smokestacks. On the hill to the far right stand the ruins of Chinzei Middle School. (Photograph by Yamahata Yosuke/Courtesy of Yamahata Shogo)
People in school and work uniforms walked or rode bicycles through layers of debris to get to their homes or family members’ workplaces. They carried home the bodies of loved ones for temporary burial on their ashened property, or cremated them on top of wood scraps in desolate fields. Some headed toward the hills, barely visible through the smoky haze, carrying tied and knotted furoshiki (wrapping cloths) that held items they had been able to salvage. As they walked, some people stopped and stared at corpses on the ground,
unable to move on. Others looked down or straight ahead, their faces blank, as if lost in a trance—in Japanese, this state was called mugamuchu (without self, as in a dream).
Before midday, Yamahata and his team reached Zenza-machi, three-quarters of a mile from the hypocenter, where Nagano’s family had lived. That morning, Nagano and her father had crawled out of their air raid shelter and stepped over corpses “and other people with stuff trickling from their noses” to get home. When they finally arrived, they froze in front of the site where their house had stood the day before. There was no trace of Nagano’s mother, Kuniko, or Seiji. Nagano saw a blackened body in the ashes and ran to it, calling out, “Okaasan! Okaasan! [Mother! Mother!]” She was sobbing over the body when one of her childhood friends appeared.
“Eh-chan!” the girl called out to Nagano. “Yesterday I saw your brother Sei-chan! He’s lying near an air raid shelter. I’m so sorry I couldn’t help him.”
Nagano and her father raced away, stumbling through the ruins to search one shelter after another. “Sei-chan! Sei-chan!” they called. Near the entrance to one shelter, a child’s body lay on the ground, completely burned. His face was covered in blisters and swollen like a balloon, and his eyes were forced shut. Blood and bodily fluids oozed from places where skin had peeled off.
“We didn’t want to think that he was my brother,” Nagano said, crying. “But since his height was about the same, we went over to the body.
“‘Are you Sei-chan?’ we asked. He couldn’t see us, but he nodded yes. And even though he nodded—it’s terrible to say—we desperately hoped that maybe this was the wrong person, that Seiji might be in a better state than this. So we asked again: ‘Are you really Sei-chan?’ The boy nodded again—yes.”
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