A cloth nametag sewn onto the breast of the boy’s ragged school uniform was still intact. Zenza Elementary School, 4th grade. Kanazawa Seiji. 9 years old. Blood type B. Nagano collapsed in grief. Her mind raced as she tried to comprehend what it had been like for him the day before, burned, alone, and scared. What went on in his mind? How did he end up here at the air raid shelter, as badly burned as he was? Had he tried to stay alive until someone came to save him? Did he long for our mother? “I mean, he was only nine,” Nagano remembered. “I felt so sorry for him. I just couldn’t stop crying.”
Nagano’s father decided to carry Seiji to one of the temporary relief stations in the area, but when he tried to pick up his son, the blistered skin on Seiji’s legs peeled off in his father’s hand. Nagano’s father quickly pulled his hand back and rushed away, leaving Nagano alone with Seiji. “Sei-chan,” she asked through her tears, “do you know where Mother and Kuniko are?” Seiji moved his head slightly. “Hold on! Hold on, okay?” Nagano pleaded. “Father will come back. . . .”
Nagano’s father returned carrying a door-size wooden shutter, the kind used in Japanese houses to cover glass windows to block the rain. He and Nagano gently lifted Seiji onto the board and carried him away. At the relief station, hundreds of injured and burned people were lined up waiting for help. The three waited their turn beneath the blazing sun. With no trees for shade or clothing to cover Seiji, Nagano and her father stood next to each other to create a shadow over their brother and son. When Seiji’s turn finally came, all the relief staff could do was cover his body with chinkyu, a thick, white zinc oxide oil for burns. “Even so,” Nagano said, “we thanked the doctor many times.” She thought that because Seiji had received treatment, he would survive.
Nagano and her father were carrying Seiji back toward the shelter when they were shocked to see Nagano’s mother and younger sister, Kuniko, coming down from Mount Kompira. Her mother, frantic and exhausted, turned to Seiji and “lost it and cried like a crazy person,” Nagano remembered, “clinging to his body and sobbing, ‘I’m sorry, Sei-chan! I’m sorry! Where were you? I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’”
When she finally caught her breath, Nagano’s mother told them what had happened the morning before. Seiji had gone outside to try to catch dragonflies. After the overpowering flash of light, their house had collapsed on top of Nagano’s mother and Kuniko. Nagano’s mother had screamed for help, but no one came. After some time, she was able to push the wooden posts off her body and free herself; she then lifted a weight-bearing column and a sewing machine off Kuniko and pulled her out of the wreckage. Remarkably, neither had suffered serious injuries. Standing in the debris of their home, they looked around. The neighborhood was flattened in every direction, and deadly quiet. No human life was evident. Fires were flaring up all around them. Stumbling over the ruins of their house, Nagano’s mother and sister ran in the direction of where Seiji had been, but he was nowhere in sight. The fires surged closer. Nagano’s mother, desperately conflicted, felt she had no choice but to flee with Kuniko. They ran to the top of Mount Kompira and hid there through the day and night.
Together now, the family lifted the door on which Seiji lay and carried him through the rubble to the air raid shelter in their former neighborhood. Inside, the heat of the afternoon sun intensified. They huddled in silence, except for Nagano’s mother, who couldn’t stop moaning and crying.
• • •
Early that morning, Governor Nagano had crossed over the mountains to see for himself the barren corridor stretching the length of the Urakami Valley. The scenes before him were unimaginable and surreal. “It was . . . it was just so horrible and pathetic that I couldn’t look.”
According to Japan’s Wartime Casualties Care Law, rescue and relief for civilian war victims were funded through the national treasury and implemented by the prefectural governments. This meant that Governor Nagano, as head of Nagasaki Prefecture, was responsible for organizing all immediate recovery efforts for Nagasaki, an impossible task not only because of the overwhelming numbers of victims but also because government agencies, hospitals, clinics, medical and food supplies, and communications systems were destroyed, and most of the city’s trained medical staff had been killed or injured. For the tens of thousands who needed help, fewer than thirty active and retired physicians had survived, and capacity in hospitals throughout the city was reduced to 240 beds.
The city’s chaotic rescue and relief efforts that day were supported by hundreds of local and prefectural soldiers, policemen, firemen, civil defense and government workers, teachers, neighborhood association leaders, and individual adults and children who carried out assigned or self-designated tasks. Teams were formed to rescue as many people as possible from beneath fallen buildings. One policeman found two hundred girls trapped under their collapsed school; nearly all died before relief workers could extricate them. Volunteer teams turned over blackened bodies in search of survivors, loaded the injured onto trucks for transport to relief stations, or carried the dead to cremation sites. Others began clearing roads and streetcar and railway tracks, worked to restore communications, or prepared and delivered tubs of onigiri and oversize buckets of water to relief stations in the ruins. In some locations, very little food was consumed, presumably because most people were too injured to get to the aid stations, or those who could had no appetite. Around some of the water buckets, people had collapsed onto the ground before or after finally having a sip.
Teams of doctors and nurses from a number of Kyushu cities and military bases had already arrived in Nagasaki, and on August 10, the prefecture’s health division requested more emergency medical assistance from other nearby municipalities. In the meantime, able-bodied adults and children helped with medical relief in whatever way they could. Loosely organized teams of surviving physicians and nurses set up additional relief stations in the devastated areas, with no walls or roofs, and in previously designated schools in the old city that were only minimally damaged. Teenagers walked through the ruins with their wartime-mandated first-aid bags, providing superficial medical support to any survivor they could find. Everyone involved in medical relief was instructed to first transport or treat victims they deemed likely to survive, requiring them to make impossible and excruciating choices between helping people they thought might live and leaving others to die waiting for help.
Atop Motohara Hill, almost a mile from the hypocenter in the far northeast corner of the valley, First Urakami Hospital was the only medical institution in the Urakami Valley still standing, though it had been burned from the inside out. Before the war, the hospital building had been a Catholic seminary, but when foreign Catholics were expelled in 1941, a Japanese Franciscan order had established a seventy-bed hospital there to provide specialized care for tuberculosis patients. The hospital’s current director was the diminutive twenty-nine-year-old physician Akizuki Tatsuichiro, a man who had lost two sisters to tuberculosis and was himself frail from chronic asthma as a child and tuberculosis as a young adult. Dr. Akizuki was the only non-Catholic among the priests, monks, and nurses who staffed the hospital.
Akizuki had been in the middle of treating a patient when the bomb’s blast had shaken the entire hospital, causing books, equipment, and sections of the ceiling to rain down on the patients and staff. He had avoided serious injury by taking cover behind a bed. As the hospital roof began to burn, Dr. Akizuki and his staff had raced through the corridors and up and down the stairs of the three-story building, walking over shattered glass and pushing through large debris to carry out all seventy of their patients before the building ignited into flames. Everyone was placed outside on the ground. By night, they were joined by injured and burned victims from surrounding neighborhoods. The air was filled with their agonized cries as Urakami Church burned in the distance.
The burned-out First Urakami Hospital for tuberculosis patients, where Dr. Akizuki Tatsuichiro worked, fall 1945. (U.S. Strategic Bomb
ing Survey/Courtesy of Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace, Committee for Research of Photographs and Materials of the Atomic Bombing)
The next morning, Dr. Akizuki’s first impulse was to run away. Instead, as some of the nurses and kitchen staff prepared rice and soup on a makeshift stove, he cheerfully greeted his patients and the hundreds of people who had gathered on the hospital grounds. Later that morning, a member of his staff directed Akizuki to an underground tunnel where he had been secretly storing medicine for several days before the bombing. Akizuki was ecstatic to open two large wooden boxes filled with small amounts of gauze, bandages, and medicines—including painkillers, antiseptic lotions, and ointments.
Dr. Akizuki was known not only for his dedication but also his short temper—both of which he demonstrated that day. As he and his staff treated hundreds of patients, Akizuki alternately offered words of hope and consolation or harsh comments, snapping at people with less serious injuries to stop complaining. One man, Kinoshita, had suffered burns on his face, shoulders, and chest and was in such pain that he could barely breathe. Even as Dr. Akizuki applied pain-relief ointment to his burns, he knew that Kinoshita was unlikely to survive. Later that day, he visited Kinoshita, by that time near death, at his home where his family had carried him. The sun was beginning to set when he left their house and walked back toward the hospital. Behind him he could hear Kinoshita’s family sobbing, crying out, “Jesus! Mary! Joseph!”
“I was so depressed in spirit,” Akizuki remembered, “overcome by the grief and pain of human existence in this transient world, that I felt as if I were myself insensible, lifeless, like a ghost.”
• • •
By early afternoon on August 10, Yamahata and his team had reached the hypocenter area. Where buildings and trees once stood, they saw a vast, leveled plain—as if, Higashi remembered, the area had been completely “wiped away . . . by the bold stroke of a colossal brush.” A man whose flesh had been burned off his feet was running through the ruins. A bewildered woman carried a bucket holding the severed head of her young daughter. Numb and exhausted, Yamahata and his colleagues proceeded north, past the hills where Taniguchi still lay on his stomach, unable to move. When the men reached Michino-o Station, hundreds of people sat or lay on the ground, waiting to be loaded onto trains that would transport them to relief stations and hospitals outside the city. As each train departed, a chorus of agonizing moans echoed in its wake.
Ten hours after they had started their journey, the three men boarded a train and returned to Hakata. In all, Yamahata had taken 119 photographs. After developing them, he expected to submit them to his superiors at the News and Information Bureau. Japan was in such chaos, however, that the agency did not immediately request them, so Yamahata was able to hold on to them until after the war. “One blessing, among these unfortunate circumstances,” he later said, “is that the resulting photographs were never used by the Japanese army . . . in one last misguided attempt to rouse popular support for the continuation of warfare.”
Bomb victims near the Urakami Valley’s main thoroughfare, just over a half mile from the hypocenter, on August 10, 1945. Rescue workers provided the futon on the ground from a damaged inn. (Photograph by Yamahata Yosuke/Courtesy of Yamahata Shogo)
• • •
The sun set on the first full day after the bombing. Some survivors were safe at home with their family members or in homes that strangers had opened to them. Countless more were missing, and their families could not sleep for worry. Across the Urakami Valley and in outlying areas, tens of thousands still lay in the ruins with mosquitoes swarming over them. Others lay body to body in air raid shelters or were packed against one another on the ground outside or on the floors inside darkened relief stations, where as soon as people stiffened and died, their bodies were carried away to be replaced by more tormented patients. Many had not eaten since the morning before.
Throughout the night, people listened with dread for the elongated hum of approaching enemy planes passing overhead. A man wandered through the ruins dampening the lips of survivors and applying oil and bandages to their wounds. At Dr. Akizuki’s hospital, the families of two tuberculosis patients arrived to find their sons alive and carried them home. Dr. Akizuki curled up on the ground wrapped in a blanket, envious of a medical team from Omura that had left Nagasaki that night to return home. From the top of a mountain, a boy heard the sound of Korean people wailing, a cultural ritual for their grief.
Nagano and her family stayed awake all night, crouched together in the shelter next to Zenza Elementary School, gently coaxing Sei-chan to stay alive. Nagano found a broken water pipe outside and used her hands to scoop water and carry it to her brother—but Seiji was too injured even to sip it. “Even with the many coincidences—one after the other—that helped us that day, there was nothing else we could do for him,” Nagano remembered. “We stayed together as a family for one night.”
By the next morning, Sei-chan had died. Nagano’s family carried him to a flattened, scorched patch of ground where about ten other bodies were lined up. “We brought pieces of half-burned wood and laid them on top of the body,” Nagano said. “Before our own eyes—” She paused, still incredulous at what they had to do. “Before our own eyes, the four of us—my mother, my father, my younger sister, and me—we lit a fire beneath Sei-chan’s body, our own flesh and blood.” Nagano’s mother found a rice bowl in the ruins and scooped Sei-chan’s remains into it. “We had no cloth to wrap it in, no handkerchief to cover the top,” Nagano said, “so she held the rice bowl with my brother’s ashes close to her chest, one hand over the top, and stroked it, over and over, whispering my brother’s name and apologizing to him. She never put his ashes down, even inside the air raid shelter. That’s how it was for us. There are really no words for the sadness I felt.”
____
Over the next five days, thousands of people walked to the homes, schools, and workplaces they guessed, or hoped, their children, parents, and siblings might have been at the time of the blast. Many used bridges and the ruins of Urakami Church and Nagasaki Medical College to try to gauge distance as they searched for the sites of their destroyed houses; in some cases, families identified their former homes by a cement sink, stove, or iron bathtub. The fact that many victims had been transported out of the city caused even more confusion for their families, who had no clue about where to look for them. Some people left handwritten notices on trees to explain who they were looking for and where to reach them if their loved one was found. Others searched inside darkened air raid shelters, striking matches and putting them close to the faces of the people on the ground. One man identified his wife’s skull by the shape of the teeth. In a school yard, a ten-year-old girl searching for her mother heard the ticking of wristwatches as she passed mostly naked, engorged bodies. Many people could not help but think about their last moments with their loved ones—the boy whose older brother had asked to borrow his watch that morning, a wife handing her husband his hat before he left for work, a mother telling her children that she was preparing eggplant for their lunch. One mother kept her front door unlocked every night in case her son came home.
Still, some people found their family members alive, and friends grabbed one another and rejoiced when they crossed paths. One unconscious eighteen-year-old girl had been carried out of the city and left for dead in a pile of corpses. Two days later, an old woman passing by noticed her foot moving. The woman called some men over, and after determining that the girl was still alive, they transported her twenty-five miles to a hospital. She woke up the next morning to find her whole body bandaged and breathing tubes in her nose and mouth. She was able to later return to her family in Nagasaki. In another miraculous reunion, an injured young girl had been transported by train to a relief station in a town called Togitsu, where a man told her that he was going to Nagasaki and asked if he could tell anyone that she was there. “Please tell Araki Shizue, my fath
er’s younger sister, living at twenty-one Maruyama-machi, that Kyuma Hisako is here,” the girl said. The next day, as she lay on the ground in the relief station, the girl heard a voice in the room say, “Where is Hisako?” It was her father, who had already cremated what he thought were his daughter’s remains.
For two days, Taniguchi’s grandfather had combed the ruins for his grandson. On the morning after the bombing, Taniguchi had awakened facedown on the hilltop in Sumiyoshi-machi where workers had placed him the day before. His back and arms were completely burned, but he still felt no pain. Raising his head, he glanced around to see corpses surrounding him. The area was completely silent.
Desperate for something to eat and drink, Taniguchi spotted a half-demolished farmhouse below him. He grabbed on to the branches of the bamboo tree beside him and tried to pull himself up, but he fell back and was stabbed in the thigh by a branch. Determined, Taniguchi wriggled his body out of the bushes and down the hill, found a container of water, gulped down nearly a half gallon, and crawled under a tree for shade. A rescue team passed, but Taniguchi was too weak to call out to them. They continued on—perhaps presuming he was dead.
Taniguchi spent another night alone in the hills, and on the morning of August 11, another rescue team passed by. One of the men nudged Taniguchi with his boot; although barely breathing, he was still alive. The men carried him on a wooden door to Michino-o Station, where he ate some rice, the first food he’d eaten in two days. Reaching into his pocket, Taniguchi pulled out some of the letters he had intended to deliver on the day of the bomb and handed them to the relief team, asking if they could take them to the post office.
That afternoon, Taniguchi was lying on his stomach, waiting for a train to come to evacuate him from the city, when his grandfather finally found him. They rode together to Isahaya, about sixteen miles outside Nagasaki. Inside Isahaya Elementary School, volunteers placed Taniguchi facedown on top of a straw mat on the wooden floor. With no medicines available to treat the gravity of his burns, Taniguchi lay in this position for nearly a week as the flesh on his back began to rot and fall away. It was here, Taniguchi remembered, that pain first surged through his body and his wounds began to bleed.
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