Nagasaki

by Susan Southard

  • • •

  Wada had stayed in the razed city to help with rescue efforts and to search for his friend Tanaka and the other eleven student streetcar operators who had never been found. Numbed to the grotesque scenes before their eyes, Wada and his friends traced their colleagues’ streetcar routes; eventually they found two of their bodies and carried them to their families’ homes. In one derailed streetcar, they found an unidentifiable body of a driver whose hands still gripped the brake handle.

  Seventeen-year-old Tanaka, however, could not be found. “He was a year younger than I was and extremely cheerful,” Wada remembered. “We were very close, so he was the person I worried about the most.” Late on the night of August 12, Wada was resting against a wall of the terminal when he looked up and saw Tanaka’s mother standing next to him. She told Wada that her son had come home. Wada quickly accompanied her back to Tanaka’s house, about five minutes away. As they walked, Tanaka’s mother told Wada where her son had been at the time of the bomb—about three-quarters of a mile from the hypocenter. He had been severely burned, she said, and it had taken him three days to get home, a walk that would have normally taken forty minutes. “I think in his heart he was trying to get back to his mother,” Wada said. “Since Tanaka’s father died in the war, he was the only child of a single mother.”

  It was dark inside the Tanakas’ partially destroyed house. In the front entryway, what looked like a body was lying on a single tatami mat. Mrs. Tanaka gave Wada a candle, which he used to light his way toward the body. At closer glance, the figure didn’t look human, and it wasn’t until Wada was right next to the body that he recognized his friend’s face.

  Something was stuck on Tanaka’s cheek. “Without even thinking,” Wada said, “I started to reach out to wipe it away—then suddenly I pulled my hand back.” Tanaka’s eyeball was hanging out of its socket. His other eye was completely crushed, and his mouth was split open all the way to his ear.

  “It was unbelievable to me that someone who looked like that could still be alive,” Wada remembered. “Then Tanaka said something that made a huge impression on me. ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he whispered, and then he stopped breathing. I took it to mean ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, so why do I have to die this way?’”

  By that time, some of the other mobilized students had arrived. Everyone stood around Tanaka’s body, not knowing what to do next. Finally, one boy suggested to Wada that they set up a funeral pyre and burn his body. “Now, it might have been the circumstances, or it might have been that everyone was in such deep shock, but nobody thought the idea was in the least bit strange,” Wada remembered. They carried Tanaka’s body outside to an area just below a reservoir, collected scraps of wood from destroyed houses nearby and piled them high, then lifted Tanaka’s disfigured body on top of the wood.

  No one could bring themselves to light the fire. Wada desperately did not want to do it, but as the student leader, he felt that it was up to him. He struck the match, touched the flame to Tanaka’s body, then lit different sections of the woodpile. Starting small, the flames gradually spread and grew until Tanaka’s body was engulfed. For nearly twelve hours, Wada and his friends stood ten feet away, watching until all of the body was burned. No one cried. “We were in a state beyond grief or pity,” Wada recalled. “Actually, I couldn’t tell you what kind of state we were in.”

  ____

  Change came quickly for the Allied POW survivors in Nagasaki’s two camps, providing early hints at the transition that would soon come. Just a mile south of the hypocenter at the destroyed Fukuoka POW Camp No. 14, eight Allied prisoners ultimately died from the bombing, and an estimated forty more were injured. While camping out in the smoldering ruins, prisoners had cared for their wounded and constructed a temporary shelter with a tin roof to protect the seriously injured from the sun. On August 12, they were marched three hours through the destroyed city to the small village of Tomachi, two and a half miles south of Nagasaki on the eastern side of the bay, to the vacated barracks of a Mitsubishi factory. The facility had better beds, plenty of fresh water, and more bandages and medicine for the injured men. At Nagasaki’s second POW camp at the Kawanami Shipyard in Nagasaki Bay, prisoners had continued their daily routines, including waking up to reveille, delousing, eating their small rations of rice, and marching to and from the shipyard to work. On August 13, however, they received a luxurious half can of brine-cured beef for dinner, and the camp commander announced that there would be no work for the next three days. Cut off from all contact with the outside world, the POWs at both camps couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on, but with these improvements, they felt hopeful.

  For the average person in Nagasaki, however, each day in the week after the bombing pulsated with relentless suffering, panic, and death. The streets were filled with people leaving the city out of fear of another bombing, to try to reach relatives outside Nagasaki, or to get to a hospital in another part of Kyushu. Some, like Do-oh and Yoshida, lay severely injured, burned, and unconscious in their homes in the far corners of the city or in Nishiyama-machi, far from the hypocenter.

  They were the fortunate ones, some would say—safe in their homes, surrounded by their families. In the gray, atomized Urakami Valley, thousands struggled to survive without housing or adequate food, water, sanitation, medicine, or any way to comprehend what had happened to them, their neighborhoods, and their city. Tiny, barefoot children squatted in the ruins and wandered through the debris and corpses, calling out for their mothers and fathers. One woman whose husband had died and who would soon lose her four daughters and four-year-old son, came to understand that when one of her children stopped asking for water, it meant that she or he had died. One family peeled cucumbers and placed the skins on their son’s burned back, an unsuccessful attempt to ease his pain. A fourteen-year-old girl spread mud over her mother’s burns, but when the mud dried, it cracked and caused more pain. Numerous women miscarried or gave birth to stillborn babies. Maggots crawled in people’s eyes, mouths, noses, ears, and every open wound; those who were too injured to move their arms and hands tried to wriggle their bodies to get them off. Numb to the horror all around, people began cracking death jokes, saying how great it would be if the swollen faces of corpses—which looked a little like watermelons—actually were watermelons that they could eat.

  Many lived in the dark holes beneath or behind their former homes. Others, like Nagano and her family, stayed in air raid shelters, soaked by constantly dripping water; one family of eight took turns sleeping on a single tatami mat, four on, four off. Some slept beneath scraps of wood or metal leaned against tree stumps like tents as primitive protection from the sun. It was hard for any of them to imagine how they would survive. Those who could walk scavenged the ruins for food and scoured the rubble of their homes for fragments of clothing and undergarments; melted glass shards; roof tiles, cooking utensils, and hand mirrors; partially burned tatami mats and bedding; and seared books, letters, and photos. Most got little or no sleep at night, surrounded by the crackling of cremation fires and the sounds of people crying, moaning, calling out for help, or mumbling nonsensically. Parents held the bodies or ashes of their dead children, whispering, “Forgive me! Please forgive me!”

  Huge deliveries of food continued to arrive from areas outside the city—mostly tubs full of onigiri, which often spoiled in the summer heat before they could be distributed. Later, canned food—including beef and seaweed—was also delivered. Survivors who had reached the sites of their former homes dug up emergency provisions they had stashed underground during the war—including canned milk, diapers, rice, salt, seaweed, tea, dried tofu, dried squid, pickled plums, and matches. Neighbors shared food and cared for infants, children, and injured adults whom they had never met. Still, hunger was rampant. Some people chewed on raw potatoes they dug up in scorched vegetable patches.

  Christian families buried their dead. “It was a lonely funeral,”
one woman said, remembering how she and her sister buried the ashes of their mother, “with just the two of us, huddled together and flattening ourselves on the ground every time a plane passed over.” Day after day, Dr. Akizuki watched one of his neighbors walk to a hillside cemetery with a hoe over his shoulder to dig graves first for the man’s father, then his five children, and then his mother, all who died one after the other.

  In keeping with Japan’s Buddhist tradition—and because of the overwhelming number of corpses—cremation fires continued to burn at all times of day and night, curls of smoke rising into the sky. Adults and children stared with hollowed eyes as the flesh of their loved ones dripped down into the flames, then placed the ashes in rice cracker cans, burned pots, scraps of cloth, or newspaper. Relief workers and Allied POWs carried the bodies of strangers to the fires and burned them, twenty or more at a time, hundreds each day—and still, thousands of corpses remained scattered in the ruins. A group of student workers poured gasoline over the bodies and conducted a mass cremation of their friends who had been inside the Mitsubishi Electric division dormitories at the time of the bombing. Families of missing people scooped ashes or picked up a single bone from cremation sites near their loved ones’ former homes or work sites to have something to hold on to.

  A grim, pervasive smell penetrated the city. An emergency relief physician likened the sickening stench of burned flesh to “the smell of scorched chicken meat.” Others described layers of stench—from bloated bodies in the river, people and animals lying dead in the ruins, the strong odor of medical ointments applied to people’s burns, survivors’ unbathed bodies in the hot summer with no breeze, and urine and excrement from tens of thousands who were too injured to move. “We couldn’t eat,” Nagano remembered. “Even though we received rations of onigiri, for a long time we couldn’t eat them because of the smells all around us.”

  • • •

  By August 14, five days after the bombing, 2,500 volunteers and military staff members joined Nagasaki’s nearly 3,000 emergency personnel—including police, fire department, civil defense, and rescue teams; Mitsubishi crews; and student workers—to help stabilize city operations. Electricity was restored to all neighborhoods except those completely annihilated by the bomb, though the city maintained a nighttime blackout as a defensive measure against additional attacks. Workers scrambled to repair the thousands of breaks in the main lines and residential feeder lines to restore water access. Although the station house itself was destroyed, the tracks at Nagasaki Station were restored enough to allow train service all the way into and out of the city. Using only rakes, shovels, and their hands to push the debris aside, workers cleared the long stretch of the main north-south road, creating the only usable road in the Urakami Valley. The resumption of streetcar service within the city would take much longer.

  Ongoing medical support remained an urgent problem. Only about three hundred relief workers were dedicated solely to medical care in Nagasaki’s two working hospitals, the Japanese Red Cross clinic, and the twenty-six other emergency relief stations throughout the city. One Nagasaki school was designated an infectious disease “hospital” for the many people being diagnosed with dysentery, a huge concern among medical professionals and city leaders because of its highly contagious nature. An estimated ten hospitals and more than fifty temporary triage sites outside the city—and even outside Nagasaki Prefecture—took in an estimated ten thousand to twelve thousand victims, large numbers of whom died after arrival. Volunteers made their way to these and other distant hospitals to bring back small batches of gauze, bandages, painkillers, antiseptic and disinfectant lotions, sesame oil, zinc oxide powder, and iodine tincture.

  One of the largest relief stations was set up in Shinkozen Elementary School, a three-story concrete building with shattered windows and other minor damages, situated south of Nagasaki Station and east of the bay, 1.8 miles from the hypocenter. As the news spread that doctors were available there, hundreds gathered outside the school hoping to receive help. Inside, every classroom on every floor was full: four rows per classroom, fifteen people per row, the feet of those in one row touching the heads of those in the next. Each room was enveloped in the smell of burned flesh, urine, feces, and patients’ vomit. Maggots hatched in every open wound. Volunteers carried seawater from Nagasaki Bay, boiled it in large oil drums, and sprinkled it over patients using watering cans. Three classrooms on the first floor were set up as operating rooms. Dr. Miake Kenji from the Sasebo Naval Hospital conducted surgeries in one of the rooms. “Most of the patients had suffered terrible burns all over their bodies,” he recalled. “Many had limbs missing or entrails hanging out. We performed amputations and stump formations and sewed up bellies, but all of the people who came across the operating tables died without even being identified.” The bodies of the dead were carried out and burned so quickly that no one could keep count or record their names.

  At First Urakami Hospital, Dr. Akizuki and his staff found a desk and chair inside the burned-out building, moved it to the hospital yard, and draped a large cloth over bamboo poles to serve as a makeshift examination room. Each morning began as the one before: Firefighters and volunteers carried more injured into the area and placed them wherever they could find space, then heaved away the bodies of people who had died overnight for cremation. Hospital patients with milder cases of tuberculosis joined in the relief efforts, but the small medical team’s workload never ended.

  Among those who lay on the ground waiting for help were some twenty or more young nuns from an orphanage run by the Convent of the Holy Cross and a large number of male students from Nagasaki Medical College. At eleven a.m. and five p.m., nurses distributed boiled rice, soup made from pumpkins or seaweed, and slices of boiled squash to over two hundred people. The outside well had been destroyed, so staff rationed the water from a smaller well inside the hospital. As families came to claim their relatives, more people appeared begging for help. New supplies arrived sporadically. Trapped and completely unprotected from what they thought was another attack, patients screamed and moaned every time enemy planes flew over the city. Many of the injured were members of Urakami Church; they prayed constantly, uttering in hushed voices, “Hail, Mary” or “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, please pray for us.” One little boy was baptized before he died. Mostly, hundreds of people lay on the ground with dazed expressions that asked, “What is to become of us?”

  Like Do-oh’s doctor had done on the night of the bombing, Dr. Akizuki used pincers to painstakingly extract deeply embedded glass fragments and a sterilized needle and thread to stich wounds. Whenever supplies allowed, he applied oil, zinc oxide ointment, Mercurochrome, iodine, and bandages to massive burns and injuries. But each patient took time, and for every patient he treated, two hundred more were calling out to him for help. From the moment he awoke until the time he collapsed for a few hours’ sleep, Akizuki felt overwhelmed, depressed, and helpless. He silently cursed the war, the Japanese government that had caused so much suffering, and the United States for dropping the bomb.

  On the evening of August 11, someone gave Dr. Akizuki a copy of the Asahi Shimbun, and for the first time since the bombing, he glanced through the newspaper and briefly reconnected to the outside world. By candlelight, he read an article issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs that ostensibly informed readers about the “new-type bomb” and about how to protect themselves in the event of such an attack. The article suggested that people find an air raid shelter with a roof, or if that wasn’t possible, wrap themselves in a blanket or layers of clothes, and turn off anything at home that could cause a fire.

  Akizuki’s head spun. Unaware that the Japanese media was prohibited from announcing the true effects of the bombs, he could barely contain his rage. “What was the use of a blanket or some clothing when everything would be burnt or charred in the brilliant heat of thousands of degrees centigrade?” he thought. “What opportunity did we have to go outside after putting out our
kitchen fires when, in an instant, tens of thousands of homes became tinder-dry and burst into flames?” But there were hundreds of patients waiting for him, so Dr. Akizuki set down the newspaper and returned to the yard to treat them while one of his tuberculosis patients held up a candle for him to see. At eleven p.m. the next night, his hands stiff from long hours of extractions and medical care, Akizuki stopped his work, lay down on the ground, pulled a blanket over his head, and cried.

  Aerial views of the Urakami Valley taken on August 7, 1945, by U.S. Army Air Forces two days before the bombing (above), and three days after the bombing on August 12, 1945 (below). The Urakami River runs through both photos from north to south (top to bottom). At center is the Mitsubishi Athletic Field. In the bottom photo, 16 is Shiroyama Elementary School; 17 (far right) is the Nagasaki Medical College; 18 is Chinzei Middle School; and 20 (bottom right) is the Nagasaki Medical College Hospital. (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey/Courtesy of Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum)

  ____

  The end of the war would not come without more delays and major resistance in Tokyo. Although the emperor had made the decision to surrender on the evening of August 9—fourteen hours after the bombing—tension between military and peace factions intensified in the days that followed, complicating the Japanese Cabinet’s required unanimous backing of its nation’s capitulation.

  On August 12, the Cabinet met to discuss the United States’ response to Japan’s surrender offer. To satisfy Japan’s foremost concern, U.S. secretary of state James Byrnes had drafted purposefully ambiguous language about the future of the emperor’s role, while carefully maintaining the perception that the United States was remaining steadfast in its commitment to unconditional surrender. But two key sections of the U.S. response would cause continued upheaval at the highest level of the Japanese government and postpone Japan’s final surrender. The first stated that “from the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers.” The second asserted that “the ultimate form of the Government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”