The people of Nagasaki were shattered by death, illness, and the practical needs of survival, leaving little room for resistance or even anger toward the soldiers their government had called the “American devils.” Many heeded official warnings to stay out of sight and avoid contact with the American soldiers, but even on the day the troops arrived, some stood at the sides of roads and pathways through the ruins and quietly watched as the Americans passed by. Over the weeks and months to come, some even dared to hope that their lives would now improve.
The occupation troops did not turn out to be violent and cruel as the Japanese people had been indoctrinated to believe. Before their arrival, many soldiers had been briefed in Japanese courtesy, as well as geography, culture, and basic language skills. Children, in particular, were enamored with the American soldiers, who played hopscotch and catch with them, and offered them chewing gum, chocolate, and milk, exotic treats that were otherwise unattainable in the months after the war’s end. It was common to hear children speak to the troops with simple English words like “hello,” “thank you,” “good morning,” and “please”—and their happy and safe interactions with the American soldiers quickly softened the worries of many adults. In turn, some U.S. soldiers took Japanese lessons from Nagasaki children and walked around the city greeting people with simple words like ohayo (good morning). A young deaf Japanese man was able to communicate with some of the soldiers using simple sign language. “I will never forget the destruction caused by the atomic bomb,” he remembered, “but I have no grudge against those soldiers. They were kind and good.”
Of the more than 450,000 occupation troops that would enter Japan, approximately 27,000 from the 6th U.S. Army were assigned to Nagasaki. Their first step was to “secure the surrender”—that is, “to establish control of the area, ensure compliance with surrender terms, and demilitarize the Japanese war machine.” They set up command posts in the Customs House on Dejima Wharf and other locations east and west of the harbor. Others established a division hospital and billets close by and maintained additional occupation facilities throughout the city. Next, they seized Nagasaki military installations, weapons inventories, communications equipment, and building supplies, all of which were destroyed, used for occupation operations, or turned over to the Japanese Home Ministry for governmental reuse. U.S. troops replaced Japanese military guards and became the policing authority across the region.
The lower Urakami Valley, looking north, fall 1945. Here are the ruins of the Mitsubishi Mori-machi factory. (Photograph by Joe O’Donnell/Japan 1945, Vanderbilt University Press, 2005)
Not everyone in Nagasaki was happy with the U.S. occupiers. Dr. Akizuki mourned the loss of his country’s sovereignty and felt that Japan had “finally become one of the United States of America.” Others, angry and embittered about the atomic bombing, found it hard to accept soldiers from their former enemy nation that had delivered the bomb. “The universal horror experienced by those living in the atom-bombed areas could not be shaken off by even the promise of peace,” fifteen-year-old Hattori Michie remembered. “We knew war is appalling and has few rules, but what the enemy did to our innocent civilians on a mass scale we felt to be outside the purview of a civilized nation’s warfare.”
A small number of soldiers committed minor cultural infractions, such as wearing shoes while inside a tatami room. Other actions, however, were extremely offensive, including evicting Japanese residents from their Western-style homes in southern Nagasaki for use as private homes for American officers, and taking over other buildings as well for occupation offices and barracks. Another conspicuous act of insensitivity came that winter when two well-fed and healthy units of the 2nd Marine Division pitted themselves against each other in a New Year’s Day football game. At a time when Nagasaki students and teachers found it almost unbearable to study and work in school buildings where so many of their friends and colleagues had died, occupation leaders chose “Atomic Athletic Field No. 2” for the game—the athletic field of a former Nagasaki high school now designated for occupation troops’ use. It was here, five months earlier, that hundreds of adults and children had been laid in rows, wounded and dying. Yoshida was among them; his parents had found him here on the day after the bombing, his face scorched and his eyes swollen shut. To prepare for the event, U.S. soldiers used scrap wood to construct goalposts and bleachers. On game day, spurred on by a marine band, thousands of occupation troops gathered to watch the teams battle for victory. Fragments of glass from the school’s shattered windows still covered the field, so tackling was replaced by a two-hand touch. The Americans called the game the Atom Bowl.
Perhaps the Americans’ most egregious activities took place in the Urakami Valley. Although General Groves and others had repeatedly denied that dangerous residual radiation was present in Nagasaki, the hypocenter area was cordoned off and U.S. troops were ordered not to enter the area. What that meant, however, was that “everybody and his brother headed directly for ground zero,” one soldier remembered. Looting for atomic keepsakes was strictly forbidden and punishable by court-martial, but some soldiers rifled through the ruins for anything they could find that they could bring home as war trophies. Moreover, when American troops built an airstrip in the northwest corner of the valley— nicknamed Atomic Field—they used bulldozers to clear the ruins, crushing human bones scattered in the debris. “There were still many dead under the rubbish,” fifteen-year-old Uchida Tsukasa remembered. “Despite that, the Americans drove their bulldozers very fast, treating the bones of the dead just the same as sand or soil. They carried the soil to lower places and used it to broaden roads there.” Hayashi Shigeo, a prodigious photographer dispatched by Tokyo’s Ministry of Education, was threatened at gunpoint by a U.S. military police officer when he tried to take a photograph of an American bulldozer dropping victims’ bodies into a ditch. In both incidents, people who lived in the area, and those whose family members’ bones were buried in the debris, could only stand by, outraged and helpless.
No one, however, begrudged the American government—along with the International Red Cross and American Red Cross organizations—for providing desperately needed medical support to Nagasaki’s hospitals and clinics. To help stabilize the nation, prevent civil unrest, and protect U.S. troops, one of the occupation’s goals was to curb widespread illness and death from the communicable diseases that were rampant across the country. In Nagasaki, this meant restoring the system of collecting night soil (human feces) using two occupation trucks and a group of forty Japanese workers. Doctors received deliveries of penicillin and other medications otherwise not available in Japan, allowing them to not only treat patients with infectious diseases such as dysentery, smallpox, and typhoid fever but also prescribe antibiotics for survivors with compromised immune systems and infections connected to radiation-related conditions. Under the leadership of Captain Herbert Horne, in charge of occupation medical services in Nagasaki, the temporary hospital inside Shinkozen Elementary School was designated the official hospital for atomic bomb victims under the affiliation of Nagasaki Medical College. Dr. Shirabe was appointed the hospital’s director. To help with Nagasaki’s crushingly scant medical services, Horne also oversaw the opening of a 103-bed hospital and outpatient clinic in an undamaged Japanese army hospital, furnished with beds, equipment, and supplies salvaged from the ruins of Nagasaki Medical College and brought in from Omura National Hospital (formerly Omura Naval Hospital). Within the first two weeks of operation in late 1945, an estimated eight hundred patients were treated.
• • •
The Wartime Casualties Care Law that had provided financial and physical support to Japanese civilians injured in the war expired in October, forcing every Nagasaki family to pay for their own medical expenses. Consequently, many people suffering from radiation illness and extreme injury—including Do-oh, Yoshida, and Taniguchi—were cared for at home without any medication or time frame for recovery. Do-oh h
ad pulled back from the edge of death, and every day her father and other family members or neighbors carried her on a stretcher to Dr. Miyajima’s home, where he continued treating her even after he closed the temporary relief station at his house. But Do-oh was still bald and her wounds were not healing. Day after day, she lay secluded in a room in her family’s home except when her parents came in to care for her. Mornings were particularly hard; when her father removed the gauze from the three-inch gash in her arm, the skin peeled off with it. He regularly reset the broken bone in her arm so it wouldn’t heal in the wrong position.
U.S. occupation troops level the atomic ruins, fall 1945. (Photograph by Tomishige Yasuo/Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images)
Yoshida’s mother cared for him day and night as he lay unconscious, enveloped in the smells of his own decaying flesh and the burning bodies being cremated at the temple next door. His mother laid out a futon in the family’s tatami room and placed newspapers and a kind of waxed paper on top of it to protect the bedding from the pus constantly oozing out of the burns on her son’s face and body. Yoshida lay on top of that, and his mother hung mosquito netting to protect him from flies. Even with her caution, however, flies landed on her while she was outside the netting, and she inadvertently carried the flies to her son when she tended to him. The flies laid eggs all over Yoshida’s burned body. His mother tried removing them with chopsticks, but the eggs were too small, so she heated a pair of scissors and scraped out the eggs and the maggots that were crawling in his wounds. Even though he was unconscious, his mother remembered that Yoshida would scream out in pain. “It’s because of my mother that I am alive,” Yoshida said. “She never slept, and any food she had she gave to me. My face was so badly burned that I couldn’t open my mouth, so my mother used a chopstick to feed me. ‘Kuu, kuu,’ she said softly, to encourage me to eat.”
The Urakami Valley, looking south, fall 1945. The cleared area at the lower right is the airstrip built by U.S. occupation forces, nicknamed “Atomic Field.” (Photograph by Joe O’Donnell/Japan 1945, Vanderbilt University Press, 2005)
Sometime in the early winter after Shinkozen was officially taken over by Nagasaki Medical College, Yoshida was brought there in a medical rescue vehicle. Despite U.S. donations, medicines and supplies were scarce inside the partially destroyed school. Helmets were used to carry water to patients lying close together on tatami mats on the floor. Medical staff and volunteers flushed patients’ wounds with salt water—hauling it not from Nagasaki Bay, which they feared was contaminated by radioactivity and decomposing bodies, but from another bay on the other side of the mountains west of the city. Before and after the war, bedside care in Japan was provided by family members who attended to basic needs such as food, tea, and heavier blankets as the weather demanded. Every day, Yoshida’s mother or father sat beside him, watching as dead bodies were carried out of the hospital, terrified that their son, too, would die.
Taniguchi was already at Shinkozen. In the weeks after the bombing, he had been shuffled from one relief station to another in villages outside Nagasaki, but all doctors could do was apply oil mixed with ashes on his massive burns. In early September, his grandfather and others had transported Taniguchi in a three-wheeled wooden cart over more than six miles of unpaved roads to Shinkozen. For the first time since the bombing, he had received bedding—a futon on top of a tatami mat—and a slightly elevated level of medical care. He was given blood transfusions, penicillin injections, raw cow liver, and persimmon tea, but none of these made a substantial impact on his healing.
Sergeant Joe O’Donnell, a young American marine photographer, arrived at Shinkozen on September 15 and documented Taniguchi’s whole-body burns. O’Donnell was in Nagasaki as part of a seven-month tour of Japan to photograph the impact of U.S. bombings, and he spent weeks wandering the streets. Every roll of black-and-white film that he snapped for the Marine Corps was sent to Pearl Harbor to be developed and then forwarded to Washington; he also carried a second camera to capture images he wanted to keep for himself, developing them in a makeshift darkroom he set up in his barracks.
At Shinkozen, Taniguchi was lying on his side as O’Donnell photographed his emaciated body and the still-acute burns on his back, buttocks, and part of his left arm. “I waved the flies away with a handkerchief,” O’Donnell remembered, “then carefully brushed out the maggots, careful not to touch the boy’s skin with my hand. The smell made me sick and my heart ached for his suffering, particularly because he was so young. I decided then that I would not take other pictures of burned victims unless ordered to do so.” His photograph of Taniguchi was one of three hundred personal images he developed in Nagasaki and hid from U.S. officials in order to safely carry them out of Japan.
Classroom inside the temporary relief hospital at Shinkozen Elementary School, partially damaged in the bombing. Patients lay on the floor on top of futons and mats, and volunteer medical personnel from outside the city joined surviving Nagasaki physicians and nurses to treat them. (Photograph by Ogawa Torahiko/Courtesy of Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum)
Six weeks later, doctors decided to transfer Taniguchi to Omura National Hospital, twenty-two miles (by road) north of the city. His nurses at Shinkozen had constantly soaked up the pus and decayed flesh that pooled around his body each day, but when they lifted Taniguchi off his tatami mat, both the mat and wooden floor beneath it had rotted, leaving a black hole about twenty inches in diameter where he had lain. Taniguchi’s chest was covered with holes caused by infected bedsores that he had developed from lying on his stomach for so long. It was almost three months after the bombing when he arrived at Omura and finally received the best medical care available in the area. Yoshida was transferred to the same hospital that December, where he regained consciousness. He lay on a bed next to Taniguchi, though they would not meet until years later.
The severely burned back of Taniguchi Sumiteru, Shinkozen relief hospital, September 15, 1945. (Photograph by Joe O’Donnell/Japan 1945, Vanderbilt University Press, 2005)
• • •
In the three months following the bombing, reconstruction efforts were slow, even with occupation support, in part because deaths and evacuations had reduced Nagasaki’s population to 140,000, nearly half of its prebomb figure. Radiation-related illnesses and deaths had dropped off, but cremation pyres still burned for the bodies found beneath crushed buildings and layers of rubble. Many who remained in the city were either too maimed or ill to support the city’s rebuilding efforts, and after years of wartime hardship and loss, countless other survivors were overpowered by kyodatsu—a condition of profound hopelessness, despair, and exhaustion. More than twenty thousand residential and industrial buildings in the city had been totally or partially destroyed, the city’s administrative functions and infrastructure were not yet operational, and food was still scarce, resulting in widespread malnutrition.
Still, even in these early days, Nagasaki had begun to rebuild. That fall, electricity was slowly restored to homes that had withstood the blast, and even some families living in huts eventually received access to electricity and a single lightbulb. The long dirt roads through the Urakami Valley were cleared, the debris raked and shoveled to the sides of the roads like snow. Construction began on 332 emergency housing units on the east side of the Urakami River, just north of where Nagano had lived. Groups of survivors created grassroots associations to coordinate ongoing relief efforts for others.
Workers prepare to tile the roof of a temporary housing unit in the Urakami Valley, 1946. Visible behind the new houses are the steel skeletons of Mitsubishi factories. The ruins of Fuchi Elementary School stand on the hillside to the right. (Photograph by Yamahata Yosuke/Courtesy of Yamahata Shogo)
The most severely damaged schools could not hold classes inside their skeletal buildings, but in early October, small teams of surviving administrators and teachers organized groups of as few as fif
teen students and held rudimentary classes in stairwells and school yards surrounded by ashes and bones. Some were able to resume classes inside functional school buildings or local temples. In one case, elementary school students and teachers made room for their classes by moving torpedoes out of a building formerly used as a temporary weapons factory.
The return to school was a stabilizing activity, though not necessarily a happy one. Countless students had lost one or both parents, and some came to class with their bald heads covered with pieces of cloth. “They seemed to spend their school life cheering one another up,” one teacher remembered. Some colleges reopened as well, but there were no textbooks and little food, and as the weather cooled, students wrapped themselves in blankets to study. Schools began the process of creating registries to account for their deceased students and teachers; at Yamazato Elementary School alone, twenty-six of thirty teachers and administrators had been killed, and more than a thousand children had died. The registry at Do-oh’s school listed her as deceased, an easy error because no one at the school had seen her since the day of the bomb.
Nagasaki Page 15