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.

____

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.”

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.”

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 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.”

 • • • 

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 father’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.

 • • • 

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.

____

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.”

Conservative Japanese Cabinet members and military leaders fervently sought to reject the U.S. conditions because they did not adequately protect the emperor’s role as sovereign ruler; these men feared that the U.S. surrender terms threatened kokutai and that Japan could be destroyed for good. They held out hope that the emperor would reverse his decision and allow the Japanese military to fight—even at the risk of its own destruction—for Japan’s existence as an independent nation ruled by the emperor. In fact, some junior military officers—having concluded that the emperor had been manipulated into surrender and that capitulation would desecrate his dignity and turn Japan into a slave nation—were already plotting coups to topple the national government.

Other Cabinet members found the U.S. counteroffer acceptable and argued that the Cabinet should follow the emperor’s August 9 surrender decision without question. They believed that Japan as a nation could be totally destroyed if it stayed in the war, and that the country had at least some chance of survival if it surrendered. After hours of debate, the Cabinet was still deadlocked, and heated arguments extended into the evening of August 12 and through the next day.

On the morning of August 14, the emperor gathered his Cabinet ministers in the imperial underground shelter. Again, he broke the stalemate and announced his decision to accept the Allies’ terms of surrender, stating that he believed Japan’s kokutai would not be lost under Allied occupation and that he could not bear to see his people suffer any longer. The emperor requested that every Cabinet member “bow to my wishes and accept the Allied reply forthwith.” Again, the ministers clung to one another and sobbed. By eleven p.m. that night, the emperor and Cabinet had signed the final surrender papers, and an imperial rescript was prepared for the emperor to record for radio broadcast to the nation the next day. To maintain order, Army Minister Anami called for the military’s complete support of the emperor’s decision. Attempts by low-ranking officers to take over the palace and block the emperor’s surrender announcement ultimately failed.

In the meantime, the war had raged on. Russian troops had continued to push back Japanese soldiers in Manchuria and on Sakhalin Island north of Japan. Allied planes had delivered more conventional and incendiary bombs on military, industrial, and key urban areas on Japan’s main islands. Before President Truman received Tokyo’s response, he ordered additional attacks on Japan. On August 14, just as Washington received word of Japan’s acceptance of the Allied terms, Truman’s orders were implemented: Approximately 740 B-29s dropped bombs on specific targets, and an estimated 160 more delivered over 12 million pounds of demolition and incendiary bombs on multiple urban areas, causing the deaths of thousands more Japanese.

At seven p.m. on August 14 in Washington (eight a.m. Japan time on August 15), President Truman held a press conference to announce the end of the war. The room was packed with White House correspondents and current and former Cabinet members. Two million people jammed New York City’s Times Square, and millions of others crowded into city centers across the country to celebrate the long-awaited conclusion to the nearly four-year global war that had claimed fifty to seventy million lives across the world. All Allied armed forces were ordered to suspend their military operations against Japan.

The people in Japan, however, did not yet know that their country had surrendered. At 7:21 a.m. that morning, Tateno Morio at NHK Radio made a special announcement directed to all Japanese citizens, telling them that at noon that day, the emperor would broadcast a special rescript. Outside the emperor’s close circle of family and government leaders, no citizen had ever heard the emperor’s voice, and from house to house across the country, word spread that the emperor would address the nation. Rumors grew about what he would say: Some thought he would announce Japan’s surrender, but many believed that he would rally the nation for greater support of the war and ask his subjects to be prepared to give their own lives for Japan’s honor.

At noon, millions of people in neighborhoods across Japan huddled around single radios to hear the emperor’s prerecorded announcement. At army headquarters, hundreds of officers stood at attention in their dress uniforms. Japanese soldiers at military bases throughout the Pacific waited by their radios for the news. The emperor himself listened on an old RCA radio in his underground shelter in Tokyo.

Japan’s national anthem, “Kimigayo,” played over the airwaves, then the emperor’s quiet, stilted voice could be heard. Static splintered his words, and much of the ornamental language he used was difficult to comprehend. Some listeners remembered hearing the word chin—a term reserved only for the emperor’s use—confirming for them that they were indeed hearing the emperor’s voice. In his extended address, the emperor justified the attack on Pearl Harbor and referred to the United States’ use of “a new and most cruel bomb.” Without using the word “defeat,” he stated only that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” The emperor portrayed Japan’s surrender decision as a heroic and humane act—to prevent not only the “ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation,” but also the “total extinction of human civilization.” He implored the Japanese people to “suffer what is insufferable” with “sincerity and integrity.”

Reactions across Japan were swift, profound, and complex. Army officers in Tokyo wept. Others in the city and across the country cheered. A small group of people knelt in front of the imperial palace, bowing in respect to their emperor. Prime Minister Suzuki resigned. High-level officials frantically burned files that might incriminate them in war trials, and they destroyed or disbursed huge stores of food and supplies they had secretly and often illegally amassed for personal benefit. Soldiers at the Western Army Headquarters in Fukuoka blindfolded, handcuffed, and executed seventeen Allied POWs. Some Japanese officers would not concede that the war was over and rallied their men to join together to annihilate the enemy, but their emotional stirrings did not manifest into large-scale action. By August 17, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy had ceased all military actions except in some remote locations where the message of surrender had not yet been received.

Approximately 350 military personnel, including Army Minister Anami, expressed their sense of personal accountability for Japan’s defeat by committing seppuku, a ritual suicide by disembowelment using a short sword to slash one’s abdomen, formerly part of the samurai Bushido code of honor. Nearly 200 more officers and soldiers, and a few civilians, would kill themselves by October 1948.

Many citizens throughout the country, however, did not fully understand what the emperor had said and relied on radio announcers and special editions of newspapers to summarize and explain the emperor’s address in lay language. Surrender was an act previously forbidden to soldiers and considered traitorous for civilians even to think about—and when people realized that this was what the emperor had announced they clung to one another or collapsed to the ground, overwhelmed with conflicting emotions. They felt grief-stricken that their nation had lost the war, anguished about the extreme number of men sacrificed, and relieved that their suffering would end. They were also angry and confused at having been continuously lied to by their government, and many felt lost without the indoctrinated “divine” purpose that had united them for so many years. Thousands of families also felt grateful that their military sons and fathers would come home alive and hoped that they would not choose suicide over surrender as they’d been trained to do.

 • • • 

In Nagasaki, countless survivors remember exactly where they were when the surrender was announced. Many Catholics were observing the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, honoring her death and ascension into heaven. A mother searching for her daughter in Shiroyama-machi listened to the emperor’s broadcast in the shade of a house that had survived the bombing. When the surrender announcement ended, she stood silently and stared blankly at the vast nothingness all around, then started out again to find her child. One man had just gathered scraps of wood to cremate his wife’s body. Three of his young children had died in the bombing, and he had found his injured wife on a tatami mat in the middle of a field, the corpse of their infant son next to her. In the days that followed, as his wife had become weaker, she had begged him to suck the milk from her engorged breasts to relieve her pain. On the afternoon of August 15, as the man stood next to the makeshift funeral pyre and watched his wife’s body burn, he could hear the slow strains of the national anthem coming from a radio inside a house nearby. Outside Nagasaki, a fifteen-year-old girl sat in a hospital waiting room holding a still-warm urn filled with the ashes of her younger sister when an agitated military officer shouted, “Japan surrendered! We are defeated!”

Dr. Shirabe Raisuke, a professor of surgery at Nagasaki Medical College, was walking along a road when he first heard from local residents that the war had ended. Later that day, his badly injured older son, Seiichi, told Dr. Shirabe how much he detested the war, a sentiment that could never have been expressed before.

Dr. Akizuki had no radio, but he cried when he heard the news, not because his country had surrendered, but because the end of the war had come too late.

Taniguchi, Yoshida, and Do-oh knew nothing of the surrender that day. Wada listened on his father’s radio inside his damaged home. Although he couldn’t understand everything the emperor said, he was deeply relieved that Japan would finally have peace. Nagano’s experience most closely mirrored the reactions of many Nagasaki survivors. She and her parents were inside the air raid shelter when word of the emperor’s announcement spread through the city, from one person to the next. “Everyone who had survived was crying and hugging each other,” Nagano remembered. “‘Why?’ we asked. ‘After everything we did to try to win the war! What purpose did it serve? So many people died. So many homes have burned down. What will we do now? What will we do? What will we do?’”