CHAPTER 4

EXPOSED

From the day after Japan surrendered, rumors circulated across the country that American troops would soon land on Japan’s shores. Thousands of Japanese fled inland from coastal regions in fear of their enemy’s mistreatment of civilians. City officials in Nagasaki urged women to leave the city, and some nurses were released from duty so they could get away. Many families packed their valuables and as much food as they could carry, then escaped to the mountains.

Do-oh’s parents agreed that their family should retreat to the hills, but since Do-oh was too injured to join them, they decided that her father would stay behind to care for her. Her mother hastily packed onigiri, canteens of water, and a few changes of clothes for herself and her three youngest children. Before their departure, she and Do-oh’s father lifted Do-oh, lying on a futon on top of a stretcher, high above their heads and placed her between the ceiling and roof of their house. At night she could see her father below, lit by candlelight. Whenever he was out of sight, though, she felt terribly alone and terrified about what might happen next. She remained hidden in the rafters until her mother and siblings returned three days later, when the panic began to subside.

U.S. soldiers did not arrive that week, but for Do-oh, the unimaginable future she had feared was suddenly realized a few weeks later when she began to suffer a series of new and unexplainable symptoms: high fever, diarrhea, hair loss, inflammation of her gums, and mysterious purple spots all over her injured body. Dr. Miyajima, the retired military doctor who had treated Do-oh since the bombing, told her parents that she would live only a few more days. He suggested that they “feed her well and let her go.”

Do-oh’s parents would have liked to give their daughter rice, but they had none. Instead, they gave her tiny sweet potatoes they had planted near their house. Do-oh’s mouth was inflamed, so her mother steamed and mashed the potatoes and placed small bites into the deepest part of her daughter’s mouth, gently encouraging her to eat. Do-oh later learned that since there were no crematoria left in her area, her father had collected firewood and saved some kerosene to burn her body.

Isolated in her house, Do-oh had no idea that within a week after the bombing, thousands of others across Nagasaki and the surrounding region had begun to experience various combinations of symptoms similar to her own—high fever, dizziness, loss of appetite, nausea, headaches, diarrhea, bloody stools, nosebleeds, whole-body weakness, and fatigue. Their hair fell out in large clumps, their burns and wounds secreted extreme amounts of pus, and their gums swelled, became infected, and bled. Like Do-oh, they developed purple spots on their bodies—“at first about the size of a pinprick,” one doctor recalled, “but growing within a few days to the size of a grain of rice or a pea.” The spots were signs of hemorrhaging beneath the skin; they also appeared at medicinal injection sites, which became infected and did not heal. Infections in other parts of the body were rampant, too, including the large intestine, esophagus, bronchial passages, lungs, and uterus. Within a few days of the appearance of their initial symptoms, many people lost consciousness, mumbled deliriously, and died in extreme pain; others languished for weeks before either dying or slowly recovering. Even those who had suffered no external injuries fell sick and died. Some relief workers and victims’ family members who had come into the hypocenter area after the bombing also suffered serious illnesses.

Fear gripped the city. As the pattern of symptoms, illness, and death became clear, some people pulled on their hair every morning to see if their time had come. Believing the illness was contagious, many families turned away relatives and guests who were staying with them after the bombing, and some farmers outside Nagasaki refused food to hungry refugees from the city.

At first, Dr. Akizuki and other physicians suspected dysentery, cholera, or possibly some form of liver disease. Others believed the illness was due to poisonous gas released by the bomb. By August 15, however, when Japanese scientists had confirmed that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, physicians deduced that what appeared to be an epidemic killing their city was somehow related to radiation contamination. This discovery was helpful in ruling out contagious diseases and other conditions, but it did nothing to minimize the mystifying, confusing, and terrifying truth about the invisible power of the bomb. People died korokoro-korokoro—one after another. Dr. Akizuki likened the situation to the Black Death pandemic that devastated Europe in the 1300s. Observing the cremations taking place in his hospital yard, he wondered if his body, too, might soon be burned. “Life or death was a matter of chance, of fate, and the dividing line between the man being cremated and the doctor cremating him was slight.”

A second wave of radiation illnesses and deaths swept through the city in late August and early September. Dr. Akizuki and his whole staff came down with nausea, diarrhea, and fatigue, which, he remembered, “made me feel as if I had been beaten all over my body.”

Dr. Shirabe Raisuke, the professor of surgery at Nagasaki Medical College, became sick as he was simultaneously grieving the death of his older son, Seiichi, and searching for the remains of his younger son, Koji, a medical student who had been in class at the time of the bombing and never came home. Shirabe’s initial fatigue was so intense he could barely function, but in this condition, he, his wife, and three daughters walked to the ruins of the college to look once again for Koji’s ashes. Dr. Shirabe was tall, with dark skin and deep-set eyes that still could not comprehend the scenes of the college’s ruin. “Several hundred crows were flying in the sky overhead,” he remembered, “scouring the ground below for the flesh of the dead.” As Shirabe and his family picked through the debris, the doctor’s youngest daughter found a fragment of blue wool trousers that provided the final confirmation of his son’s death: Sewn into a belt loop was the name of Dr. Shirabe’s nephew, a reminder that before leaving Nagasaki for the war, his nephew had given the pants to Koji. Disconsolate, Shirabe and his family gathered ashes from the area where his son had died and carried them home.

A few days later, Dr. Shirabe collapsed. Small purple spots covered his body like those he had seen on his patients before they died. For weeks, he was so frail he could barely turn his head, and his days and nights were filled with anxiety over the future of his family. One day, however, a medical student came to visit and offered Dr. Shirabe a drink of nontoxic ethyl alcohol mixed with sugar water. Shirabe resisted at first but then took a few sips. “This tasted wonderful in my mouth,” he recalled, “and I drank a whole glassful. My body warmed up, and I found that I could talk without getting tired.” He began drinking small amounts of wine at meals, and though he couldn’t say for sure that this was the reason for his recovery, he began to feel stronger, and the purple spots began to fade.

Still weak, consumed with grief over his sons’ deaths, and concerned about the future of the Medical College, Dr. Shirabe resumed treating others suffering from injury and radiation illness. Later that fall, at the invitation of a joint team of U.S. and Japanese researchers, he directed a detailed survey of more than eight thousand people’s atomic bomb injuries and deaths. Working under extreme conditions at Shinkozen and in the surrounding community, he and his team of fifty medical students and ten physicians from Nagasaki Medical College and Kawatana Kyosai Hospital spent months conducting interviews and examinations to catalog injuries, illnesses, and mortality rates relating to various factors, including distance from the hypocenter, shielding, access to medical care, evacuation, gender, and extent of multiple types of injuries.

 • • • 

In early September, Nagasaki Prefecture issued a public notice—possibly linked to an (inaccurate) assessment by an American chemist reported in U.S. newspapers—stating that the atomic bomb had contributed a “devastating effect on all living organisms” in the Urakami Valley and that no trees or plants would grow there for seventy years. Nagasaki officials recommended that everyone living in the Urakami Valley relocate. Families with the means to escape had already evacuated in the immediate aftermath of the bomb, but those who remained now faced what they thought was the impending demise of their city. At the same time, torrential storms deluged the city with over twelve inches of rain, flooding the Urakami Valley and washing away the air raid shelters and makeshift shacks where an estimated seven hundred families still lived in the ruins.

Once the city dried out, families reconstructed tiny primitive huts, slept on the floors of train stations, or lived in burned-out train cars. Relief support had faded from the now-demilitarized Japanese armed forces, and emergency food and provisions provided by the Nagasaki Prefectural Government were difficult to access due to still-impassable roads, a dysfunctional streetcar system, and the inability of many victims to get to distribution sites because of injury and illness. Except for the Allied POWs in Nagasaki who were now receiving U.S. parachute drops of provisions and medical supplies, no one in the city had enough to eat. Nagasaki’s municipal water system was still in disrepair, so many people walked long distances to access working wells. An eight-year-old boy drank the water from a vase of flowers set at a gravesite. Two young girls retrieved water each day by crossing a school playground-turned- crematorium covered with ashes and fragments of human bone. Some people washed their clothes in the river as unclaimed decomposing corpses floated by.

The second wave of radiation illnesses and deaths continued through early October. Wada, too, became ill, one of many who suffered radiation-related symptoms after spending significant time in the Urakami Valley and the hypocenter area as he searched for his missing colleagues, cremated bodies, and hauled rocks and debris from the streetcar tracks. Blood appeared in Wada’s urine and excrement, and he started losing his hair. “Back then we didn’t have shampoo; we had only soap. I wondered if my hair loss was because of that, so I started washing my hair with only water. But my hair kept falling out. Eventually I became bald.”

At the few hospitals providing care, some patients were given medication to help stop internal bleeding and to relieve pain. But this was rare. In the place of nearly nonexistent medicines, physicians and family caregivers devised their own remedies. Doctors treated patients with blood transfusions, rations of fresh liver to boost white blood cell production, and large doses of glucose and vitamins B, C, and K. Dr. Akizuki, long interested in therapeutic nutrition, required his staff and patients to follow a high-salt, no-sugar diet to support the health of blood cells—a regimen to which he attributed his own and many of his staff’s recovery. Dr. Shirabe promoted the drinking of sake. In rural areas outside the city, doctors recommended that their patients soak in mineral hot springs. Mothers and grandmothers treating family members at home served them a raw egg each morning and brewed bitter teas from mulberry leaves, cuttlefish, and Chinese herbs. Wada’s grandmother insisted he drink kakinoha (persimmon leaf) tea. “It tasted pretty bad,” he admitted, “but I was told over and over that if I didn’t drink it, I wouldn’t get well—so I grit my teeth and drank it every day.” For caregivers, holding a dying child’s hand, touching a patient’s back or forehead, or speaking a few kind words was often all that could be done.

Those who did not fall ill lived in constant anxiety, haunted by the question of when their turn would come. From Dr. Akizuki’s perspective on top of Motohara Hill, death carved a clear geographical path: The first people who suffered and died from radiation-related illness were living inside the Josei Girls’ High School air raid shelter at the bottom of the hill. The illness then climbed the hill, killing people in relative order according to their distance from the atomic blast. When the next tier of people grew sick, they were carried to Akizuki’s burned-out hospital by their neighbors who lived farther up the hill—and the distance between the homes of the sick and his hospital became shorter and shorter. “The Maekawa family, the Matsuokas, and then the Yamaguchis were attacked by radiation sickness,” Akizuki remembered. “I named this widening advance of the disease the ‘concentric circles of death.’” He watched as his neighbor, Mr. Yamaguchi, lost thirteen family members from atomic bomb sickness. After each death, Mr. Yamaguchi carried the body to the cemetery, dug the grave, and called for the priest. After each ceremony, he returned home to care for the remaining family members, all of whom had fallen ill. “They are dying, one by one,” he told Dr. Akizuki. “Who will send for the priest when I am dying? Who will dig my grave when I am gone?”

 • • • 

Doctors were frantic to understand and stop the mysterious disease that was ravaging the city, but they had little means to conduct research. At the fully equipped Omura Naval Hospital north of the city, however, Shiotsuki Masao, a twenty-five-year-old doctor in training, took on the immense project of performing autopsies on as many dead bodies as possible from the piles of corpses waiting each day for transport to a burial or cremation site.

The hospital had taken in 758 victims on the night of the bombing three weeks earlier. A hundred had died before morning, and over a thousand more had arrived in the days that followed—mostly factory workers, students, and housewives transported out of Nagasaki by relief workers. The hospital’s small two-story buildings had overflowed with patients—sometimes forty to a room—and Dr. Shiotsuki didn’t sleep for three days and nights as he tried to treat the complex burns, injuries, and lacerations that had penetrated his patients’ internal organs, none of which had been part of his training. Once the symptoms of radiation disease began, the rate of death increased so rapidly that at times all he could do was go from one dead patient to another to provide official confirmation of their deaths. Early on, when patients did not yet understand that hair loss was one of the first signs of probable and imminent death, Dr. Shiotsuki gently placed his hand on their heads where patches of hair still remained. “Loss of hair often accompanies burns,” he falsely reassured them. “It should stop in a few days.” It was, in his judgment, the most humane care he could give to patients who didn’t know they would soon die.

Dr. Shiotsuki began his investigations as early as August 13, even before he knew the nature of the bomb or had any hint that radiation exposure was causing these mysterious symptoms. He started by photographing, X-raying, and documenting in detailed written reports the course of his patients’ conditions, treatment methods provided, and their ultimate recovery or death. Observing his patients dying from whole-body radiation exposure, he noted: “There is no conspicuous damage to the heart or the circulatory system, but as the end approaches, the blood pressure plummets. Because of high fever or general weakening perhaps, a pneumonia-like condition is apt to occur. During this period, the body temperature continues to rise. In the final stages, the patient registers the highest temperature; then suddenly it falls and the patient dies. Some patients suffer severe vision disabilities and some receive brain damage. Victims who did not experience brain damage suffered no clouding of consciousness. In fact, in spite of their high fevers, most of them were extremely calm and lucid.”

For Dr. Shiotsuki, however, external observations alone seemed inadequate. To surmount his feelings of despair and helplessness, he became fixated on the idea of conducting autopsies in order to observe and document the internal damages to his patients’ bodies. As a new doctor, Shiotsuki felt that he was too inexperienced to understand everything he would see, but he fervently hoped that both his autopsy specimens and written records would provide more qualified doctors valuable information for later analysis.

The Omura Naval Hospital had no autopsy room, so Shiotsuki and a male orderly named Iyonaga Yasumasa set up a working space in a small shack on the hospital grounds that was used as a mortuary. “The room was hot and stuffy,” Shiotsuki remembered. “Under a dim light covered by a shade, we would lift a corpse onto the table made of coffins, say a prayer, then wield the scalpel. What horrific damage had been done to the tissue! As I made those incisions, how many times did I stifle a gasp or let out a sigh. Everywhere the veins had been torn to shreds, and the blood had seeped everywhere.”

Many of Shiotsuki’s postmortem examinations shared common findings, including hemorrhaging of the lungs and kidneys, and blood clots on the outer membranes of the intestines, spleen, and kidneys. He also observed hemorrhaging in the brain, white spots on the large intestine, and ruptures in the liver, spleen, and lungs. Blood tests revealed that patients’ white blood cell counts were lower than normal by 90 percent or more, their red blood cell counts were half of normal levels, and hemoglobin was significantly diminished.

“No one knew when those mysterious symptoms would suddenly appear and drag another victim to the abyss,” Dr. Shiotsuki wrote. When he himself became ill, his tests showed a white blood cell count 50 percent lower than normal—the result, he believed, of his ongoing contact with radiation-exposed people. He treated himself with glucose and vitamin injections, continued working, and recovered within ten days, which he attributed to his stamina and early care. As he and Iyonaga examined more and more bodies, they placed the patients’ irradiated organs in jars of formaldehyde on the floor, then found a tiny, unused storage room where they stacked more jars. When a senior hospital official deemed Dr. Shiotsuki’s research unnecessary in the face of Japan’s mortifying defeat, Shiotsuki began hiding the specimen jars between the wood paneling and the outside wall of the mortuary hut. “To the inexperienced eye,” he explained, “these organs were merely grotesque lumps of flesh. But for us they were eloquent testimony to a horrible tragedy.”

Dr. Shiotsuki was discharged from the navy in mid-September and ordered to return home to Tokyo. He was gravely concerned about the preservation of the specimen jars, which he imagined would be destroyed upon his departure. Sending them to Tokyo was not an option because Japan’s shipping offices were in too great a disarray to guarantee their safe arrival. His only choice was to carry home as many specimen jars as he could. He had planned to pack as much food as possible to survive since much of Tokyo had been burned to the ground. Instead, Shiotsuki wrapped specimen jars in newspaper, sacks, and clothing and placed them into his baggage. After seeing his patients for the last time, he slung his duffel bag of specimens onto his back, lifted more bags holding his personal belongings and additional specimens, and left for home.

Shiotsuki’s train out of Omura Station was crowded, filled mostly with discharged Japanese soldiers. He was fortunate to get a seat, but within a few hours, a passing soldier lost his balance and stepped on his duffel bag. Formaldehyde began leaking onto the floor of the train, creating a pungent smell. People’s eyes began burning. When some of the passengers became agitated, Shiotsuki explained what had happened, apologized for the smell, and asked for their forbearance. But the commotion grew. Soldiers demanded that he throw the bag out the window. Shiotsuki sat quietly, his head bowed, anxious to protect his research. Suddenly, a commander with whom Shiotsuki had spoken earlier stood up and bellowed, “What do you think is preserved in that formaldehyde? The guts of the people who died in the special bombing at Nagasaki, that’s what. The doctor is continuing his research in order to pray for the repose of those victims. The smell will soon go away, so just put up with it until it does.” Everyone grew quiet, and Shiotsuki continued on his journey without further incident.

He traveled for two days and nights before reaching Tokyo. Once home, he opened the duffel bag to see that only one jar had broken. Two days later, he repacked the bag and set off for Tohoku University, where he had received his medical degree. There, he divided the specimens between the departments of pathology and surgery, “with the prayer,” he later wrote, “that these medical data might prove useful for the peace of the human race.” For the first time since the bombing, he felt, at last, that the war had ended.

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Before the atomic bombs were dropped, U.S. scientists conducted no studies on the potential effects of high-dose, whole-body radiation exposure, nor did they investigate or develop potential treatments for the medical conditions that would ensue. The absence of such studies was not due to lack of awareness of the dangers of radiation to the body. In the 1920s, the International X-Ray and Radium Protection Committee had issued the world’s first safety standards both for professionals working with radioactive substances and for patients receiving X-rays or new cancer radiation therapies to specific areas of their bodies. By the 1940s, the risks of small doses of radiation to human organs, tissue, and cells had been explored by scientists worldwide. During the development of the bombs, too, U.S. scientists knew the dangers of radiation exposure, evidenced by the Manhattan Project’s precise handling, hygiene, ventilation, and radioactive monitoring procedures at its sites. To some degree, U.S. scientists and military leaders also understood the dangers of the radiation released at the time of the bombs’ explosions. In a May 1945 memo, for example, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, stated: “During the detonation, radiations are emitted which (unless personnel are shielded) are expected to be injurious within a radius of a mile and lethal within a radius of about six-tenths of a mile.”

However, as the bombs were developed and subsequently used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, serious consideration was not given to the people whose entire bodies would in a single instant be exposed to massive, not-yet-calculable doses of radiation. “The chief effort at Los Alamos was devoted to the design and fabrication of a successful atomic bomb,” wrote physician and radiologist Stafford Warren, chief of the Medical Section of the Manhattan Project. “Scientists and engineers engaged in this effort were, understandably, so immersed in their own problems that it was difficult to persuade any of them even to speculate on what the aftereffects of the detonation might be. Their concern was whether any one of their several designs for the bomb would actually detonate, and, if the detonation did occur, how massive it would be.” Time was also a factor; once scientists had successfully tested the plutonium bomb in the New Mexico desert, they had only three weeks to finalize preparations for the Hiroshima bombing, leaving little time to study the radiation effects of the test blast. Without empirical evidence, no one knew how far or low to the ground the bombs’ radioactive waves would travel, or the extent of their destruction on the internal organs of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians.

Instead, scientists and military leaders had made presumptions. They deduced that as the blast force and heat of the bombs inflicted mass destruction and death, most of the radiation released at the time of the explosion would be captured by the rising atomic cloud. Accordingly, the pilots of the planes involved in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were trained to get away from the blast areas in less than a minute in order to avoid unsafe proximity to the radioactive clouds. U.S. scientists also assumed that anyone who might be exposed to fatal radiation levels (which had not yet been empirically determined) would be killed by the blast before the effects of radiation exposure manifested in their bodies.

Even less understood was the human impact of residual radiation—nuclear fallout from the atomic clouds (which some scientists anticipated) and lingering radiation through absorption by the soil and debris (which few scientists expected due to the height of the bombs’ detonation points). Manhattan Project director General Leslie Groves demonstrated conflicting assessments of the bombs’ potential residual radiation levels by declaring before the bombings that U.S. troops could safely have moved into the targeted cities within thirty minutes of the attacks. However, in the days between the atomic bombings and American occupation troops’ arrival in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the general ordered U.S. research teams into both cities to measure radiation levels to ensure that his assumption of no danger was, in fact, true.

U.S. scientists’ and military leaders’ lack of knowledge and grossly miscalculated assumptions, combined with their desire to safeguard the United States’ reputation, led to passionate repudiation of Japanese claims of radiation effects on the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the weeks and months after the bombing. In late August, when U.S. and worldwide media outlets picked up stories from the Japanese press about the mysterious and deadly radiation-related illnesses, General Groves promptly dismissed the reports as pure propaganda, unsubstantiated by U.S. scientific studies. Coming out of a war in which both sides used the media to propagate negative portrayals of their enemy, it may have been reasonable for Groves to assume that the Japanese would exaggerate reports of suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this case, however, the reports were true—and Groves neglected to say that Japanese claims of radiation illness and death were unsubstantiated by U.S. scientific studies only because those studies had not been conducted.

Even privately, Groves did not waver. In a late August telephone conversation with the director of clinical services at Oak Ridge Hospital in Tennessee, one of the Manhattan Project’s secret sites, Groves asserted his belief that Japanese reports of radiation illness were a play for sympathy and that the rising death tolls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the result of rescue workers finding more dead bodies in the weeks after the bombings. Neither his public nor his private opinion seemed to change when, on August 21, 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian became exposed to high levels of radiation during an accident while handling plutonium at Los Alamos. Daghlian experienced severe and agonizing radiation-related symptoms similar to those of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He died twenty-five days later.

In late August and early September, Groves and other U.S. officials tried to quash public discussion on radiation effects—and its inherent challenge to the United States’ morality in using the bombs—with deflective claims about the lawfulness of the bombs’ use and their decisive role in ending the war. Groves also shifted focus to the scientific development of the bombs and emphasized Japan’s wartime atrocities. “The atomic bomb is not an inhuman weapon,” he stated in the New York Times. “I think our best answer to anyone who doubts this is that we did not start the war, and if they don’t like the way we ended it, to remember who started it.”

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The disconnect between what was happening on the ground in Nagasaki and Hiroshima and what was being reported in the United States further intensified after the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 aboard the USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. The Japanese media, free at last from Japan’s oppressive wartime censorship, was initially told that General Douglas MacArthur—the newly appointed Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) and head of the U.S. occupation in Japan—was a fervent advocate of freedom of the press. But as soon as MacArthur arrived in Japan, Japanese journalists and media organizations were required to abide by strict mandates, particularly regarding what they could not report—which ultimately included any details of the radiation effects in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Two of Japan’s major media organizations were briefly suspended for breaching these guidelines in early September—the first, by criticizing the barbaric nature of the atomic bombs and suggesting that without them, Japan might have won the war; the second, by publishing a statement by a leading politician who called the atomic bombs a violation of international law and a war crime.

On September 18, General MacArthur issued an occupation press code, ending any final hope of press freedom in postwar Japan. Planned by U.S. officials prior to the end of the war, the comprehensive and exacting list of rules mandated that all Japanese news reports must be “truthful”—defined as containing no hint of editorial commentary, no “false or destructive criticism of the Allied Powers,” and no grievance against U.S. occupation forces. Major Japanese newspapers and other publications were placed under pre-censorship rules, requiring them to deliver originals of all articles and publications to the occupation censorship office for approval and return before they were printed. Japanese books, textbooks, films, and mail going into and out of the country were closely scrutinized and controlled. Moreover, no one could mention that censorship existed. As a consequence, all media coverage about the atomic bombings and their radiation effects suddenly stopped—and journalists could not say why.

Foreign reporters in Japan were also highly restricted, allowed to operate only after applying for and being granted SCAP accreditation. They were required to submit all reports to occupation censors for approval before their release. In an effort to maintain control over the atomic bomb story, the U.S. War Department sponsored one official, tightly regulated press junket to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mid-September, after which foreign journalists were limited to escorted trips to POW camps in northern parts of the country.

Two reporters—one from the United States and one from Australia—managed to secretly make their way to Nagasaki and Hiroshima and report on what they saw. The Chicago Tribune’s George Weller saw his chance in early September, when the occupation press office offered a sanctioned press junket to southern Japan to view an airstrip being used to refuel U.S. planes traveling between Japan and Guam. After landing in a tiny town at the southern tip of Kyushu, Weller dodged his escort and found his way to a train station. Twenty-four hours and numerous local trains later, he reached the outskirts of Nagasaki. Posing as a U.S. colonel, Weller demanded to be taken to Nagasaki’s military headquarters, where a Japanese general believed his story and immediately provided him lodging, food, a vehicle, and two kempeitai (military police) daily to hand-carry his dispatches to Tokyo.

Over the next few weeks, Weller walked through the ruins of the city and witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of radiation on people’s bodies, which he referred to as Disease X. He spoke with Nagasaki physicians and heard their best analyses of the effects of radiation on the different organs of the body. He also met with POWs in the two Nagasaki camps, who plied him with questions regarding sports, world news, and Frank Sinatra. Every night, Weller typed his stories by lamplight, addressed the package to “Chief Censor, American Headquarters, Tokyo,” and handed them to the two military officers for delivery to Tokyo.

He never received a response. Years later, Weller found out that MacArthur’s censors, who could not have been happy with him for defying their rules, had rejected all of his reports. Three weeks after arriving in Nagasaki, Weller left on a U.S. hospital ship transporting POWs to Guam. He carried with him carbon copies of every page he had written, though these dispatches would become misplaced, lost to history for sixty years.

Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, too, eluded MacArthur’s barriers to southern Japan. Just before the U.S. War Department’s press junket for U.S. journalists, Burchett made his way to Hiroshima and became the first foreign journalist to witness the obliterated city. Burchett’s first dispatch included graphic details of radiation-related illness and death—information that Groves had already adamantly denied. With the help of a Japanese and another Australian journalist, Burchett’s story evaded U.S. censors in Tokyo and was sent by Morse code directly to London. The piece was distributed worldwide and appeared on the front page of Britain’s Daily Express.

U.S. officials were outraged. When Burchett returned to Tokyo on September 7, he attended a press conference led by General Thomas Farrell—Groves’s deputy commanding general and chief of field operations of the Manhattan Project. Farrell was in Japan to confirm the safety of U.S. occupation troops about to enter Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to Burchett, during the press conference Farrell adamantly refuted Burchett’s charges of radiation poisoning and insisted that what Burchett saw were injuries and burns from the bomb’s blast and heat. In a fierce public exchange, Burchett retorted that he had observed evidence of radiation effects, including fish that were dying when they entered a stream in the outskirts of the city. Farrell countered: “I’m afraid you’ve fallen victim to Japanese propaganda.”

 • • • 

Over the next week, General Farrell led a preliminary Manhattan Project investigation team to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Contrary to some Japanese officials’ assessments, the U.S. scientists confirmed that although radiation levels were higher than normal at both cities’ hypocenter areas and in regions where black rain had fallen, the levels were low enough to be safe for U.S. occupation troops. The scientists stayed on to conduct further research, and additional teams from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Strategic Bombing Survey arrived in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to document the effects of the bomb’s blast, heat, and radiation as a means to support American nuclear weapons development and bolster U.S. civil defense measures against a potential atomic bomb attack. The outcomes of these studies were classified and barred from release.

Many Japanese scientists who were conducting their own investigations in Nagasaki and Hiroshima initially offered and were later mandated to hand over their research to U.S. scientists. In some cases, they were ordered to give up their autonomy and work under the authority of a U.S. team. Some Japanese researchers, including Dr. Shirabe, were able to quietly continue their studies on atom bomb illnesses and mortality rates, though they could not publish their findings until after the occupation ended. In a policy of unmitigated appropriation, U.S. investigators seized bomb victims’ medical records, autopsy specimens, blood samples, and tissue biopsies from both cities and shipped them to the United States for further analysis.

American military police also arrested a Nippon Eiga-sha (Japanese Film Company) crew as it was documenting Nagasaki’s destruction and the impact of radiation exposure on survivors. All of the crew’s footage of both Nagasaki and Hiroshima was confiscated, but when the U.S. teams recognized the black-and-white film’s unparalleled value—impossible to duplicate “until another atomic bomb is released under combat conditions”—they ordered the Japanese filmmakers to complete their filming and edit the footage for submission to the United States. Pentagon officials screened the film in 1946 and denied its public release.

General Farrell’s reports to General Groves and numerous U.S. studies confirmed that horrific radiation illnesses and deaths were caused by initial radiation exposure from the bombings, but when Farrell returned to the United States, he, along with Groves and others, persisted in minimizing the illnesses and deaths from both initial and residual radiation exposure. “The Japanese claim that people died from radiations [sic],” Groves said in a New York Times article. “If this is true, the number was very small.”

To prove his point that residual radiation levels were safe in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Groves invited a group of reporters to witness ongoing readings of low radiation levels at the Trinity test bomb site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. In a strange contradiction, however, the journalists entering the site were required to put on white canvas coverings over their shoes “to make certain that some of the radioactive material still present in the ground might not stick to our soles,” one of them wrote. Without addressing this inconsistency, Groves again justified the bombings, telling the journalists, “While many people were killed, many lives were saved, particularly American lives.”

A September 15 confidential memo from the U.S. War Department to American media outlets provided a final blow to open reporting on the bombs’ radiation effects. The memo requested that all reports about the atomic bombs—particularly reports that included scientific or technical details—be approved by the War Department prior to publication in order to protect the military secrecy of the bomb. Typical of the era, U.S. media organizations complied almost uniformly, printing the government’s press releases as they were written, with little question or opposition.

In combination with censorship of the Japanese media, most reports about the human impact of the bombs were effectively suspended in both Japan and the United States. Later that year, General Groves testified before the U.S. Senate that death from high-dose radiation exposure is “without undue suffering” and “a very pleasant way to die.”

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Nagano’s younger sister, Kuniko, died from radiation toxicity on September 10. She was thirteen years old.

After the emperor’s August 15 surrender proclamation, Nagano’s father had decided to evacuate his family to the small village of Obama, his hometown on the Shimabara Peninsula. The next morning, Nagano, Kuniko, and their parents had left their air raid shelter, pressed through the destroyed Urakami Valley, and exited the city. Nagano’s mother held the rice bowl with Sei-chan’s ashes close to her chest. On unpaved roads, they had walked in silence twenty-one miles to the east along the edge of Tachibana Bay, then south for another fourteen miles to the village of Obama. “We may have slept,” Nagano said, “but I don’t remember. It was such a wretched time that there were no words to be spoken.”

A distant great-aunt of Nagano’s father had taken them in. As the family settled into their new residence, Kuniko was still so terrified of another atomic bombing that every time an airplane flew overhead, she hid under the bedcovers, shivering and crying—inconsolable even as Nagano and her family reassured her that the war was over and no more bombs would be dropped.

In early September, just as horror stories were arriving from Nagasaki about illness and death from the bomb’s radiation, Kuniko became ill with the telltale symptoms. Nagano was consumed with grief and confusion. “After the bomb, she seemed fine,” she said. “During the whole time we were walking to Obama, she didn’t complain even once—she didn’t say she was tired or anything—so I never thought for a moment, even in my wildest imagination, that she would die. But then she completely lost her hair, her gums bled, and big purple spots appeared on her body. She got a fever, vomited blood, had blood in her stool, and she was in so much pain.

“I begged God to save her,” Nagano remembered. “I prayed to let me die in her place. But she died anyway. She writhed in agony for a week, and then she died.”

Nagano blamed herself for Sei-chan’s and Kuniko’s deaths. “I had done a horrible thing,” she said. “They didn’t want to come home from my grandparents’ house earlier that year, but I brought them home anyway. I really wanted to die,” she remembered, unable to control her tears. “I still think I should have died instead of them.”

When Kuniko died, Nagano’s older brother came home from the Omura army base where he had been stationed, and her grandparents traveled to Obama from southern Kyushu—a family gathering that hadn’t been possible when Sei-chan died. Her parents bought a kotsutsubo (ceramic urn) for Kuniko’s ashes and a second one for Sei-chan’s, finally giving him a dignified resting place. Her mother was hospitalized with radiation-related symptoms but recovered within a month. For years, Nagano could not comprehend or accept the selective nature of radiation exposure: Kuniko had died an agonizing death, while her mother—“who was in the same house at the same time as my sister”—lived for fifty more years.

Nagano’s father returned to Nagasaki to resume his job at the Mitsubishi Electric factory south of the harbor. He lived in a single men’s dormitory and went back to see his family once a month when he received his small paycheck. Nagano’s mother cried every day and barely spoke to Nagano. At seventeen, Nagano had lost her siblings, her home, and now her mother. As she began her new life in Obama, she struggled to survive in what felt like an endless state of emotional isolation.

____

Autumn arrived in Nagasaki, bringing cooler days and nights. After early teams of American soldiers swept Nagasaki Bay for underwater mines dropped by the United States in the final year of the war, U.S. military ships arrived in Nagasaki in mid-September to evacuate Allied prisoners of war. POWs poured into the city from camps across Kyushu. “It was an eerie experience travelling down the Nagasaki valley,” an Australian soldier remembered. “Not a sound. No birds. Not even a lizard. Just brown, treeless soil like cocoa, no grass, and twisted girderwork.”

The POWs were processed at the port in assembly-line fashion: first coffee and doughnuts, then showers, delousing, and brief medical inspections. Those who were seriously injured, malnourished, or ill with tuberculosis, infections, ulcers, or other conditions were carried out to the Sanctuary and the Haven, two fully equipped hospital ships anchored in Nagasaki Bay. Everyone else received new underwear, socks, fatigues, and toiletry supplies. The men had their first full meal in months or years—fried chicken, spaghetti, corn bread, and cake—and danced with nurses to a band playing “Two O’Clock Jump.” After a movie, they slept in beds lined up on the ships’ decks. Within two weeks, over nine thousand POWs, along with many foreign monks, priests, nuns, and missionaries who had been interned on Kyushu, sailed out of Nagasaki harbor to Allied-held ports across Asia, where they transferred to ships and planes that carried them to their home countries across the globe.

On September 23, U.S. occupation troops arrived in Nagasaki Bay. The marines on board were dressed in full combat gear, including bayonets and guns, to meet possible Japanese resistance. As their ships lumbered closer to land, the men were overwhelmed by the putrid smell of the city. They passed abandoned Japanese ships in the harbor and could see the tangled steel skeleton of a Mitsubishi factory. Rudi Bohlmann, a soldier from South Dakota, recalled the young orphaned boys who helped moor the ships to the docks and devoured the apples and oranges the soldiers dropped down to them. “They were just starved to death and had sores,” he remembered. “Eyes were all mattered and running, their ears sort of dripping with matter. The sides of their mouth was all festered [sic].”

The victors met no opposition as they landed on their former enemy’s shores. The first U.S. troops to disembark divided into small groups and left in jeeps and trucks every hour for short tours of the city. They were stunned and rendered speechless by the grisly scenes before them, brought on by a single bomb. The Urakami Valley had vanished from existence, corpses were burning on cremation pyres, skulls and bones were piled on the ground, and people were walking through the ruins with beleaguered and empty expressions—“going nowhere, it seems,” remembered Keith Lynch, a sailor from Nebraska. “Just walking.” In a letter to his parents the next day, he wrote that he saw “a sight I hope my children, if I am so fortunate, will never have to see, hear of, or ever think of. It was horrible and when you get to thinking, unbelievable. . . . Such a thing as I saw yesterday cannot be described in words. You have to see it and I hope no one ever has to see such a thing again.”

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.

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 had 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.

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.”

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.

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.

 • • • 

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.

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 fifteen 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.

Communities, families, and sole survivors honored their dead and prayed for their souls. In the fall of 1945, Urakami Church held an outdoor Mass for the approximately 8,500 Christian victims of the bomb. “The relatives of the dead people stood in rows holding white crosses, eight thousand crosses,” remembered Nagai Kayano, a young girl who had lost her mother in the bombing. Her father, Dr. Nagai Takashi, a Nagasaki radiologist and devout Catholic, spoke at the ceremony and pronounced his deeply held beliefs that it was God’s providence that carried the bomb to Nagasaki so that Japan’s largest Christian community could sacrifice themselves to end the war. On a smaller scale, on October 9, the two-month anniversary of the bombing, teachers and students at a Catholic girls’ high school held a memorial service in the school yard for the more than two hundred in their school community who had died.

Barrels were placed at intersections in the Urakami Valley for the collection of ashes and bones. A young girl and her siblings “fished” for human bones in the river and buried them under a tree. A mother collected gold buttons from a school uniform similar to her son’s, as well as a fragment of a school cap and some bones from the ruins of his school, and held a simple funeral for him—though whenever she heard footsteps, she longed to turn around and see that he had, in fact, returned home. Whenever Wada passed by a cremation pyre or a newly uncovered body, he placed his hands together and said a silent prayer.

A celebratory moment for the city came on November 25, when the Nagasaki Streetcar Company resumed limited service. “I was so happy!” Wada remembered. “Seven cars returned to service, and I drove the fourth. When the streetcars started moving, children and adults were running beside us shouting with excitement.” When fishermen and farmers didn’t have money, they offered Wada fish or vegetables instead. “Everyone was so happy,” Wada said. “At that time, I was so proud of my job. I really felt at peace again.”

____

It would take five years for the city of Nagasaki to accomplish the nearly impossible task of counting the number of dead and injured from the atomic bombing. Officials lacked accurate population figures from before the bombing because older adults and young children had been evacuated, soldiers had been conscripted, and there was a lack of documentation for the thousands of Koreans, Chinese, and other Asian workers brought to Japan against their will. Tens of thousands of people, too, had left or returned to the city after the attack. Also, because no one had adequate knowledge of the effects of high-dose radiation exposure, an incalculable number of early radiation deaths may have been attributed to other conditions and not reported as related to the bombing.

Still, after an arduous process to determine figures as reliably as possible, the final numbers were complete. Because thousands died in the months immediately following the bombing, casualty estimates were determined through December 31, 1945:

Number of people killed: 73,884

Number of people injured: 74,909

Number of people (not killed or injured) impacted by death or injury of family members, destruction of their homes and communities, and job loss: 120,820

A new name was coined for the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: hibakusha (atomic bomb–affected people). The term referred to everyone directly affected by the bombings, including those who died in the blast and fires or later from injury or radiation illnesses, those who survived their injuries or radiation illnesses, and those who entered the cities in the weeks after the bombings. It was a word that, like the bombings themselves, would remain an integral part of survivors’ private and public identities for the rest of their lives.