CHAPTER 1

CONVERGENCE

Before the sun rose on August 9, 1945, eighteen-year-old Wada Koichi slipped on his black wool uniform and visored cap, closed the wooden sliding door behind him, and left his grandparents’ house in the Maruyama district of Nagasaki, a half mile inland from the bay. Through narrow, darkened streets, he walked his familiar route through the old city, two miles to the north and east to Hotarujaya Terminal to begin his six a.m. shift as a streetcar operator.

Even in the faint light of daybreak, the city looked largely green. Set into trees and foliage, wooden houses were clustered in small neighborhoods called machi. Verdant, low mountains hugged the city in a near circle around the bay. As he walked, Wada passed permanently closed streetside markets, reminding him once again of his persistent hunger. Throughout Japan, fruits and vegetables were scarce, meat was no longer available, and fish was rarely obtainable. Rice, tightly rationed for years, was down to approximately two cups per person per month. To offset hunger, most families planted sweet potatoes in the small gardens behind their houses. That morning, enveloped in fog and near darkness, principals and teachers across the city were already at their schools fertilizing, weeding, and harvesting the potatoes and small number of vegetables they’d planted in every patch of ground they could find. “I thought constantly about food,” Wada remembered, “and wondered when the day would come when I would be able to eat until I was full.”

Arriving at Hotarujaya Terminal, Wada pressed his signature seal into ink, stamped the work log to document his presence, and stood in line with his friends and coworkers to receive a brake handle and the number of the streetcar he would drive that day. More than eighteen months earlier, the Japanese government had assigned him to this job, and now he served as a leader of the mobilized students working there. Wada walked over to the depot, stepped up into his designated streetcar, and attached the brake. Another young worker boarded as well to collect fares and distribute tickets. Short but strong, Wada stood at the helm and steered his streetcar out of the terminal toward the first stop on his daily route, Shianbashi—Reflection Bridge—very close to his home, where he had started out that morning.

Surrounded by mountains on three sides, Nagasaki is built along the banks of a long, narrow bay and the two rivers that flow into it. The smaller Nakashima River curves southwestward toward the port through a valley where the city’s oldest neighborhoods and government offices have existed for centuries. The Urakami River flows north to south through the Urakami Valley, a narrow fertile region filled with rice paddies and farmland until it was incorporated into the city in 1920. Near the harbor, Mount Inasa, Nagasaki’s largest peak, overlooks both valleys, the shipyards that line the bay, and the residential districts south of the Nakashima Valley. To the far south and west, the blue of the ocean and sky stretches to the end of sight.

In 1945, Nagasaki’s streets were not yet paved, and buildings rarely rose higher than three stories. Streetcars serving Nagasaki’s 240,000 people wound through the city on tracks, their wires connected to cables strung between electrical poles lining the roads. Churches stood throughout the city, the bell towers of Urakami Church rising higher than the rest. Numerous steel and armament factories were situated to the north and south of the main port, and two prisoner-of-war camps operated within the city limits—one on Koyagi Island near the mouth of Nagasaki Harbor, and the other just north of the port in an abandoned spinning mill at the Mitsubishi Shipyard Saiwai-machi Plant.

As the sun broke over the horizon, Wada steered his car north past Dejima, the former site of the Dutch trading post during Japan’s two hundred years of isolation. At eighteen, he was old enough to remember a childhood before Japan was at war, when he had played with British, Chinese, Russian, and American diplomats’ children. “I thought they were just like me,” he remembered. “Sometimes I went to their homes, and the American and British mothers made cakes. The Chinese families made delicious buns. But the Russians gave me black bread”—he winced, laughing—“that wasn’t so good.”

As a child, Wada lived with his parents, grandparents, and younger sister. He and his father, a bank employee, often went to baseball games at the local stadium; young Wada was thrilled whenever the Tokyo team was in town so he could watch its star player, Russian Victor Starffin, pitch at record speed. When he was five, his father purchased a radio, a rare item in Nagasaki in the 1930s. There was no broadcast station in the city, however, so his father mounted an antenna on top of a tall bamboo pole to receive radio waves from Kumamoto. Weather and music programs aired sporadically throughout the day, but the specific broadcast times for sports programs were published in the newspaper, so neighbors arrived uninvited at Wada’s house to listen to baseball and sumo wrestling. His parents weren’t happy with the crowds, but Wada loved having all the people packed inside his house. “The thing I remember most,” he said, “is listening to the 1936 Berlin Olympics when a Nagasaki swimmer named Maehata Hideko swam the two-hundred-meter breaststroke. Everyone cheered and clapped when she won!”

When Wada was ten, his mother and newborn sibling died during childbirth. Two years later, his father died of tuberculosis, a disease that, due to lack of antibiotics and poor living conditions, killed an estimated 140,000 Japanese each year. “All he could do was rest,” Wada remembered. “If there had been medicine, he might have lived.” Wada’s grandparents took over caring for him and his younger sister, but twelve-year-old Wada was overwhelmed: His parents were gone, his grandparents had little means, and Wada was too young to get a job. “Because I was a boy,” he recalled, “I was not allowed to cry.”

The deaths of Wada’s parents coincided with Japan’s invasion of China and the beginning of a long period of Japanese military aggression against other nations. Daily routines transformed for every Japanese citizen. New legislation pushed forward by militarist leaders allowed the government to control and utilize Japanese industry, media, and human labor to subsidize the war. In Nagasaki and across the country, munitions factories accelerated output. Gasoline and leather goods were rationed, and later public access to charcoal, eggs, rice, and potatoes was tightly regulated. Radio announcements—underscored by rousing wartime marches—celebrated Japan’s battle victories and fed propaganda to the Japanese people about their country’s supremacy and its innate destiny under the emperor to become both emancipator and guardian of all of Asia. To quash Japan’s earlier support for democratic principles, the government introduced intense military indoctrination, social restrictions, and rigid mandates of personal behavior. Every household was required to display a portrait of the emperor and empress. Elementary schools were now called national citizens’ schools. At school, children were trained to praise their country’s military successes in China and were instructed to write letters of encouragement to soldiers. In Nagasaki, Chinese cultural festivals held in the city for centuries were canceled, and Nagasaki Station became the scene for enormous crowds cheering and waving flags as young soldiers were sent off to the front. Under tight security and hidden from public view, thousands of workers at the Mitsubishi Shipyard and Machinery Works built the seventy-thousand-ton Musashi—at the time, the largest battleship ever made.

In August 1941, the Japanese Ministry of Education released Shinmin no michi [The Way of Subjects], a manifesto that condemned the West’s world domination throughout modern history and commanded the Japanese people to embrace a vision for a new world order ruled by Japan’s benevolent emperor. The proclamation contextualized Japan’s invasions of Manchuria and China as steps toward a world restored to peace based on Japanese nationalistic moral principles. Japanese citizens were pressed to purge themselves of “the evils of European and American thought,” acquiesce to a systemized military state, and demonstrate absolute loyalty to the emperor by forgoing their individual needs and desires. Even as they felt the impact of the U.S.-led embargo of oil and other natural resources, many Japanese supported the government’s refusal to withdraw from China, particularly because a withdrawal order from the prime minister would have likely resulted in his assassination.

But the Japanese people could not have imagined their country’s next step. On December 8, 1941 (December 7 in the United States), Prime Minister Tojo Hideki stunned the nation when he announced in a live radio address that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, initiating a war against the United States and its allies. “The key to victory lies in a ‘faith in victory,’” he said. “For 2,600 years since it was founded, our Empire has never known a defeat. . . . Let us pledge ourselves that we will never stain our glorious history.”

Fourteen-year-old Wada heard the announcement on his father’s radio. As a child, when Japan was invading China, he had dreamed of enlisting as soon as he was eligible. Before her death, however, his mother had taught him that “Banzai!”—the Japanese battle cry in the name of the emperor—was wrong. Hearing the news of his country’s attack on Pearl Harbor, he now “questioned a little whether Japan was truly fighting to save people in the world.” At that time, protest was severely punished, so Wada kept his misgivings to himself. Meanwhile, Japanese soldiers battled farther into the Chinese interior and simultaneously raced into U.S., British, French, Australian, and Dutch-held territories in Southeast Asia, fighting against inevitable loss at the hands of a far more powerful enemy.

 • • • 

It was, in the words of historian John W. Dower, a “war without mercy,” in which both Japan and the United States promoted racist, dehumanizing language about and perceptions of each other. In the United States, a Time magazine article reported that the “ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing . . . indicates it.” Within this climate of racism and political fear-mongering, the U.S. government rounded up and interned an estimated 120,000 Japanese American citizens and “resident aliens” deemed high risks for espionage and sabotage. In Japan, American and British enemies were portrayed as terrifying demons, and everything “Western”—including literature, English classes, music, and political philosophy—was purged from Japanese education and society. In Nagasaki alone, an estimated twenty to thirty foreign monks, nuns, and priests were suspected as enemy spies and interned in a convent on the outskirts of the city. The indoctrination of Japanese soldiers intensified: Chanting the slogan “We’ll never cease fire till our enemies cease to be!” they were trained to believe that the destiny of the empire depended on every battle. Military personnel were forbidden to surrender or become prisoners of war; they were ordered to kill themselves instead as an act of honor for their families and their nation and to avoid any trace of shame.

Day-to-day life became more and more austere and controlled, focused solely on compliance and economic survival. The government granted stowed enormous contracts for production of weapons and war supplies to Japan’s zaibatsu—massive privately owned business conglomerates such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui—while most other commercial industries and family businesses were forced to redirect their labor and production to serve the vast needs of the Japanese military. Nagasaki men who lost their jobs because of government closures joined the factory labor teams of Mitsubishi’s four major industries (shipbuilding, electrical machinery, munitions, and steel), which now employed an even larger percentage of the city’s workforce. Consumer goods disappeared, and messages via radio, newsprint, teachers, and ever-present military personnel pummeled the Japanese people with refrains of “Luxury is the enemy!” and “Let’s send even one more plane to the front!”

Over time, nearly every Japanese citizen was required to work for the war effort—an attempt to offset the extreme imbalances between Japan and the United States in both coal and steel production and the manufacturing of aircraft, tanks, and ammunition. Initially, the Japanese government ordered all men not serving in the military to manual labor, manufacturing, communications, and transportation jobs that in some way supported the government’s mission. Eventually, young unmarried women, jailed convicts, and malnourished, weakened, and often lice-infected prisoners of war were similarly assigned. Married women were urged to bear as many children as possible to increase Japan’s population. Korean and Chinese men, forcibly recruited from their homelands, toiled in Japanese mines and factories; in 1944, nearly sixty thousand Koreans and one thousand Chinese worked in and around Nagasaki, living in minimal barracks near their worksites and eating thin gruel three times a day. On the eighth day of every month—designated “Imperial Edict Day” to commemorate Japan’s entry into the war—workers were sometimes given an extra onigiri—rice ball—to fuel their determination. To further boost Japan’s domestic workforce, “education” was redefined to include labor service; at first, students fourteen and older were mandated to participate in part-time labor projects around food and coal production. By 1944, the national government ordered these students to cease their education and part-time labor, and work full-time for the war effort. Children over ten were mobilized into volunteer labor corps.

The Japanese people surrendered clothing, jewelry, every possible metal household item, and even gold teeth to help the government fund the war. Most of all, they sacrificed their fathers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, and brothers, sending them off to the front without protest, only to receive their ashes back in small wooden boxes. Publicly they could show no grief or remorse and had to passively accept their neighbors’ congratulations for their son’s or father’s honorable death in service to the nation. Local branches of national women’s organizations made care packages for soldiers overseas and senninbari—thousand-stitch belts—for new recruits leaving for war, a symbolic gesture to protect them from harm. Every family was required to belong to a tonarigumi, through which Japan’s military police monitored not only public obedience and resistance but also every individual’s private enthusiasm level or “treasonous” attitudes toward the war. Nagasaki alone had 273 tonarigumi, each with five to ten families. Those in the minority who expressed disbelief in the emperor’s divinity, the government’s political ambitions, or Japan’s military aggression were imprisoned, tortured, and often killed. Even at work, disobedience to one’s supervisor could result in extreme physical punishment.

Eventually, Wada’s European and American friends were expelled from Nagasaki, and again he questioned the government’s intentions. “I was told that America, England, and Holland were evil, but I wondered how that was possible when the families I knew had such nice parents.” It was also clear to Wada that despite Japan’s pronouncements of superiority, his life was getting worse. He had been ordered to withdraw from school to work for the war effort and was paid with a loaf of old bread at the end of each day; later as a streetcar driver, he earned only half of what the adult workers were paid. Wada’s grandparents sold their kimonos and other precious items for a small percentage of their value. He was always hungry. When his older friends left for the war, he and everyone else knew they weren’t likely to return, especially by 1945, when many recruits were “invited” into the kamikaze corps. “I thought something was wrong,” Wada remembered. He later wished that he had spoken out publicly against the war. “But to tell you the truth, I was scared. I worried that I might be killed.”

As his own draft age drew near, Wada faced a serious decision. Not only was he against the war, but he also knew that if he went away, his grandparents would have no one to support them. In an act of subversive resistance, he deliberately failed his pre-service physical examination. “I wore glasses at the time, which was not an automatic disqualifier,” he said, “but at the examination, I pretended that I was nearly blind.” Wada was dismissed from military service, but even with a medical justification, he was labeled an antiwar student and was verbally berated, slapped, and beaten, often by police officers. He survived by working overtime, allowing him to double his wages and better support his sister and grandparents, and he spent time with his friends whenever he could. “From the time I was very young, I was not one to give in,” he explained. “I had to manage on my own. No matter how hard things got, no matter how difficult things were, there was always tomorrow. If tomorrow was hard, there was always the next day.”

On the morning of August 9, Wada drove his streetcar north past Nagasaki Station into the Urakami Valley. Thick white smoke rose from the smokestacks of the Mitsubishi factories that lined both sides of the river. On either side of him, Wada could see thousands of tile-roofed houses huddled close together. More than 150 shops, pharmacies, tailors, and furniture stores were now closed or serving as ration stations. Staircases ascended into the hills, leading to more closed shops and houses with narrow balconies. Nagasaki Medical College and its affiliated hospital stood at the base of the eastern hills. Farther north, the redbrick Urakami Church with its twin bell towers overlooked the entire valley.

By eight a.m., Nagasaki’s streetcars were packed with adults and children heading toward their assigned worksites. Those who couldn’t fit into the jammed cars walked—often for more than an hour—to arrive on time for their shifts. Some skipped work to search the hillsides for edible plants and weeds—risking the punishment of having their names posted on a board at their worksite that would identify them as enemy collaborators. As Wada steered through the Urakami Valley, he received word of a streetcar derailment elsewhere in the city that caused him to change his usual route. He had no idea that this accident would save his life.

____

Earlier that morning, another Nagasaki teenager, Nagano Etsuko, awakened and joined her family in morning calisthenics. “Physical exercises guided by someone on the radio,” she explained. “I really hated it! Even in the winter, my father made us throw open the windows and exercise.” Despite his strictness, sixteen-year-old Nagano loved and respected her father, a small man who, at just over forty years old when the war began, had aged out of the draft and worked instead at Mitsubishi Electric. Nagano felt less warmly toward her mother. “She was a little bit self-centered,” she recalled, “and she was always irritated with my siblings and me.” Still, Nagano appreciated that her mother had taught herself how to make clothes. During the war when clothing was rationed and no fabric was available, her mother had taken her own kimonos, undone the stitching, and made dresses for Nagano and her younger sister, Kuniko. “My friends thought I was lucky.”

Nagano’s memories before the war centered on her family—her parents and three siblings—who lived in a single-family home in the Urakami Valley, just north of Nagasaki Station. “My older brother was kindhearted,” she said. “Because I’m his sister, it’s strange for me to say this, but—he was handsome. My girlfriends would beg me to introduce them to him, and they’d come over to my house for no particular reason just so they could see him.” Nagano thought her younger sister, Kuniko, was very pretty, with her huge eyes and fair skin, though the two girls often quarreled. Before the war, Nagano sometimes walked to the book rental store carrying her baby brother, Seiji (whom her family called Sei-chan), on her back. “I could stand and read, and my mother wouldn’t say anything because I was babysitting.” Their yard was filled with pomegranate, fig, mandarin orange, and loquat trees, and as Sei-chan grew older, he, Kuniko, and Nagano climbed them to pick the fruit and eat it. “Ah,” Nagano sighed, “they were so delicious. We were so happy.”

Nagano was eleven when the Pacific War started, and over the next two years, as she and her family faced increased challenges, she watched her city transform. By 1943, as the Allies began to push back Japanese advances in the Pacific and use bases in China to launch air strikes on Japan’s main islands, Nagasaki officials implemented the city’s first defense measures against possible Allied attacks. Ten sites—mostly schools and other public buildings—were chosen to serve as first-aid stations. During mandatory tonarigumi air raid drills, everyone dropped what they were doing—or rose from their sleep—to report to designated locations where attendance was taken. People of all ages practiced bucket relays and other firefighting exercises. Near City Hall and in the older sections of Nagasaki, entire city blocks were razed to create firebreaks and evacuation routes, forcing schools to relocate and countless families to move in with relatives or friends in the Urakami Valley or in areas outside the city. Every family was required to remove the wooden ceilings in their houses to help slow potential fires. Someone—usually a woman because most men were either drafted or working—had to be at home at all times to prevent the spread of fires in the event of an air attack.

Company employees and members of civilian defense corps dug underground air raid shelters beneath large factories, offices, city prefectural buildings, and schools. Others carved hundreds of primitive, tunnel-shaped shelters into the hillsides surrounding the city; some shelters could hold as many as a hundred people, though many leaked and puddled after every rain. Families were also required to dig shelters beneath their homes. “We lifted the tatami and dug a hole just big enough for all of us to squat inside,” Nagano remembered. “We placed our valuables and food into oil drums and put them in the hole, then covered it with a door and put buckets of water on top to use in case of fire.”

Most mobilized students worked at railroad stations and in armament and shipbuilding plants situated on the bay and along the banks of the Urakami River. Nagano was assigned to the production line in a Mitsubishi airplane parts factory built inside a college gymnasium over the eastern hills from her Urakami Valley home. Every morning she rode a streetcar to the stop in front of Suwa Shrine, then walked three-quarters of a mile north to the factory. In mandated silence, she operated a lathe alongside adult employees. During her time off, there was virtually nothing to do. “Movies were not allowed,” she remembered, “and restaurants were closed due to lack of food. To entertain ourselves, my friends and I took photographs of each other and swapped them back and forth. I was still a child, and I wasn’t able to think very deeply about the war situation.”

Nagasaki was bombed for the first time in late 1944, part of the first U.S. test raids of nighttime incendiary attacks on Japanese urban areas. Physical damages in the city were minor, but twenty-six people were injured and thirteen people died, becoming Nagasaki’s first civilian deaths. By the end of that year, U.S. troops had claimed victories in Guam and the other Mariana Islands, providing them easier access to Japan’s main islands and allowing the United States to intensify its targeted bombing attacks on Japanese military, industrial, and transportation sites. U.S. bombers flew over Nagasaki day and night en route to targets across Japan.

Nagasaki prepared itself for another attack. To fortify citywide defense measures, municipal leaders reinforced antiaircraft, searchlight, and radar brigades, repaired hillside shelters weakened by rainfall, kept water tanks full, and secured emergency telephone communication systems. In a multitiered firefighting strategy, thirty-seven teams totaling nearly 3,300 workers were deployed throughout the city to lead emergency fire brigades, each with its own pumper truck, and some with gasoline-run pumps as well. Civilian bucket brigades remained trained and ready. In the event of an attack, auxiliary police and fire units were prepared to direct pedestrian and vehicle traffic, support first-aid and epidemic prevention efforts, and oversee the disposal of the dead.

City and prefectural leaders selected additional sites for emergency relief stations, and more than 280 doctors and nurses were in place to execute the city’s crisis relief plan—though some doctors were young, not-yet-fully-trained medical students who had received their degrees early to fill in for physicians drafted into the military. Concrete buildings in the city and surrounding villages served as emergency evacuation sites. Clothing, medicines, and large stores of rice, noodles, soy sauce, condensed milk, dried sardines, salt, corn, and soybeans were stockpiled inside Urakami Church and other buildings believed to be safe from attack. To hinder enemy vision of potential targets, the city implemented mandatory blackouts: Families were forbidden to use lights after dark, and factories operating overnight were ordered to cover their windows to eliminate any seepage of light. From inside their homes and air raid shelters, children listened to and glanced up at Allied planes overhead; some learned to identify each type of aircraft by the sound of its engines.

Heeding the national government’s call to evacuate their children to rural areas outside the city, in late 1944, Nagano’s parents sent Kuniko, thirteen, and Seiji, nine, to live with Nagano’s grandparents in Kagoshima, at the southern tip of Kyushu. Nagano’s older brother was drafted and sent outside the city for training, so Nagano, mandated to serve as a mobilized student worker, remained in Nagasaki with her parents. “Up until then, we were an ordinary family.”

Her loneliness was unbearable, and in the spring of 1945, she begged her parents to let Kuniko and Sei-chan come home. After much discussion, her mother finally gave in and agreed to let Nagano go to Kagoshima to retrieve them, but she was adamant that Nagano could bring them home only if they wanted to come. Otherwise, Nagano could not bring them back.

Nagano eagerly agreed. She rode the train to Kagoshima alone, and when she got there, her brother and sister insisted that they had made good friends there and did not yet want to return home. When Nagano pressed them with different reasons they should come back, Kuniko and Seiji began to cry. “You shouldn’t force them,” Nagano’s grandparents scolded her. But Nagano didn’t listen. During Kuniko and Seiji’s school break, she took them by train back to Nagasaki.

Four months later, on the morning of August 9, Nagano and her family completed their calisthenics. By this time, people across the city were awake, and everyone, including Nagano, was hungry. Mothers, grandmothers, and daughters scraped together meals out of acorns, sawdust, soybean grinds, potato stems, peanut shells, and pumpkin gruel, with protein sources from bugs, worms, rodent flesh, and snakes. One girl Nagano’s age was so thin that her friends called her Senko (incense stick). Others fought lethargy resulting from a combination of malnutrition and lack of sleep.

A citywide air raid alarm wailed across loudspeakers and radios, prompting formulaic responses. Factories stopped production. Hospital staff carried their patients to their designated shelters. People across the city pulled on their air raid hoods, and parents yelled to their children to run for cover in the holes beneath their houses or in nearby air raid shelters. Thousands of people—including Nagano and her family—huddled in these dark, damp caves. Mothers, aunts, and eldest sisters stayed behind to fight anticipated fires in their homes.

After a long wait, the all-clear sounded. Nagano returned home and prepared herself for work. She had received a ration of new white running shoes, a rare treasure in the summer of 1945. But she wanted to protect them from becoming soiled, so she chose instead to wear geta—raised wooden sandals. The city was bright in the morning sun when she departed for work, leaving her mother and younger sister and brother behind.

____

Fifteen-year-old Do-oh Mineko was, in her own words, a bit of a “wild child.” Her boisterous energy and strong competitiveness worried her mother, who warned Do-oh that the gods were watching her and would become angry if she didn’t demonstrate more feminine behaviors. “But I couldn’t see the gods, so I thought that maybe they didn’t exist,” Do-oh explained. “In Japanese, we have a word wanpaku [impertinent]. That was me.”

Do-oh’s family followed traditional Japanese gender roles, giving higher esteem and priority to men and boys. Her father, who had served in Manchuria, now worked as a high-level employee at Mitsubishi Shipyard. At home, he was a strict authoritarian who demanded absolute obedience from his children, including two hours of study a night. At dinner, he sat at a separate table in the front of the room, and even during the most dire wartime deprivation, he was given an extra serving of food. Do-oh thought men were pretty lucky.

Her mother, in contrast, was gentle, patient, and obedient without complaint. Her elegant beauty was evident even during the war, when she wore no makeup and tied her hair back with a kerchief. Before strict rationing was implemented, she had sold fish to supplement the family income: Pulling a two-wheeled cart to the fish market, she would load up her purchases, return home, and repack the fish into two baskets. She then hung them from either end of a pole across her shoulders and walked from house to house peddling her merchandise. Do-oh, the fourth of seven children, had inherited her mother’s beauty—large almond eyes, smooth skin, and articulated round lips. In addition to helping look after her younger siblings, Do-oh had two daily chores: hauling water from a nearby community well back to her house for dishes, baths, and laundry; and cleaning rice or other grains for family meals the next day. On winter nights, the tips of her fingers froze as she washed the rice, but Do-oh persevered because of her father’s strict policy: “No work, no food.”

Do-oh and her family lived on Mount Inasa, just west of Nagasaki’s port. As a young girl, she had played hide-and-seek, jumped rope, and drawn chalk pictures on stones with her friends. At Inasa Elementary School, Do-oh had a hundred percent attendance record and above-average grades. But Do-oh was a tomboy, not the genteel young woman her parents and teachers would have wanted. She was captain of the dodgeball team, placed first or second in many of her school races on sports days, and even represented her school in a citywide running competition. At recess, she ignored the other girls and ran around the playground.

In December 1941, her country’s attack on Pearl Harbor initiated numerous changes in Do-oh’s life. “All the students were gathered in the assembly room,” she recalled. “We bowed to the emperor’s photo, then the principal talked with us about Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy and told us that we were now at war with the United States and England. He said we needed to study hard and build physical strength. . . . The teachers’ faces looked worried and tense.” The following year, twelve-year-old Do-oh and her family evacuated for safety farther inland to a rural area in the northwestern corner of the city. Do-oh passed the admissions exam for Keiho Girls’ High School, a two-hour walk from her home.

During her first year there, classes were held as usual, and after school, Do-oh studied flower arranging, tea ceremony, koto, and Japanese archery. Gradually, however, students were required to plant potato sprouts on the school grounds during their physical education classes and after school, and Do-oh’s academic instruction became increasingly focused on militaristic indoctrination. She and her classmates recited the Imperial Rescript on Education, commanding total adoration and loyalty to the emperor and the nation under his rule. “Should emergency arise,” one line read, “offer yourselves courageously to the State.” Do-oh, however, did not expect her country to lose. “We were taught that Japan was God’s chosen country, and because of this, Japan would definitely win the war.” Japanese soldiers had become an elite class, and Do-oh and her young friends daydreamed of becoming their wives.

Do-oh’s oldest brother received a “red paper” in 1942, signifying his immediate military conscription. He was twenty-three. Like many new recruits, he prepared his last will and testament, sealing it in an envelope with fingernail and hair clippings as physical remembrances in the event of his death. On the day he left for war, Do-oh’s mother rose early and used food she had secretly stashed away for the occasion to make ohagi—sticky rice balls covered with sweetened adzuki beans. “Eat until your stomach is full,” she told her son. Members of the tonarigumi arrived to bid him farewell; as they sang a patriotic song, Do-oh’s brother saluted and told the crowd that he would work hard for the sake of the country. Not long after, Do-oh’s second-oldest brother was also drafted. Two years later, her eldest brother died in a naval battle near Guam. Her father traveled by train to Sasebo, fifty miles north of Nagasaki, to collect his ashes—but the white box he received was empty, so Do-oh’s parents placed their son’s fingernail and hair clippings inside the box in his memory. Her mother cried for months.

In 1944, fourteen-year-old Do-oh was just starting to dream about her future when she was forced to leave school to work full-time for the war effort. With thousands of other students, she was assigned to the Mitsubishi Arms Factory Ohashi Plant, where the aerial-launched torpedoes used in the Pearl Harbor attack had been manufactured. Do-oh’s job was to inspect the bolts of newly made torpedoes as they came off the assembly line. Once a month, students returned to their schools for “attendance day,” where they were required to do military drills under the command of an officer. One of Do-oh’s only surviving photos was taken by a friend on one of these days. In order to look nice, Do-oh had defied school rules and worn street clothes—a dark skirt and white cotton blouse—instead of her school uniform. “I was fashion-conscious.” She shrugged. “I had my own image.”

To “undermine the morale of the Japanese people,” in early March 1945, the United States initiated an unrelenting firebombing campaign of Japanese cities. Over the next four months, enormous industrial and residential sections of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and nearly every major Japanese city burned to the ground, killing, wounding, and displacing vast civilian populations.

Nagasaki went into high alert, feverishly reinforcing its air raid defense systems, emergency stockpiles, and evacuation sites. Employees and mobilized student workers moved large Mitsubishi machinery, precision instruments, and administrative departments to schools and underground shelters. Others blasted and dug six parallel, interconnected tunnels into a hillside in the northwest sector of the city. Inside the tunnels, Mitsubishi constructed a makeshift factory to continue its round-the-clock production of torpedo parts. Between mandated evictions for fire prevention purposes and voluntary evacuations of children, the elderly, and pregnant family members, an estimated fifty thousand people moved—either to the perceived-to-be-safer Urakami Valley, areas outside the city, or nearby islands. Elementary schools relocated their classes to shrines, private homes, and other temporary locations.

At Nagasaki Medical College, students now kept helmets and medical supplies near their desks. High school students and community volunteers formed emergency relief squads and carried kits containing hydrogen peroxide, iodine, bandages, scissors, aspirin, tissues, tweezers, and handkerchiefs. Every tonarigumi was equipped with a water tank, small manual pump, stretcher, and an appropriate number of ladders based on population. In addition to their required belowground shelters, every household was mandated to have at least two waterproof buckets, a shovel, a pickax, and fire-smothering equipment. In the event of a bomb attack, “we students were told to kneel down, bend over, and use thumbs to plug our ears and our fingers to cover our eyes,” Do-oh remembered, “to prevent our eardrums from getting damaged and our eyeballs from popping out. We practiced this over and over.”

Nagasaki was bombed a second time in April 1945, leaving 129 dead. Occasionally, American planes approached the city, turned their engines off to avoid detection, and flew low over the shipyards, pelting them with machine-gun fire. Other Allied planes dropped leaflets warning of Nagasaki’s destruction by fire and urging people to leave—though by Japanese law, citizens could not read or discuss the leaflets, and they faced arrest unless they immediately handed them over to the police. Day after day through the spring and early summer, however, no additional conventional or incendiary bombs fell on Nagasaki, even as other Japanese cities collapsed in flames. Rumors circulated—or perhaps they were hopeful speculations—that the Americans were treating Nagasaki differently because of its history of international trade, renowned beauty, Christian population, or the Allied POWs interned there.

That spring, news arrived that Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, had surrendered. By that time, however, many people’s profound weariness overwhelmed any previous nationalistic fervor. Chronic hunger now outweighed fear of punishment for illegally fleeing Japan’s cities. Tuberculosis claimed the lives of many babies and young adults, mortality rates spiked among children under seven suffering with diarrhea, and thousands were affected by beriberi, a serious condition resulting from malnutrition. Women and girls slept in their work clothes, and men and boys wore gaiters (protective leg coverings) around the clock to be ready for nightly air raid alarms. “We had no time to take a bath,” one boy remembered, “so we had a hard time removing fleas and lice all over our bodies.” Japan’s diminishing raw materials and disabled transportation systems had resulted in sharp decreases in factory production levels, but adults and mobilized students were still required to work long shifts, if only to demolish buildings and dig shelters or sit silently and do no work at all. Schoolchildren collected pine sap in the woods to help make fuel for Japanese fighter planes. With nearly three million soldiers and civilians killed in battle or Allied bombings at home—more than 3 percent of Japan’s population—the atmosphere in families and work communities was heavy as people waited for news of another soldier’s death.

Even without accurate media reports, most people could now surmise the gravity of Japan’s military losses in the Pacific and the devastating impact of Allied firebombing attacks, which by August had incinerated all or part of sixty-four Japanese cities. According to postwar surveys, by July 1945, public trust in the country’s leaders had reached an all-time low, with two-thirds of the Japanese people certain that the nation’s defeat was inevitable. “Even as kids we understood we were losing the war,” a Nagasaki man recalled. “Any fool could see it. We needed everything. We didn’t even have shoes. How could we win the war?”

Some Japanese Cabinet members had recognized as early as the spring of 1944 the urgency of their country’s losses and its certain defeat. Right-wing promilitary Cabinet members, however, seemed ready to sacrifice their citizens in what they saw as their nation’s ultimate battle. As Allied troops advanced toward Japan’s main islands, these two factions heatedly deliberated over Japan’s terms of surrender. Consensus, mandated by Japan’s constitution, could not be achieved—and without it, the Japanese people could do nothing but brace for invasion.

The government redeployed its already-weakened troops from China and Manchuria to Kyushu and Honshu, Japan’s largest home islands. In Nagasaki, officials set up heavy artillery in bunkers on nearby islands and ordered mines to be placed in the waters leading up to the bay. Workers at Mitsubishi Shipyard constructed several models of special attack boats, including an estimated six hundred shinyo—one-man plywood motorboats with bombs in the hull, designed to emerge from hidden coves on Nagasaki’s coastline and surrounding islands and strike enemy ships after their mobilized student drivers had jumped into the sea. Approximately one hundred kaiten—individually manned suicide torpedoes launched from a submarine or ship—were also deployed.

While imperial portraits were removed from schools and government offices and hidden in locations outside the city, all men ages fifteen to sixty and women seventeen to forty were drafted into the National Volunteer Fighting Corps and emboldened to die “like shattered jewels” for their emperor—that is, to give their lives in battle or commit suicide rather than dishonor the emperor’s name by surrendering. Every household had a bamboo spear posted near the door, and Do-oh, her classmates, and thousands of other students participated in combat training on how to use these spears to attack enemy soldiers, despite how ridiculous this seemed to those who understood that they would be shot before they could even get close.

In their house five miles inland, Do-oh and her family were safe when, in late July and early August, Allied attacks bombarded Nagasaki three more times with over two hundred tons of conventional bombs. Parts of the Mitsubishi and Kawanami shipyards and dozens of houses were destroyed, and the Mitsubishi steelworks factory and Nagasaki Medical College suffered minor damages. More than two hundred people were killed, including a young family inside their home, twelve in an air raid shelter that collapsed, and thirty-two more who drowned when the wall of their air raid shelter cracked, causing water to flood in.

On the morning of August 9, Do-oh put on her hated wartime attire—loose-fitting trousers, a long-sleeved work blouse, and split-toed heavy cloth footwear. Her blouse had a tag sewn into it providing her name, address, and blood type, and she wore an armband with the name of her school on it. Crisscrossed over her shoulders and chest were straps holding a first-aid kit and a padded cotton hood to protect her ears from loud explosions during an air raid, or—if soaked in water—from fire. Do-oh had not let go of her vision of a future after the war. “I loved fashion,” she said. “That was my dream.”

____

Unbeknownst to the people of Nagasaki, Japan, or the United States, in the months leading up to the morning of August 9, leaders of the United States, the USSR, and Japan played out a series of mostly covert political maneuvers and military operations to end the war and attain, from each nation’s perspective, optimum postwar goals. In the early 1940s, the United States had established the Manhattan Project and hired world-renowned scientists to create the world’s first atomic bomb. After years of top-secret development, the scientists were close to achieving their objective: to split the nucleus of an atom, manipulate and harness the forces that hold it together, and unleash an explosive power greater than any human had ever generated.

Vice President Harry S. Truman knew nothing about the development of the bomb prior to President Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. Two weeks later, top military advisers briefed Truman about the Manhattan Project and told him that the first bombs would be ready for use on Japan by August. There were no consequential debates on whether to use the bomb at all or prohibit its use on noncombatant Japanese citizens. Top U.S. officials briefly discussed but ultimately vetoed proposals to issue an official warning to Japan or detonate a demonstration bomb over an uninhabited area to intimidate Japan into surrendering. Final plans were made to deliver the bombs as soon as they were ready.

That spring, a group of U.S. military personnel and scientists met to establish target criteria for the atomic bombings. The committee did not prioritize the military activity within potential target cities; instead, its two primary goals were “obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan,” and making the attack “sufficiently spectacular” so that “the weapon [would] be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released.” Specifications for target cities included their size (larger than three miles in diameter), location (within B-29 bombers’ 1,500-mile maximum flight range from the U.S. airbase in the South Pacific), capacity for “being damaged effectively by a blast,” and the existence of a war-related factory surrounded by workers’ houses. For accuracy—particularly because of the $2 billion price tag of the bombs—predictable, clear weather was required for a visual sighting (versus radar) of the predetermined aiming point. To measure the effects of the bomb, Japanese cities already destroyed by incendiary bomb attacks could not be considered. From an original list of seventeen possible cities, the Target Committee narrowed the choices to four that met all or most of the criteria: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Niigata. General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, informed the War Department about one of Nagasaki’s POW camps near the center of the city; ultimately, this information did not exclude Nagasaki as a priority target.

For Japan’s part, Hirohito and Japanese foreign minister Togo Shigenori made tentative requests in June and July for the Soviets’ assistance in surrender mediation. The United States knew of these communications, but because of Japan’s simultaneous preparation for the invasion of Kyushu and its need for Cabinet consensus, U.S. analysts debated about how close Japanese leaders were to actually agreeing on surrender. Japan also sought guarantees of the USSR’s continued neutrality—not knowing that the Soviets had already agreed to join the Allies against Japan and that Soviet entry into the war was now set for early August.

Allied leaders were preparing to convene in Potsdam, Germany, to deliberate over the division of postwar Germany and draft a unified demand for Japanese surrender when—in the predawn hours of July 16—the United States conducted its first nuclear weapon test, code-named Trinity, in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The detonation ignited a terrifying, massive fireball that melted sand into glass, warmed the faces of official witnesses ten miles away, released radioactive debris, and confirmed that an implosion-type plutonium device was feasible for use as a weapon against Japan. To maintain tight secrecy and appease local citizens’ concerns, area media outlets cooperated with the U.S. Office of Censorship by releasing the story that the explosion was a “harmless accident in a remote ammunition dump.”

Ten days later, the United States, Britain, and China issued the Potsdam Declaration, an ultimatum calling for Japan’s unconditional surrender and demanding immediate disarmament, postwar occupation, prosecution of war criminals, and the end of Japan’s imperial system. “The alternative for Japan,” the declaration read, “is prompt and utter destruction.” Some of Truman’s advisers believed this message could hasten Japan’s surrender and had advocated the inclusion of a clause guaranteeing Japan’s retention of the emperor, but this idea was rejected for the final draft. The atomic bomb was not mentioned.

Unable to agree on a response to these conditions, the Japanese Cabinet announced its mokusatsu position—reported in the United States as “silent contempt,” though the word can also be translated as “withholding comment” or “remaining in wise and masterly inactivity.” But Japan’s delay in responding to the Potsdam Declaration had no impact on the United States’ decision to use its atomic bombs on Japan; that is, on the day before the declaration was issued, Truman had already ordered the bombing of Hiroshima—scheduled for early August “as soon as weather will permit.” Less than two weeks later, at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima’s Shima Hospital, decimating the city and its residents with an explosive force equal to sixteen thousand tons of TNT. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed that day or died from injuries by the end of the year.

“This is the greatest thing in history,” Truman exclaimed when the news reached him on board the USS Augusta on his return from Germany. Later that day, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson released a statement on behalf of the president, written prior to Potsdam, announcing the Hiroshima attack and introducing the atomic bomb to the American public. “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city,” the statement read. “We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.”

Again, no immediate response came from Tokyo. On the day of the bombing, Japanese officials had heard that Hiroshima had been hit by some kind of new bomb, and that night, the Domei News Agency had reported Truman’s announcement about the atomic bomb used over Hiroshima. But it took two days for a team of thirty Japanese scientists and military specialists to get to Hiroshima to investigate the bombing, and it took several more days for them to scientifically confirm that the August 6 weapon was indeed an atomic bomb. Their official report would arrive in Tokyo on August 11.

The delivery of additional atomic bombs, however, did not depend on a reply from Tokyo or any further directive from President Truman. His original order was to use them on Japan “as ready”—and on August 8, two days after the Hiroshima attack, the second atomic bomb’s assembly was complete.

____

News of the Hiroshima bombing reached Nagasaki on August 8, when a newspaper headline announced: “Enemy Drops New-Type Bomb on Hiroshima—Considerable Damage Done.” Many in the city didn’t see the story that day, but those who did were alarmed: By then, most people understood that the Japanese media drastically underplayed the impact of Allied attacks on Japanese cities, so they knew that the words “considerable damage” meant that something far worse had happened.

Some members of Nagasaki’s medical community heard about the bombing from Nagasaki Medical College president Tsuno-o Susumu, who had passed through Hiroshima by train on his way home from Tokyo. As soon as he arrived in Nagasaki on August 8, he hurriedly gathered college faculty and staff to describe reports of “a great flash . . . violent blast . . . and fire.” With extreme agitation, he told the group about the damages and burned bodies he had seen, and he warned them that Nagasaki’s air raid shelters might not provide sufficient protection. Medical College officials decided to suspend classes starting on August 10. That evening, Nishioka Takejiro, chairman of the Nagasaki Shimbun Company, which published the city’s newspaper, rushed into Nagasaki Prefecture governor Nagano Wakamatsu’s office to similarly report his own eyewitness details of Hiroshima’s damages, shocking the governor with descriptions of total devastation, death, and injuries unlike anyone had ever seen. Hoping there was still time to somehow protect Nagasaki, Governor Nagano called a meeting for the next morning with local police chiefs and administrators to formulate a citywide evacuation order.

 • • • 

As the night of August 8 came to a close, the world’s first plutonium bomb lay waiting in a specially constructed concrete-lined pit next to the airstrip on Tinian Island—a tiny dot in the Northern Marianas chain, ten miles long and three miles wide, just north of Guam and southwest of Saipan in the vast western Pacific. Fat Man, they called the bomb, and at ten feet eight inches in length and five feet in diameter, and weighing 10,800 pounds, the name fit. At the bomb’s core, a small amount of subcritical, enriched plutonium-239 was ringed by sixty-four timed high explosives that, when detonated, would compress the plutonium into a critical mass, triggering a nuclear explosion. The bomb’s nose, sides, and tail were covered with the signatures and hometowns of ground and mission crew members, along with brief handwritten messages. “Here’s to you!” wrote one soldier from Chicago.

By eleven p.m., the bomb had been hydraulically lifted and loaded into the womb of a specially modified B-29 named Bockscar. Members of the 509th Composite Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces, who had trained for more than a year to successfully deliver the nuclear bombs over their target cities, were making final preparations for the second atomic bomb mission. The crews of Bockscar and the two companion planes—tasked with visually recording the bombing and collecting scientific data at the time of the blast—gathered for a final briefing. At midnight, as they studied maps and aerial photographs of Kokura and Nagasaki, the mission’s primary and secondary targets, the USSR declared war on Japan. One and a half million Soviet troops entered Japanese-occupied Manchuria on three fronts.

At nearly four a.m. (three a.m. Japan time), Major Charles Sweeney climbed into Bockscar’s pilot seat, started the engines, rolled the plane forward, and accelerated down the runway. Weighing more than seventy-seven tons, with thirteen crew members, seven thousand gallons of fuel, and the plutonium bomb, Bockscar barely lifted off the Tinian airfield and lumbered upward over the ocean. The two companion planes followed. With radio contact between them silenced to prevent detection, Sweeney and the men in all three planes settled in for their 1,500-mile flight through darkness to southern Japan.

 • • • 

The people of Nagasaki hardly slept that night. After eleven p.m., air raid alarms blared, and families across the city awakened and fled to the tiny shelters beneath their houses. Night-shift workers at factories, city services, and watchtowers took refuge in the nearest hillside shelters, and physicians, nurses, and medical personnel at Nagasaki’s hospitals and clinics pulled themselves out of bed or left their work areas to carry patients down to basements for protection.

Sixteen-year-old Taniguchi Sumiteru was working the night shift at Michino-o Post Office, where he watched for fires and prepared, if needed, to evacuate records. Taniguchi was fourteen when he was mobilized to work for the postal service, and the extra income, though small, was vital to his family’s survival. His mother had died in 1930 when he was a year old, and that year, his father had left to work as a train engineer in Japanese-held Manchuria, leaving Taniguchi and his older brother and sister to be raised by their grandparents. “My father came back in 1946,” Taniguchi said, “so I didn’t see him for sixteen years. I had one photo of him. He wrote letters and sent money home to help my grandparents.”

As a young boy, Taniguchi had helped plant and harvest soybeans, potatoes, cucumbers, watermelons, and chrysanthemums on his grandparents’ small plot of land halfway up Mount Inasa, which helped supplement their tiny rations of food during the war. He followed the rules—of his grandparents, his school, and his government. “I was a child then,” he reflected. “I pretty much thought that whatever adults said was correct: that the war was good, that Japan—and only Japan—was good, and that the Koreans, Chinese, and Americans were bad. These weren’t my thoughts,” he clarified. “They’re what the adults taught me. When I grew older, I understood that these were lies.”

When he finished his shift in the early hours of August 9, Taniguchi lay down on a tatami mat on the post-office floor and fell asleep. He awoke in the morning with the expectation of several hours off until his next shift started at noon. Instead, a superior asked him to cover his morning route, so Taniguchi packed his assigned mail into his mailbag, attached the bag to his red bicycle, and headed out. Though he was sixteen, he was small and slight, and with his soft, round face, he looked closer to twelve. As he rode through the rural countryside, his feet barely reached the pedals.

 • • • 

By 9:45 a.m., Bockscar had crossed the Pacific, but as it approached Kokura on the northwest coast of Kyushu, it was now accompanied only by the mission’s instrument plane; the third plane, equipped to film the atomic bombing, had mistakenly missed their planned rendezvous point. The operation’s plans were thwarted again when the wind over the region changed, causing cloud cover and heavy smoke to blow in from the nearby city of Yawata, which was still burning from a U.S. firebombing attack the day before. The two U.S. pilots dodged antiaircraft fire from the ground and flak from approaching Japanese planes, but after three runs over Kokura, Bockscar’s crew still could not make a visual sighting of the city, so Sweeney turned his plane and directed it 150 miles southwest toward Nagasaki. It was 10:30 a.m.

At the same time, more than seven hundred miles north in Tokyo, an emergency meeting of Japan’s “Big Six” Supreme Council for the Direction of the War (Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro, Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa, Army Minister Anami Korechika, Army Chief of Staff Umezu Yoshijiro, and Navy Chief of Staff Toyoda Soemu) convened to discuss the Soviet Union’s surprise invasion of Manchuria and to try again to find agreement on Japan’s surrender terms. The mood was somber. Even without yet knowing the scale of the Soviet attack, Japan’s leaders knew that their troops could not effectively retaliate, and the Soviet declaration of war had ended any last hope of Japan’s securing Soviet neutrality or its assistance in attaining better surrender terms. Prime Minister Suzuki had met Emperor Hirohito earlier that morning and received approval to advocate for acceptance of the Potsdam surrender terms. Grave concern over Japan’s dire domestic situation and the Hiroshima bombing fortified the arguments of those pressing for immediate surrender.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Nagasaki, different levels of air raid alarms had continued to sound during the morning, and people had scurried to and from nearby shelters. Some were so exhausted and frustrated with the routine that they ignored the alarms and went on with whatever they were doing. Thirteen-year-old Yoshida Katsuji and six of his childhood friends had walked from their homes across the mountains into the Urakami Valley to the Nagasaki Prefecture Technical School, where Yoshida was a student in the shipbuilding course. When they tried to get into one of his school’s air raid shelters, they found it was already filled to capacity with teachers and staff. Instead, they fled to a shelter in the woods and crouched inside.

“Us?” Yoshida said. “We thought Japan would win for sure. We had to endure until we won. That’s how it was. Everyone wanted to fight in the war. We longed to. We were educated this way starting in elementary school. We were brainwashed, so we didn’t think it was possible for us to lose.” The emperor, he explained, “was considered a descendant of God. At school, there was a portrait of him. We would bow and pay our respects when we entered a room. That was the Japanese way.” For more than a year, Yoshida’s classes had been canceled; instead, he had dug air raid shelters, joined bucket brigades, made bamboo spears, and participated in drills to use them to fight the enemy.

When the alarm lifted on the morning of August 9, Yoshida and his friends—seven in all—were supposed to return directly to school, but they took their time coming down from the mountain as they tried to decide whether to skip their assigned duties and go swimming instead. They stopped for a drink of water at a roadside well in the hills bordering the western edge of the Urakami Valley.

By then it was eleven a.m. People throughout the city were back to their daily routines, hanging laundry, reading newspapers, weeding gardens, visiting sick family members, scouring the hills for food, lining up at ration stations, or chatting with neighbors. Twenty-four parishioners and two priests gathered inside Urakami Church for confession. One mother set some beans out to dry in preparation for cooking a special dish for the annual Catholic Feast of the Assumption on August 15. A child played near his family’s front door. Of nine Nagasaki residents who had survived the Hiroshima bombing, some had already returned to Nagasaki, while others arrived in the city that morning by train. One man, who had dug into the ruins of his Hiroshima home to find the bones of his wife, now walked through the streets of Nagasaki carrying a washbasin filled with her ashes to give to her parents.

Korean and Chinese workers, prisoners of war, and mobilized adults and students had returned to their work sites; some dug or repaired shelters, others piled sandbags against the windows of City Hall for protection against machine-gun fire. In the Mitsubishi sports field, bamboo spear drills in preparation for an invasion had just concluded. Classes had resumed at Nagasaki Medical College. Streetcars meandered through the city. Hundreds of people injured in the air raids just over a week earlier continued to be treated in Nagasaki’s hospitals, and at the tuberculosis hospital in the northern Urakami Valley, staff members served a late breakfast to their patients. One doctor, trained in German, thought to himself, Im Westen nichts neues (All quiet on the western front). In the concrete-lined shelter near Suwa Shrine that served as the Nagasaki Prefecture Air Defense Headquarters, Governor Nagano had just begun his meeting with Nagasaki police leaders about an evacuation plan. The sun was hot, and the high-pitched, rhythmic song of cicadas vibrated throughout the city.

Six miles above, the two B-29s approached Nagasaki. Major Sweeney and his crew could hardly believe what they saw: Nagasaki, too, was invisible beneath high clouds. This presented a serious problem. Sweeney’s orders were to drop the bomb only after visual sighting of the aiming point—the center of the old city, east of Nagasaki Harbor. Now, however, a visual sighting would likely require numerous passes over the city, which was no longer possible due to fuel loss: Not only had a fuel transfer pump failed before takeoff, rendering six hundred gallons of fuel inaccessible, but more fuel than expected had been consumed waiting at the rendezvous point and while circling over Kokura. Bockscar now had only enough fuel to pass over Nagasaki once and still make it back for an emergency landing at the American air base on Okinawa. Further, Sweeney and his weaponeer, Navy commander Fred Ashworth, knew that not using the bomb on Japan might require dumping it into the sea to prevent a nuclear explosion upon landing. Against orders, they made the split-second decision to drop the bomb by radar.

Air raid alarms did not sound in the city—presumably because Nagasaki’s air raid defense personnel did not observe the planes in time or did not recognize the immediate threat of only two planes flying at such a high altitude. When antiaircraft soldiers on Mount Kompira finally spotted the planes, they jumped into trenches to aim their weapons but didn’t have time to fire; even if they had, their guns could not have reached the U.S. planes. Several minutes earlier, some citizens had heard a brief radio announcement that two B-29s had been seen flying west over Shimabara Peninsula. When they heard the planes approaching, or saw them glistening high in the sky, they called out to warn others and threw themselves into air raid shelters, onto the ground, or beneath beds and desks inside houses, schools, and workplaces. A doctor just about to perform a pneumothorax procedure heard the distant sound of planes, pulled the needle out of his patient, and dived for cover. Most of Nagasaki’s residents, however, had no warning.

By this time, the crews on both planes were wearing protective welders’ glasses so dark that they could barely see their own hands. Captain Kermit Beahan, Bockscar’s bombardier, activated the tone signal that opened the bomb bay doors and indicated thirty seconds until release. Five seconds later, he noticed a hole in the clouds and made a visual identification of Nagasaki.

“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he yelled. He released the bomb. The instrument plane simultaneously discharged three parachutes, each attached to metal canisters containing cylindrical radiosondes to measure blast pressure and relay data back to the aircraft. Ten thousand pounds lighter, Bockscar lurched upward, the bomb bay doors closed, and Sweeney turned the plane an intense 155 degrees to the left to get away from the impending blast.

On the ground below, eighteen-year-old Wada had just arrived at Hotarujaya Terminal at the far eastern corner of the old city. The driver responsible for the accident that caused the earlier streetcar derailment was being severely scolded by the company chiefs. “I went to have a bite to eat,” Wada remembered, “then sat down on a bench with my friends to discuss the cause of the accident.”

Nagano was at work in the temporary Mitsubishi factory in Katafuchi-machi, on the other side of the mountains from her family’s home.

Taniguchi was delivering mail, riding his bicycle through the hills of a residential area in the northwestern corner of the city.

Sixteen-year-old Do-oh was back at her workstation inside the Mitsubishi weapons factory, inspecting torpedoes and eagerly awaiting her lunch break.

On the side of a road on the western side of the Urakami River, Yoshida was lowering a bucket into the well when he looked up and, like others across the city, noticed parachutes high in the sky, descending through a crack in the clouds.

“Rakka-san, they were called back then,” he remembered. Descending umbrellas. “I just thought that they were regular parachutes—that maybe soldiers were coming down.”

“Hey, look! Something’s falling!” he called out to his friends. They all looked up, putting their hands to their foreheads to block the sun so they could see.

“The parachutes floated down, saaatto,” he said. Quietly, with no sound.