Eyewitnesses to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The mushroom cloud over NagasakiOn 6 August 1945, a number of eyes in the Japanese city of Hiroshima turned skyward at the drone of a US B-29 bomber flying across the cloudless sky, accompanied by two other aircraft. Their arrival was not a surprise; the early warning radar net had detected the incoming planes and an air-raid alert had been issued for the city. But soon the Japanese military realized that only three planes were incoming, and the alert was lifted. The anti-aircraft guns sat silent, and the fighter planes lingered in their hangars. A mere three planes were considered incapable of posing a significant threat, so it was presumed that these craft were weather planes– a precursor to a true attack. The Japanese military opted to conserve their diminishing supplies of munitions and fuel for use against more serious threats.
The sound of the American planes drew the attention of the city’s residents, many of whom were outdoors participating in work programs. A few saw a large parachute unfurl beneath the B-29 before it flew away, but most saw only the flash that soon followed. The events that unfolded that morning on the streets of Hiroshima were recorded by those who survived. These survivors would come to be known as hibakusha– “people exposed to the bomb.”
For those who didn’t see the planes, the sudden flare of harsh light was the first indication that something unusual had happened. In that eerily silent moment, white clouds sprung from the clear blue sky as the Little Boy spilled the destructive equivalent of thirteen thousand tons of TNT over the city, projecting intense radiation in every direction.
Yoshitaka Kawamoto was thirteen years old when the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, in a classroom less than a kilometer away from the hypocenter:
A bit farther away at 3.7 kilometers, a chief weather man for the Hiroshima District Weather Bureau named Isao Kita describes his experience:
The sky became reddish over Hiroshima, and saturated with smoke and dust. All who were alive and mobile quickly began to try to help the injured or flee the area, few realizing the magnitude of the destruction. The scent of char was on the air as fires began to break out around the city. Ninety percent of Hiroshima’s buildings has been pulverized or damaged by the pressure wave– which had swept virtually unhindered across the flat landscape of the area– and tens of thousands of people were dead or dying.
Of the survivors, Akiko Takakura was among the closest to ground zero at only three hundred meters. She was twenty years old at the time, and she had just started her morning routine at her job in the in the Bank of Hiroshima.
Soon the control operator of the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation in Tokyo noticed that the Hiroshima station was off the air. Unaware of what had happened, he tried to re-establish his program by using another cable, but that attempt failed as well. 
The Tokyo railroad telegraph center also discovered that the main telegraph line had stopped working just north of Hiroshima. From those stations which were within sight of Hiroshima and still in contact, confused telegraph reports of a terrible explosion began to arrive in Tokyo.
As the mushroom cloud towered over the city, the smoky sky churned with lightning and thunder. Within a few hours, a sticky black rain began to fall which blackened everything it touched. Makeshift hospitals treated overwhelming numbers of injured as thousands of wounded left the city and hundreds of people attempted to enter the affected area to find their loved ones.
Hiroshi Sawachika was an army doctor stationed at the army headquarters in the neighboring city of Ujina on that day:
Several hours later, word reached the Japanese government in Tokyo that some kind of catastrophic explosion had leveled the city. Sixteen hours after the event, Tokyo finally learned what had caused the disaster when the White House made a public announcement in Washington regarding the nuclear attack. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki was attacked by a second atomic bomb, and though the hilly terrain there protected much of the city, tens of thousands were injured and killed by the twenty-one kiloton Fat Man and the radiation it produced. Japan shortly surrendered, ending the Second World War.
Radiation sickness took many lives in the following days, and over two hundred thousand people were exposed to heavy non-fatal doses of radiation during the attacks and due to fallout in the intervening weeks. These men, women, and children who were exposed to the bomb are the hibakusha. This status entitles one to a monthly allowance from the government as compensation for injuries, since many of them have lingering health problems from which they will never recover. The radiation exposure has also left them much more susceptible to cancer.
From the flattened ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sprang new cities, each of which are vibrant and active places today. Most of the surviving hibakusha still live in Japan, which to date are numbered at 266,598. At last count in August 2005, the death toll from these atomic weapons stands at 379,776– some from the blast itself, and others from radiation and fallout exposure in the following months and years.
But health problems are not the only difficulties faced by the survivors of the nuclear attacks of 1945. A general lack of knowledge as to the effects of radiation has caused considerable discrimination against these individuals. It seems that a great number of Japanese citizens are under the impression that radiation sickness is contagious or hereditary, causing many communities to ostracize the hibakusha, and causing many employers to refuse to hire the hibakusha or their children even today.
The stories of the eyewitnesses to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are moving, though disturbing. May humankind never again err so spectacularly as we did during that week in 1945.
Further reading:
Voice of Hibakusha
Hibakusha Testimony Videos
Wikipedia on Hibakusha
Buy John Hersey’s Hiroshima on Amazon.com
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Amazing to think, a horrible thought if it had happened to the rest of the work (aka WWIII, Holocaust blah blah). The story of the weather man was very interesting.. Imagine that, seeing a blast in the sky a mile awayand having a heat wave rushing at you like the heat radiating out an oven.
One thing I’ve always wondered, especially after reading the stories of the outcast hibakusha, is a person who’s suffered a major dose of radiation somehow radioactive themselves. I mean, if you survive a dose of radiation with burns and product from a nuclear blast, is there enough collected on the skin to harm another person? Is there any truth to people being afraid of hibakusha?
Probably a stupid question.