The Flash of August — Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This episode deals with events that touch deeply on human life and dignity. What is written here is not a story of victory or defeat, nor a tale of technical triumph. In the summer of 1945, what happened to two cities? And how do we, today, try to receive and pass down that event? We will trace these questions in words as quiet as we can manage. The desert flash we followed in earlier episodes was, here, for the first time, set off above a city where people lived their daily lives. Beyond the figures and the dates, there were lives — nameless to us, yet undeniably real. We want to hold that in mind from the very start.

August 6, 1945 — Hiroshima

That morning, the sky over Hiroshima is said to have been clear. Around 8:15 a.m., a single bomb dropped from one bomber detonated in the air above the city. This atomic bomb, which used uranium, is said to have been the one later called ‘Little Boy.’ A short time after its release, the first nuclear weapon humanity ever used against a city sent out its light directly above Hiroshima.

Near the hypocenter, heat and blast are said to have spread in an instant. Various records remain of the scale of the explosion, and the ground surface close to the hypocenter is said to have reached several thousand degrees. Across a wide area of the city, buildings collapsed and fires spread. Many lives were lost that very day, and the streets, it is recorded, overflowed with the wounded and those who had lost their homes.

The harm this bomb brought did not end with that single day. The radiation released in the explosion is said to have continued to ravage the bodies of those who survived for a long time afterward, and people suffering from the symptoms known as radiation sickness never ceased to appear. Hair fell out, fevers would not break, and people lost their lives without knowing the cause — at the time, it is said, what radiation did to the human body was not yet well understood. What the survivors carried was not only injury and illness. There was the grief of losing family, the complicated feelings about having survived, and the discrimination and prejudice that continued for years afterward. The weight there was something no figure could ever contain.

Hiroshima had been, from the start, a city where many people simply lived ordinary lives. There were children going to school, adults at work, and that morning too an unchanging day was about to begin. The atomic bomb was dropped not only on military facilities but on the very daily life of those citizens. Many students out working on building-demolition labor are said to have been among the victims, and what was taken were countless lives that should have gone on into the future.

August 9 — Nagasaki

Three days after Hiroshima, on August 9, an atomic bomb fell on another city as well: Nagasaki. It is said to have detonated at a point different from the original target. Around 11:02 a.m., a bomb using plutonium, called ‘Fat Man,’ sent out its light in the air over the northern part of the city. The terrain of many slopes and valleys is said to have affected how the damage spread, yet even so, the blow a single city received was beyond measure.

In Nagasaki too, heat, blast, and radiation took the lives of people that day and afterward. The area exposed to the bomb is said to have included the lives of people who had long kept an old faith, as well as places of medicine and education. With the explosion, the area near the heart of the city was almost entirely lost, and those who survived were, like the people of Hiroshima, made to suffer the lingering effects of radiation for a long time afterward.

The testimony of survivors and each of the belongings left in the museums tell us today that there was indeed a life there. A scorched lunch box, a stopped watch, the words of people who kept searching for their families. These are records that speak of the bomb’s power, and at the same time they are proof of the very daily life that was taken away. The owners of those belongings had names too, and families waiting for their return — and when we think of that, the event of the atomic bombing rises up not as a single line of distant history but as a reality continuous with us who live today.

Divided Views on the Bombings

Why were the atomic bombs dropped? Was it justified? To this question there is still no settled answer. Among historians and those directly involved, the assessments diverge, and several views stand side by side. Here we take no stance on which is correct, and wish simply to set the main views fairly beside one another.

One view holds that, had a mainland invasion been carried out, enormous casualties would surely have fallen on both sides, and that the bombings were meant to avoid this and bring the war to an early end. This is said to have been an explanation widely told for some time after the war. On the other hand, there is the view that Japan’s capacity to continue fighting had already declined, that surrender may have been near even without the atomic bombs, and that the bombings may have been unnecessary. It is said that among former military officers and politicians too, there were those who voiced such doubts in later years.

Furthermore, a view has been put forward that there may have been an intent to check the Soviet Union in the contest for leadership in the postwar world. The Soviet entry into the war against Japan on August 8, 1945, is said to have been a great shock to Japan’s war leadership, and there is research holding that it was the Soviet entry that acted most strongly on the decision to surrender. Which hastened the surrender more, and by how much — the atomic bombs or the Soviet entry — this debate continues today as an important point in the history of the war’s end, and even among researchers no single conclusion has been reached.

These views contain parts that contradict one another, and the assessments remain divided. Where there is a source that strongly supports one position, there is also a source that casts doubt on it. For that very reason, rather than choosing any one as the correct answer, it can be said to matter that we know the very fact that several views stand side by side. What is certain is that this question cannot be cut cleanly into simple good and evil, that people of differing positions still earnestly continue the debate, and that it is a subject to be faced with weight and care.

The bombs dropped on the two cities were a scene in a war and, at the same time, a turning point in human history. The experience of a single bomb taking an entire city was something humans tasted here for the first time and, so far, for the last in actual war. This event would go on to change, from its very foundations, how the world that came after would face the nuclear. The postwar world in which we live is built upon the countless lives lost that summer — that one fact, at least, we wish never to forget.