Nagasaki:
A Life After Nuclear War, excerpt
by Susan Southard
Below is a short excerpt from chapter three of Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, by Susan Southard. The chapter is titled “Embers,” and takes place in the predawn hours of August 10, 1945, some sixteen hours after the August 9 atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
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Nagasaki mayor Okada Jukichi had spent the night of August 9 atop a hill on the eastern border of the Urakami Valley, waiting in a panic for the fires below to diminish. At three a.m. on August 10, he made his way down the hill. In darkness lit only by scattered embers, he stumbled through debris and bodies to the place where his house had stood the day before, just a few hundred feet from the hypocenter. The soles of Okada’s shoes burned as he frantically combed through the hot ashes for his wife and children. Finding no trace of them, he hurried to the air raid shelter beneath his house to discover at least ten dead bodies, including those of his entire family. Simultaneously crazed and clearheaded, he proceeded to the next neighborhood over, where he identified the deceased family members of his deputy mayor.
Okada was one of the earliest witnesses to the still-smoldering hypocenter area, which had been totally unreachable the day before. Covered in soot, he ran across the low southeastern mountains bordering the Urakami Valley to the air raid shelter of the Nagasaki Prefecture Air Defense Headquarters near Suwa Shrine. The mayor reported what he had seen to Governor Nagano, estimating the death toll at fifty thousand people—far higher than Governor Nagano could have imagined. Stunned, the governor decided to request regular updates from police chiefs in each region of the city and to dispatch reports to Japan’s home minister in Tokyo every half hour with updated damages and fatality estimates from what he still called the new-type bomb.
The soles of Okada’s shoes burned as he frantically combed through the hot ashes for his wife and children. Finding no trace of them, he hurried to the air raid shelter beneath his house to discover at least ten dead bodies, including those of his entire family.
While Okada was searching for his family in the middle of the night, a three-man documentary crew—veteran war photographer Yamahata Yōsuke, writer Higashi Jun, and painter Yamada Eiji—arrived at Michino-o Station, in the rural outskirts of Nagasaki two miles north of the hypocenter. The team, sent by Japan’s News and Information Bureau—the government’s military propaganda organization—had been given orders to record Nagasaki’s damages for use in anti-U.S. propaganda campaigns. Due to Nagasaki’s damaged tracks, Michino-o Station was as far south as the train could go.
After their eleven-hour journey, the men stepped off into the cool night air and began walking toward the city to report to the military police headquarters in southern Nagasaki. Their path took them along hillsides near where Taniguchi lay. From the top of a small mountain at Nagasaki’s northern edge, the vast atomic plain lay before them, dotted by small fires still burning in the ruins. Layers of smoke wafted overhead.
“We made our first steps into this macabre domain,” Higashi later wrote, “as though embarking on a journey into a different world.” With only the light of the crescent moon and the scattered fires to help them see, the men reached the main prefectural road running north-south through the Urakami Valley, barely detectable beneath layers of ashen rubble. The air was hot. They stumbled over bodies and passed people lying on the ground begging for water. A mother, dazed and confused, held her dead child in her arms and whimpered for help. The men offered the victims kind and encouraging words, but there was little else they could do. Higashi, however, was aghast when he stepped on something “soft and spongy” and discovered that he was standing on the corpse of a horse, and he was terrified when a person suddenly surfaced from a hole in the ground and grabbed his leg, begging for help.
The men walked for two hours, past the areas where Yoshida lay on the ground and Nagano and her father huddled in a crowded air raid shelter. They finally reached the military police headquarters, damaged but still standing. After reporting in, the team walked to the hills to wait for the morning light.
In the dim light, the massive expanse of atomic destruction gradually became visible to Yamahata, his colleagues, and the thousands of people who emerged from air raid shelters or descended from the hills where they had hidden during the night. The sun broke over the horizon at 5:42 a.m., barely penetrating the smoky haze that blanketed the city. In the dim light, the massive expanse of atomic destruction gradually became visible to Yamahata, his colleagues, and the thousands of people who emerged from air raid shelters or descended from the hills where they had hidden during the night. Those who could move wandered aimlessly through the remains of the city or stumbled and crawled to flee the devastated region. “Even their eyes were burned,” Yamahata remembered. “The backs of the eyelids were red and swollen as though they had been turned inside out, and the edges of the eyes were yellow like the fat of chicken. Blinded, people groped their way forward with both hands extended in front of them.” As the team began its journey north, past the flattened Nagasaki Station and into the barren Urakami Valley, Yamahata focused solely on his task to photograph what one survivor called a “monochromatic, soundless hell.”
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Adapted from Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Susan Southard. Purchase Nagasaki here.
