The Air-Raid Sounded

The 240,000 citizens of Nagasaki were quite unprepared for the attack. I remember the air-raid warning sounded early that morning, but a few hours later it was cancelled - I don't remember exactly when, but probably before eight o'clock. It was a scorchingly hot day; from daybreak, cicadas were singing loudly. In the air-raid shelter, we were sweating profusely in our padded hoods and long-sleeved jackets, which were supposed to protect us against burns and injuries.

Nagasaki Survivors

So it was a relief when the warning was cancelled, and we removed our padded hoods and returned to our duties. Following a government order issued in February 1944, middle- and high-school students throughout Japan were recruited to work at weapons manufacturing plants or at places related to the military. The Japanese people, regardless of age and sex, worked, offering their precious lives in "a heroic sacrifice" to carry out the seisen or sacred war. We were taught to become faithful shiko no mitate - humble shields for the Emperor.

I was doing some clerical work for the Japanese imperial army. At about 11 o'clock, I thought I heard the throbs of a B-29 circling over the two-storey army headquarters building. I wondered why an American bomber was flying around above us when we had been given the all-clear. There was no noise of anti-aircraft fire. We were working in our shirt sleeves; and all the windows and doors were wide open because it was so stiflingly hot and humid in our two-storey building.

At that moment, a horrible flash, thousands of times as powerful as lightning, hit me. I felt that it almost rooted out my eyes. Thinking that a huge bomb had exploded above our building, I jumped up from my seat and was hit by a tremendous wind, which smashed down windows, doors, ceilings and walls, and shook the whole building. I remember trying to run for the stairs before being knocked to the floor and losing consciousness. It was a hot blast, carrying splinters of glass and concrete debris. But it did not have that burning heat of the hypocentre, where everyone and everything was melted in an instant by the heat flash. I learned later that the heat decreased with distance. I was 2,800m away from the hypocentre.