The first atomic bomb used in war, dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, marked the beginning of a new era in warfare and the imminent end of World War II. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the Americans dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. In this city, even today, officials, survivors and residents insist that Nagasaki should be remembered not as one of the first cities to suffer the devastation caused by a wartime nuclear weapon, but as the last.
“If a nuclear weapon were used, what would happen under the mushroom cloud?” Nagasaki Mayor Shiro Suzuki, the son of atomic bomb survivors, asked in an interview last fall. “What will happen to the human beings underneath?”
Nagasaki, a centuries-old trading port, was never meant to be the target. It was a sick stroke of luck: the city had barely appeared on the American target list; on the day of the attack, it became the target only when the original target, Kokura, a city of about 130,000, was too difficult for the bombers to see.
And even then, the atomic bomb dubbed “Fat Man” missed its target, exploding approximately 1,650 feet above the area of Nagasaki known as Urakami (home to Japan’s largest Catholic population) instead of the original target in the center of the city.
The bomb is estimated to have killed around 70,000 people. 3,000 metres from the epicentre, combustible material burst into flames and the Urakami Cathedral, then the largest Catholic church in Asia, burned down. The flames in the Urakami district lasted for about 14 hours.
Near what was once ground zero for the explosion, there are small reminders of the devastation caused by the bomb. A slim brick tower of the original Urakami Cathedral rises from grass and stone just a few metres from the epicentre. There is a halved torii gate, cut cleanly in half by the blast, standing at the foot of Sanno Shrine. Nearby, camphor trees, once stripped bare by the bomb, have grown back lush and green.
As conflict rages in places like Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, the sense that the world is on track to repeat itself is palpable among atomic bomb survivors, known in Japan as hibakusha. Seiichiro Mise, who was 10 when the United States dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, said he saw a child on television inside a bomb shelter in Ukraine. The boy was shaking and crying, Mise said, wishing the war would end — a sentiment he once shared. “All of us here,” he said, “have the potential to become victims of nuclear weapons.”
Today, atop Mount Nabekanmuri, southeast of the city, one can see the sprawl of a modern metropolis, home to some 400,000 residents, which could hopefully be the last place to experience the horrors of nuclear war.
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Anyone who has stood in line at a modern coffee shop and eavesdropped on other customers’ minutely specific orders (skim milk, soy milk, oat milk, decaf, semi-decaf, blended, foamed, iced) knows that the saying is wrong: We are not what we eat. We are what we drink. It’s how we intentionally mark ourselves, unintentionally reveal ourselves, or a combination of the two.
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