Marines cleared bomb debris to play a football game, which they dubbed the Atom Bowl. ( Shifting circumstances and last-minute choices doomed the Nagasaki.) Even though the flattened cities were essentially graveyards, they were treated less than reverently by some of the “occupationaires,” as they called themselves. Soon tens of thousands of occupation troops arrived in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed by a second atomic bomb three days after Hiroshima. Kondo’s family was among those who would return and rebuild their lives upon the ashes.
Yet within 24 hours, survivors were already returning to the city to search for relatives, friends, and former homes in the rubble. It was being said, he reported, that Hiroshima might remain uninhabitable for 75 years. At the city center near where the bomb exploded, only the skeletons of three concrete buildings were still standing. “I was dumbfounded with the destruction before me,” he wrote. The first, Leslie Nakashima-who before the war had possessed both American and Japanese citizenship and been stranded in Japan for the duration of the conflict-confirmed in a United Press dispatch that the city of 300,000 had been obliterated. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Ī few weeks later, foreign correspondents began trying to get into Hiroshima. Had the city been attacked by a massive force of B-29s? Had a new sort of weapon been used? How else could such devastation be explained? That day and night, as hellish fires and whirlwinds tore through the ruins, and blast survivors tried to find refuge in the city’s few surviving parks, the Japanese government in Tokyo had a difficult time processing what had happened.
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The house collapsed on top of them, but her mother managed to free them from the debris and escape before a wall of flame consumed the area. Kondo-then just over eight months old-was in her mother’s arms in their house near the city center. Not only near the epicenter, but across the city.”Īt the time of the bombing, Ms. “You dig two feet and there are bones,” Hidehiko Yuzaki, the governor of Hiroshima Prefecture, told me. Kondo to work for peace, including leading a peace study tour throughout Japan, and sharing her story in venues around the world. Like other bomb survivors, the painful experiences of her childhood compel Ms. Her mother managed to dig out of the wreckage, and they both survived. Koko Tanimoto Kondo was eight months old when the bomb hit less than a mile from her home, causing it to collapse. The true death toll-estimates have ranged between 100,000 and 280,000-will never be known. Those directly under the bomb’s detonation point, or hypocenter, were incinerated, instantaneously erased from existence. dropped the bomb-dubbed “Little Boy” and scribbled with profane messages to the Japanese emperor-on Hiroshima, tens of thousands of people were burned to death or buried alive by collapsing buildings or bludgeoned by flying debris. ( For those who lived, memories of the bomb are impossible to forget.) Hellish fires and whirlwinds Kondo was one of the few humans on Earth to have witnessed and survived it.
She told me that she and her mother, Chisa Tanimoto-also a blast survivor who lived to an advanced age-used to joke grimly that the bomb’s radiation had somehow preserved them.Īs we walked down a wide, tree-lined boulevard that sunny morning, it was hard for me to comprehend that this was the site of the first nuclear attack in history, and that Ms.
She was then 74, but as we walked through the city together, I could hardly keep up with her. Kondo, she was alternately solemn and mischievous, with a pronounced gallows humor. Her parents didn't learn of her death until they returned from China in 1946. Tomie Yamane, 4, was living with her grandparents and dressed in this skirt when the bomb hit, killing them all.