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By Root 1115 0

from the plane: ‘Five or six seconds later, everything turned yellow. It was like I’d looked right at the sun. Then there was a big sound a second or two later and everything went dark.’ The flash as bright as the sun brought, first, intense heat, which melted human beings virtually to nothing within a kilometer of ground zero (also called the hypocenter) and burned exposed skin up to 2.5 miles away. Seconds later came the blast wave, knocking over hibachi grills and setting fires, flattening wooden buildings for 2 miles around and concrete structures close to the hypocenter, and tearing the clothes and skin off people, smashing their internal organs and driving splintered glass into their bodies. Finally, unseen and at first unfelt, came radiation, gamma rays and neutrons that penetrated the skin of many who counted themselves fortunate to have escaped burn and blast. Condensation occurred atop the rising cloud of smoke and dirt and debris, and an ashy black rain fell for an hour and a half, drenching the miserable city with the radiation it contained.26

6. The bombed people

Silence. Then bewilderment: ‘I felt as though I had been struck on the back by something like a big hammer,’ recalled a young woman, ‘and thrown into boiling oil ...I felt as though the directions were all changed around.’ Science fiction: the blast blew so hard that a group of boys working in a field were lacerated by blades of the grass that surrounded them. Absurdity: while birds, insects, lizards, and households pets vaporized, several survivors remember seeing carp swimming peacefully in ponds or cisterns hours after the bomb had struck, and rats were seemingly unaffected. And horror, as people looked up, dazed, or began to stumble, walk, or run—where?— anywhere else, to find water for their burns or thirst, medical help, or loved ones. ‘We finally came across some living human beings,’ remembered a primary-school student named Iwao Nakamura. ‘But maybe it would be more correct to say that we met some people from Hell. They were naked and their skin, burned and bloody, was like red rust and their bodies were bloated up like balloons.’ A grocer, badly burned, saw, and participated in, a nightmare:

The appearance of people was. .. well, they all had their skin blackened by burns. . . They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back. . . They held their arms bent [forward] like this. . . and their skin—not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too—hung down... I can still picture them in my mind—like walking ghosts.. . They didn’t look like people of this world . . . They had a special way of walking—very slowly . . . I myself was one of them.

‘When I came to my senses,’ a soldier told Kenzaburo Oe, ‘I found my comrades still standing erect and saluting; when I said, “Hey”, and tapped their shoulders, they crumbled down into ashes.’27

They walked to the rivers and to the slopes of Hijiyama Hill, which seemed to offer relative protection from whatever might come next. A military policeman, weeping, stroked a young girl’s face, and murmured, ‘I have a child this age, how is she now?’ At an impromptu aid station in the skirts of Hijiyama, Toyofumi Ogura found several women, badly injured, who ‘howled and screamed as if possessed for the children they’d lost’. Nearby was the counterpart to this scene, as children, in agony of pain, cried for their mothers. Futuba Kitayama watched them die, one by one. Amid the horror, Ogura found a friend, Professor Watanabe, feasting on pumpkin roasted by the bomb’s heat. Invited to taste, Ogura found it ‘surprisingly good’. An officer named Matsumura, bloodied at the waist but feeling the tug of duty, made his way to the hillside headquarters of Lieutenant General Yamamoto, his chief of ordnance. Yamamoto glanced at Matsumura, then asked, ‘Is your son [musuko] safe?’ The younger man was briefly confused: he had only daughters, as the general knew. Then, seeing Yamamoto smiling, he realized that it was an