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ENVISIONING NAGASAKI

The Rise of the Municipal Vision of Reconstruction

On May 3, 1949, representatives from Nagasaki and Hiroshima met in Tokyo to discuss the title of Nagasaki’s reconstruction law. Hiroshima had already submitted a proposal to the National Diet to reconstruct as a “peace commemoration city” (heiwa kinen toshi), and Nagasaki officials, too, sought a reconstruction law that recognized the “special nature” of their city’s destruction. The main problem for Hiroshima officials was that Nagasaki wanted to include the word “peace” in their law’s title. The meeting “saw the confrontation of fiery opinions” from both sides, but the “attitude of Hiroshima,” as Nagasaki representative Tsubouchi Hachirō saw it, was already set. Hiroshima officials claimed a monopoly on the word “peace,” asserting that there could be only one “peace city.” They argued, as Tsubouchi explained in an op-ed in the Nagasaki minyū on May 11, that the existence of two peace cities in Japan would “undoubtedly blur the focal point” and dilute the essence of a “peace city” altogether. Whether the concern over a blurred “focal point” refers to “peace” or “Hiroshima” was not clear. In fact, Hiroshima officials went as far as requesting the Diet refuse Nagasaki’s proposal for a special reconstruction law entirely. In the end, Hiroshima’s unwillingness to share the designation of a “peace city” determined the fate of the two cities. Nagasaki’s law passed, but the city was now destined to become the “international cultural city” (kokusai bunka toshi). As Tsubouchi titled his op-ed piece in the Nagasaki minyū, Nagasaki had lost to Hiroshima.1
The competition between Nagasaki and Hiroshima grew out of the postwar need for national reconstruction funds. In the early months after the war, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were among all the other cities razed by Allied bombs. Little was known about the two cities except that they were destroyed by a new type of bomb that was atomic, the significance of which only gradually came to be understood. In all of the bombed-out cities, the initial reaction was to rebuild what had been destroyed, but resources were scarce. The national government developed a plan in November 1945 to aid in the reconstruction of 115 war-torn cities, including Nagasaki and Hiroshima.2 Before the 1949 special reconstruction laws for the two cities, among forty-one cities slated to receive national reconstruction funds, Hiroshima placed sixth on the list, but Nagasaki trailed far behind at thirty-first. As the dust began to settle and the significance of the atomic bombings gradually gained recognition, city officials from Nagasaki and Hiroshima thought that the special nature of their destruction entitled them to national funds. They began appealing to Tokyo from 1946 but found themselves in competition with one another for national funds, culminating in the 1949 reconstruction law debates. The laws solidified Hiroshima’s place as an atomic-bombed city over Nagasaki, but it also placed both cities at the top of the list for national funds.3
Nagasaki’s struggle in Tokyo for recognition of its atomic experience in the face of a powerful Hiroshima lobby illustrates one of the first moments when Hiroshima memory activists, in this case municipal representatives, sought to establish an atomic narrative that placed their city at the center. But it also reflected the disparate paths of reconstruction taken by the two cities. Nagasaki officials had been developing a reconstruction plan based on the goal of reviving and cultivating an urban identity in keeping with its historic past as an international city. As a former military city, Hiroshima had no such usable past, and so officials there, led by Mayor Hamai Shinzō, the “atomic-bombing mayor,” drew on their immediate, tragic past to cultivate an urban identity that gave special significance to the postwar catchword of “peace.” That is, they thought that through an emphasis on their identity as the world’s first atomic-bombed city, they could make Hiroshima a symbol to represent the importance of peace; in that scenario, however, there could be only one symbol. Nagasaki did not have a place in Hiroshima’s narrative. By mid-1949, when officials from the two cities met to discuss issues related to commemoration of the bombings, representatives from Hiroshima thought they had a claim to “peace” as their privilege because they had dedicated reconstruction efforts to commemorating the atomic bombing, while Nagasaki had not.
The path of reconstruction, in both cities, was not predetermined but rather grew out of the many visions for reconstruction that emerged during the first several years after the bombing. A combination of economists and other scholars, the American occupiers, and Christians envisioned the revival of Nagasaki in similar ways to municipal officials, creating what I call the municipal vision of reconstruction. The vision gained the most traction early on and persisted above the rest. It sought to link the city’s international past to its atomic present instead of defining Nagasaki’s place in history solely in terms of the bombing. Even before the Americans arrived, city officials had hoped to restore the “old Nagasaki” (mukashi no Nagasaki) that had existed before the bombing. For a city that was once known as the “Kyoto of Kyushu” and even the “Naples of Japan,” it was natural to wish to rebuild the city in those terms rather than associate it with an atomic wasteland.4 Unlike in Hiroshima, it made little sense to officials in Nagasaki to draw on the immediate past—war and atomic destruction—for a model to define the city’s urban identity going forward when the distant past shone brightly in their eyes. The American occupiers, too, saw a revival of Nagasaki’s past as a “gateway to the Orient” as the key to building a bright future.5 As a result, from the first years of restoration planning, the memory of the atomic bombing figured relatively little in the discourse of reconstruction. To realize their vision, officials emphasized in media representations the historic characteristics of the city, not least of which was the history of Christianity, and they focused on rebuilding, refurbishing, and maintaining historic sites. Discussions of the bombing that centered on the Catholic region of Urakami served a dual purpose for officials who sought to boast of the Christian history while locating the bombing in the northern part of the city, far removed from central Nagasaki, thus distancing the dark, recent memory from the bright past.

The Destruction

The atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki at 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945. The blast leveled all buildings made of lighter materials like wood and left few others standing. Of the approximately fifty-one thousand buildings in Nagasaki before the bombing, 36.1 percent were completely destroyed or damaged. By comparison, the number in Hiroshima was 91.9 percent, even though the plutonium bomb in Nagasaki had more destructive power. Because the bomb exploded in the narrow Urakami valley, much of the power of the plutonium bomb, including the blast and heat rays, was buffered by the surrounding mountains.6 Mount Konpira protected most of the central part of the city in the south and southeast—which was the intended target—from the worst part of the explosion, heat, and radiation blast. The physical destruction extended south about 4 kilometers, but broken windows were reported as far away as 19 kilometers. Wholesale destruction by the bomb reached up to 2.5 kilometers from the hypocenter, 0.5 kilometer farther than the reach of the Hiroshima bomb. Shortly after the blast in Nagasaki, various locations throughout the city spontaneously combusted, ignited by the intense heat rays, and conflagrations quickly spread across the landscape, raging through the streets and into the buildings still standing. At around noon, fires ignited in areas several kilometers from ground zero and spread over what remained of the city.7 At 2.4 kilometers away, Nagasaki train station was rocked by the initial blast and subsequently burned in the fires. Many government buildings within 4 kilometers of the blast in the southern part of the city, while ravaged, remained structurally intact. The solid stone structures of City Hall and the Prefecture Office stood standing, but fires destroyed their interiors. The conflagration flattened all the buildings surrounding the Prefecture Office, but the fires stopped short of the southernmost part of the city.8 The Urakami valley was virtually erased, save for the skeletons of larger buildings such as the Nagasaki Medical University Hospital, which stood 750 meters from the hypocenter, and the reinforced steel frames of some of the Mitsubishi factories. The damage inflicted on human bodies varied depending on their location and proximity to the blast as well as their amount of exposure to the radiation, including in the weeks following. In general, immediate injuries have been categorized as thermal, blast, and radiation injuries. Thermal injuries resulted in keloid scarring on one’s body, and radiation-related injuries often plagued a survivor throughout their life by producing illnesses such as various types of cancers.9
The greatest aftereffect of the atomic bomb, indeed, that which distinguished it from conventional bombs used during the war, was radiation. Although Mount Konpira prevented the blast from reaching parts of the city, it could not save the city from radioactive fallout and residual radiation. People who seemed unharmed after the blast or who entered the blast radius after the bombing became sick with radiation poisoning and died in days, weeks, months, or years after the bomb. On August 23, the Mainichi shinbun printed the theory that the bombed areas of Nagasaki and Hiroshima would remain biologically sterile for at least seventy years. The Asahi shinbun and the Yomiuri hōchi shinbun ran the same story the next day.10 The Manhattan Project scientists knew of the radioactive element of the bomb, and Japanese scientists suspected it. But no one knew exactly what would happen from radiation; everything was speculation. Even some American Marines stationed in Nagasaki did not understand why their hair was falling out or why they had bloody diarrhea. For weeks and months, tens of thousands of people, including U.S. military personnel, moved around the irradiated part of Nagasaki, mostly unaware of the danger.
The radiation in Nagasaki, which was much greater than in Hiroshima, continued to affect residents for months and years after the bombing. Residue from the bomb, sometimes called “ashes of death” in Japan, and which included radioisotopes, became a component of the fallout and harmed anyone exposed to it. The black rain that fell from the mushroom cloud in Nagasaki about twenty minutes after the explosion contained massive amounts of radioactive matter, which rained over the aid workers, local survivors, and other “early entrants” into the city who were searching for family members or who were engaged in such tasks as corpse disposal. Scientists have measured the maximum value of overall exposure dose from fallout, strongest at around 15 centimeters above ground, to range from 4 to 40 rads (radiation absorbed dose) in Hiroshima and from 48 to 149 rads in the Nishiyama District of Nagasaki. In early October 1945, the Japan–United States Joint Commission measured the gamma-ray dose at one meter above ground about 3 kilometers to the west of ground zero in Hiroshima (where black rain had carried much of the fallout) to be 0.045 milliroentgen per hour, and in Nishiyama, Nagasaki, the number was 1 milliroentgen per hour, or more than twenty-two times the dose in Hiroshima.11 The black rain had transported radioactive fallout over Mount Konpira to the Nishiyama reservoir east of the hypocenter, which was one of four main water supplies of the city even after the bombing. Additionally, unfissioned plutonium-239, which has a half-life of twenty-four thousand years and is highly radioactive, was detected in Nishiyama in 1969, and has been persistent in the soil in the form of plutonium oxide.12 In the early 1980s, the soil surrounding the reservoir was again shown to be “highly contaminated with the plutonium due to Nagasaki Atomic Bomb.”13 The radioactive fallout in this way created countless “secondary A-bomb victims,” including American military personnel during the occupation.14
The population of Nagasaki in 1945 (prebombing) was around 270,000, but the exact number of people in the city at the time of the bombing is unknown. Some residents had moved, evacuated, or been mobilized to work in industrial factories, and military troop movements around the city were not recorded.15 Tens of thousands of people died in a matter of seconds, others more slowly. By the end of 1945, approximately seventy-four thousand people had died in the explosion and fires, or from the immediate release of gamma radiation and the radioactive fallout, another seventy-five thousand were injured. An estimated sixty to eighty Allied prisoners of war (POWs), including American soldiers, died in the bombing, and around two hundred others were injured. Since 1943, Allied POWs had been sent to Fukuoka POW Camp No. 14—a prison in Nagasaki 1.65 kilometers away from the hypocenter, which was completely destroyed. Various factors, such as radiation, made it difficult for scientists to calculate precise numbers of atomic-bombing dead and wounded in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which led to varying estimates.16
After the bombing, Nagasaki residents immediately set out on the long road to physical reconstruction.17 As survivors emerged from the rubble, clearing debris and corpses took months, and for a long time residents lived in destitution in trenches and improvised huts. Air-raid trenches provided a place to sleep and after most of the fires had faded days later, residents began constructing makeshift homes in the trenches out of surrounding debris, such as burned wood and broken tiles. Police forces began removing corpses a few days after the ...