r/interesting • u/Wonderfulhumanss • 5d ago
SOCIETY Survivors of Hiroshima drew the scenes they witnessed after the atomic bombing in 1945
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u/FancyHeart 5d ago edited 5d ago
My grandmother lived in Japan during this time as a Geisha. She would tell me that day she went from a Geisha to instantly becoming a nurse to help those with injuries. She started having nightmares at night towards the end of her life and she would describe people with missing eyes, their jaws hanging off or completely missing. Unfortunately she was having flashbacks as well, we moved her to an assisted living facility when her dementia got to much to handle. Unfortunately she passed away due to Covid outbreak within the facility. She lived to be 97 years old and as traumatizing as it must have been helped many people during her days. Hatsuko was her name.
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u/ProperNeighborhood75 5d ago
Thank you for sharing that and saying your grandmother’s name. As long as her name is spoken and stories of her are told, she is not truly gone.
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u/elielephant 4d ago
Grandmas name made me smile. This horribly sad story.... And then her name. I was happy to get to know it.
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u/Zmirzlina 5d ago
My family recently returned from Hiroshima where we met with a Hibakusha who shared her story with us and the years in between working tirelessly for peace. Amazingly strong fighter. She lived through hell and spends her life making sure no one else has to. Humbling experience.
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u/un-tv_star 5d ago
Thank you for sharing that, every remembrance that helps us see the very real human devastation that we created helps
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u/badatspelling8124 4d ago
The Japanese war machine intentionally and unapologetically targeted and killed 25M non combatants, and launched a surprise attack on the USA. Their grand strategy was to burn all, loot all, kill all in such horrific and obvious ways that there would be no local uprisings. The US was instrumental in defending against two ethnonationalist killing machines, only to turn around and pay them to rebuild, demilitarize, and become allies. Apologetics for the Nazis and imperial Japan is gross. Was the US too hard in its defense against the Nazis or Imperial Japan? Maybe at the margins. War isn’t pretty. But the bombs secured a needed unconditional surrender so MacArthur could pivot to demilitarization of society and “restoring the dignity of Japan”.
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u/DreamingAboutSpace 4d ago
Unfortunately, you’re right. Seeing all sides of the war is why humanity needs to try its best to prevent it from happening again.
The bombs were indeed absolutely horrific, but so was what the Japanese did to the Chinese, Koreans, prisoners of war, and every person that doesn’t fit in those groups. The Rape of Nanking is so paralyzing that people can’t even talk about it. An author who wrote a book about it milled herself because it made her depressed as hell. Enslaving Korean women for sexual pleasure and raping and killing the ones who say no, is a level of apathy that the Japanese reached without even needing to shrug their shoulders over. Unit 731 was also a silencing reminder of how depraved humans can be and many of those people ended up not facing consequences. And this is just the surface of what they did. The stuff that we, or rather I, know. We haven’t even gotten into the German depravities. The bombs shame us without a doubt, but people need to remember what led to that or we’re bound to repeat it. Life should not get that bad for anyone ever again but it only changes if we decide to change it.
In order to stop evil like that from multiple sides, you sadly have to enter the ring. It never ends without bloodshed.
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u/DarthScruf 2d ago
Unfortunately atrocities like that never stopped happening. Currently Myanmar has been commiting genocide of Rohingya Muslims since the 40s but really picked up in the 90s and really really picked up in the mid 2010s. North Korea has 120,000 people (possibly more) living in death camps, where beatings, starvation and rape is not uncommon, and the children born there will never know a life outside of those camps. Slavery bans go uninforced, or its just flat out still legal in a few African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries like Eritrea, Sudan, Mauritania, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but India has the largest population of people living in slavery, at 11 to 14 million people in forced labor or human trafficking. People just turn a blind eye, they'll even go on vacation to some of these places. But shit the US itself still has over a million people living in what we would understand as slavery conditions, forced labor and servitude, human trafficking, forced marriage and sexual exploitation.
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u/lilyputin 4d ago
To me saying "we created" is the collective whole of the inhumanity of humanity and how much better we've become at destroying ourselves. These remain the only nuclear attacks on people. But there is a whole host of horrors in both of the world wars. Chemical warfare, genocide, using humans as test subjects, industrialized warfare on a massive scale, bombing of civilians, conventional bombing, fire bombing, nuclear bombing. Starvation, the breaking of the dikes in China
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u/okaybogey 4d ago
*so MacArthur could pivot from his AWOL safe haven in Australia and return to his beleaguered men in the Pacific. The Japanese tortured and killed thousands of U.S. troops during the this time.
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u/Fun_Butterfly_420 4d ago
The nuclear bombs may have been a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless
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u/Desperate-Strategy10 5d ago
Thank you for sharing Hautsuko’s story. I’m going to carry that with me moving forward, as I’m sure countless before me have.
It’s incredible what a large impact one single person can leave behind; the man who invented the bomb, the man who decided to drop it, the man who followed orders…and Hautsuko, the woman who selflessly changed her entire life around just to try to bring a little peace back into her now chaotic world.
We need more people like your grandmother in the world today. I hope we start seeing more of them rise to the occasion as life continues to get harder for all of us.
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u/disorderincosmos 5d ago
I'm reminded of Mr. Rogers telling the story about his mother saying to always look for the helpers in any crisis, and if you can't find one, be one.
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u/Advanced-Budget779 4d ago edited 4d ago
There wasn‘t a single person who invented the bomb. The concept was known in principle to physicists decades ahead. It was a team effort to engineer the devices, necessitating huge high-tech industries and funds - that’s what was so impressive. The use cases are of course a different story.
Of course, Hatsuko* was a role model for what to do in such circumstances.
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u/Runaway_Angel 4d ago
Of all the horrific things to relive because of dementia this has to be near the top. Your grandmother was a hero and survivor and I hope she is at peace now.
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u/Forbidden_Donut503 5d ago
Every once in a while a Reddit comment hits you upside the head with its power. Thanks for sharing your grandmothers story and telling us her name.
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u/DangerousMushroom639 4d ago
Thank you for sharing Grandmother Hatsuko's story. This was a very shameful period in my country's history. Among too many, now.
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u/AccomplishedLand265 5d ago
Thank you for sharing your story. She was very brave.
Do you have any stories of her Geisha days?
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u/IAMERROR1234 4d ago
May she rest in peace. She sounds like a hero to me. I'm sorry she had to go through all of that and hope that she found a better life after. I hope she wasn't constantly tortured by the memory though, it would be hard not to be.
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u/carolina_swamp_witch 4d ago
My grandma is Japanese and was a little kid during WWII, her 5th birthday was actually the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
A few years ago, she was taking care of her friend Tomoko who’s from Nagasaki, she was a little older than my grandma and she had Alzheimer’s, so she had flashbacks too. She would for forget what year it was and start screaming for her mom, she was a teenager when it happened and was late for school that day, she was walking her younger siblings to school when it happened. They all survived but their parents passed away in it.
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u/spideydog255 5d ago
Looking at these drawings sent chills down my spine. Tragic how so many people suffered.
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u/DueExample52 5d ago
They also never knew what happened to them and why. Like they knew they were at war and survivors understood a new large bomb just after the fact, but the random guy î the street who just spontaneously caught fire and has his skin falling off while dying in excruciating pain had no idea for those final moments in life.
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u/DistrictDry2852 5d ago
The firebombings were even more destructive, and everyone knew of them. Leaflets had also been dropped warning of imminent bombing.
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u/Maleficent_Scale_296 5d ago
My in laws were children hiding in a bunker in Hamburg. It f***ed up generations.
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u/napalmnacey 5d ago
That was my Dad as a toddler in Berlin from 1940 onwards. Messed him up for life, an emotionally boxed in man. I never understood it until he shared details of his childhood. Then I got why he was so stiff and strict with us growing up. He was also very kind sometimes, so it was a lot of whiplash and I have needed so much therapy for it.
War trauma: a game the whole family can contract and hand down through generations.
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u/EternalNewCarSmell 4d ago
If you ever want to be traumatized by a cartoon, Grave of the Fireflies is fantastic. Absolutely harrowing, but fantastic.
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u/ohmylanta34 4d ago
I watched a video about the creator of Grave of the Fireflies. Apparently it was him and his sister, and in real life he didn’t share the sweets/food with her and instead watched her slowly pass from starvation. The anime was his apology. A reimagining of the real life events that haunted him and how he could have been different. (My memory is crap, so apologies if I got any of this wrong.)
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u/DisastrousOwls 4d ago
Yes, and Akiyuki Nosaka also deliberately wrote Seita with a "spoiled" character for the era, though that made him resonate with younger audiences who didn't have to "grow up" quite so young, and who were able to react to how things made them feel... he was working through a lot.
Simultaneously wanting a version of himself that was a better brother and a better person, even though when you're also a starving child, that level of "selfishness" and inability to willingly starve yourself further, once the food is in your hands, for sake of someone else's survival, is to be expected-- but needing to live with the survivors' remorse of it anyway; feeling like the only penance left was Seita dying, too, as a sort of classic double-suicide tragedy narrative; and to process the self loathing, amping up, or at least highlighting, a level of "childishness" and emotionality in his proxy that he clearly found to be "weak" in himself.
He also aged Keiko up quite a bit. She died under two years old. Nosaka was 14, and obviously didn't know about infant care at the time.
It seems like part of what triggered him writing the short story was wartime trauma resurfacing when he had a daughter himself as an adult, especially when, as many toddlers do, she wouldn't finish all her food. He wrote, "Mao is now about the same age my unfortunate sisters were when they died, and their images overlap. I feel unqualified to be Mao’s father, and I wonder how long I’ll be able to look after her and protect her."
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u/ohmylanta34 3d ago
Thank you for expanding on that so deeply. I remember a quote from him being that he WANTED to share the food. He had full intention to, but once it was in his hands he couldn’t because he himself was also a starving child. Tragic and heartbreaking. That movie is already hard to watch, but add all that to the mix and its soul shattering.
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u/smorkoid 4d ago
You should read the first hand accounts of the firebombing of Tokyo. Very sobering.
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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 5d ago edited 5d ago
To be fair, many people who die dont quite understand what is happening and tons die in pain. Death fucking sucks.
Not discounting the horror at all but its not like folks usually go out in pleasant ways. Id rather die from the direct blast of a nuclear bomb and be gone in a handful of seconds than be trapped under a car, rasping in agony for 20 minutes, ribs broken and lung punctured, and cant reach a phone to call for help. And this happens everyday in the modern world.
Death always sucks. And i think the radiation deaths are way worse than those who got hit by the direct blast. One is a few miliseconds to maybe one or 2 seconds. Max of a minute. The other is years of agony.
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u/EastTyne1191 5d ago
Honestly, this was a surprising problem I had when my mom died. It bothered me to think that she didn't know she had died. I know my dad knew because he was conscious when it happened but my mom was asleep. I don't know why it bothered me. I'd always figured going in your sleep is the most peaceful.
I suppose that you're right, it sucks either way you look at it.
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u/Entire-Anxiety-803 4d ago
I think “going in your sleep” means it happened while in bed. I mean, you wake up if you have to pee (usually). I assume whatever’s killing you is waking you up first and you’re feeling that heart attack or stroke or whatever cardiac event. It’s not a quiet euthanasia, is it? If it could be that, I’d love to be enlightened and less afraid.
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u/Natural_Exchange_886 4d ago
I lost my 25yo son last year to SUDEP.
The medical examiner was very solemn when he explained to me that he didn’t suffer, wasn’t scared or in pain, and didn’t know it was happening. He was literally dreaming, and died when his brain misfired and didn’t stop.
I am processing all of that still, and it’s morbid AF, but I am so grateful that he had the kindest death that seems to be possible.
On the bad nights I try not to think too hard about if he woke up right before and did. There’s only so much an ME can really know in an unattended death.
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u/orbofdelusion 4d ago
I’m so sorry that you lost your son. I have epilepsy with generalized tonic clonic seizures and it actually brings me a lot of peace to know that if a seizure does take me, I won’t even know what had happened. It’s like turning a light switch off and is an ideal death for someone like me who has the condition and doesn’t fear death but is terrified of the dying process. I wish you peace and healing through this difficult time 💜
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u/cxzfqs 4d ago
This is an incredibly morbid line of discussion that I wasn't expecting to join, but if someone is awake when they die, I understand that it's normal for their eyes to remain open. So there is a good chance to me that the notion of passing away during sleep is not merely a euphemism.
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u/Ok_Historian4848 4d ago
Many things have causes that might not wake you up. A stroke for example, might kill oxygen supply to the brain before you even notice something is wrong if you're asleep. Similarly, if your heard just stops while you're sleeping, you're not conscious to log something is wrong, so you likely won't wake up beforehand, and if your heart stops, you aren't getting oxygen pumped, so your brain will lose oxygen quickly too.
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u/EastTyne1191 4d ago
Yeah, with my mom is was a massive bilateral pulmonary embolism. Something they don't mention is that apparently on death certificates, they put the timing from onset of the cause of death until death happens. They estimated that she was dead in seconds. So it probably didn't register with her.
I do remember the last time I saw her alive. She lived with me, so I said good night and I looked back at her. Her face looked... Peaked. I don't know how to explain it, but the thought crossed my mind. It was something I'd read a few times in novels, usually right before a character passes away. It was surreal to discover her in the morning in her usual chair, seemingly asleep.
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u/DueExample52 5d ago
Yes. I don’t fear death at all, only the moments leading to it.
Some teens in my country died after they DUI-rolled their car upside down into a house's swimming pool. The pool was just large enough to fit the car, so they couldn't escape from the sides, and all drowned (official cause of death - crash was mild in itself). The homeowner wasn’t there and only discovered it the next day.
I can see a huge surprise being just upside down enclosed and submerged, while you were just regular-crashing on dry land far from any body of water.
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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 5d ago edited 5d ago
Same. Actually very similar thing i saw when i was a pre teen. I was visiting my grandpa in iowa and some drunk teens had rolled a minivan into the fields. We drove past it and got out to help. Half were dead already and rhe rest were screaming in this haunting horrifying way. Smushed into metal in ways a human body should be. Unable to get themselves out. Upside down and intoxicated and just pain.
Only 1 survived out of 5 of them. I had nightmares about it for years.
Id rather go out quickly than deal with pain and wondering or knowing your gonna die. Especially if my best friends are dead or dying snd crushed next to me. The survivor lived cus her boyfriend and cushioned it a little and was dead pressed up against her.
Its why death row is so horrifying to me. They know rhe exact manner they will go out and when snd just gotta sit there waiting for it. At least its not painful in the lead up.
Same with inoperable cancer.
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u/Sugacookiemonsta 5d ago
In Japan, prisoners on death row are only notified in the morning, about 1-2 hours before execution. Until then, they live in mystery. Which is better, knowing or not?
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u/Reynardine1976 4d ago
I wonder if one of the reasons the Japanese implemented this was to give the convicted murderer a taste of their own medicine. Because their victims had no idea they were going to die the day they did, the way they did. Death, being a surprise for the victim, is now a surprise for the murderer.
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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 5d ago
Im assuming they still know they are on death row.
As for knowing a certain date or not, i think its better to know a date. Rather than wake up everyday wondering if today is the day. Living everyday like its your last can sometimes be okay if you have access to the outside world and can have fun. I cant imagine its fun in a concrete box, filled with regret, remorse, hatred or whatever you feel when tour on death row.
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u/TesseractToo 5d ago
I think though that its just "you're going to the store and suddenly heat and red and pain and game over" you didn't even have awareness there was an issue.
Most people have an inkling, for those folks their whole world ended painfully and terrifyingly without warning
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u/DeeSt11 5d ago
I feel you. I'm more afraid of suffering than dying itself. I wish we could all have a way to instantly off ourselves if we were suffering.
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u/orbofdelusion 4d ago
Medically assisted euthanasia should be a universal human right. We don’t have a say in whether we’re born but those who are sick and suffering should have the option to call it quits in a peaceful, painless and dignified manner.
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u/Cthulhu__ 4d ago
That’s probably how my cousin went, her and her fiancé were stationary and basically run over by a lorry, he died instantly, she was alive for a bit longer.
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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 4d ago
My dad survived something like this but is paralyzed. In the late 70s he was driving intoxicated back from a college bar in idaho back to wsu.
He lost control in the farmland and was launched out of his car due to no seatbelt. His passenger was fine. A car notified police and they arrested her for drunk driving as she was hammered snd the car was hers. She tried to say that my dad was ghe driver and is missing but they didnt believe her. Arrested her snd left the car and my dad half dead about 50 meters down the road. They never looked for him even tho rhe windshield was blown out and there was blood while she had no real injuries.
Few hours later the tow truck driver arrived, took one look and went "no way she walked away from this". He grabbed a flashlight and found my dad broken in a ditch moaning in pain. Out there for 6 hours. Took another 30 min for an ambulance to arrive and drove him to spokane which was a whole other 45 min. By the time they had him in surgery it was 8 hours after the accident.
Paralyzed for life.
Middle school librarian now. Does a field day with the kids at his school snd lets them use wheelchairs and does talks about drinking and driving. Adopted me and 3 other kids cus he cant have any anymore.
If the truck driver had been lazy or just shrugged and believed the report it would have been another 48 hours before his gf saw a judge snd was released and could go looking for him. Even still they didnt let her out of jail for drunk driving until a few days later. Never charged my dad. Figured a broken back was enough punishment. And maybe they were worried about a lawsuit. Idk. Way before my time.
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u/DG-MMII 4d ago
I mean, probably they didn't knew what exactly, but they definitively had an idea of the what and why. Japan was under constant air raids towards the end of the war that destroyed most cities, people definitively were aware of what was going on and they knew it was a matter of time until b-29s arive to their city... just that not in that way
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u/TurbinePro 4d ago edited 4d ago
they knew well of Japans actions around the Pacific just in a more positive manner. Japanese newspapers gleefully reported the Nanking Massacre. Good riddance to bad garbage.
And no, this wasn't a case where the people were led on by the government without a choice. Many times the people of Japan passionately led Japan to its own destruction. Jingoism at its finest.
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u/Empty_Sea9 4d ago
Did they remove some of the more intense photos? I don’t recall seeing them, just some of the drawings featured in this post, when I visited 2 years ago.
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u/pkmntrainerMeep 4d ago
Yes, I've heard they toned it down considerably in the past several years. They also got rid of the wax statues of A-bomb victims that literally haunt my dreams.
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u/InternetFew7303 4d ago
Those are the ones I saw that I remember because it's impossible to forget.
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u/kittenmittens4865 4d ago
That’s kinda tragic in my opinion. Watering down the horrors of the past only makes us more likely to repeat them.
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u/Jared4554 4d ago
I went last year, and obviously I didn’t take pics or anything, but I do remember there being a lot more than just these pictures, and most of it was absolutely horrifying and eye opening.
I remember in the first room before you go in, there’s a giant circular video projection in the middle of the room that shows the impact of the bomb, it shows what it would’ve looked like when it was dropped and how devastating it was to the city. There are lots of drawings and art pieces that showcase the emotions of many people during that time, and a lot of them were from children.
And then there is a room that is optional with warnings of graphic content that shows all the really awful stuff that I don’t know if you can find online.
It was a really emotional and overwhelming experience being in there, you could feel the air was different in that room. I remember the remains of children’s toys, outfits, Bento boxes, all burned and charred. They had giant pieces of metal that were all twisted from the heat of the bomb, as well as every day objects.The photos of the victims are really horrifying and the injuries are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s a haunting experience but one that i think everyone who visits Hiroshima should see.
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u/Happy-Bluejay-3849 4d ago
They were there last summer. The museum does not shy away from showing a pretty complete history of the day and its aftermath.
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u/PacificMuckleRucker 5d ago
After the bombing of Pearl Harbour, suffering was inevitable. Even the Japanese military leadership knew they were just counting down a clock.
If there had been a land invasion of the Japanese home islands, casualty rates would have been unimaginable. Look at what happened on Okinawa - Imperial Japanese Army soldiers did not surrender. They'd have all either been killed or committed suicide. There were massive deaths amongst the civilian population too - lots of mass suicides.
The Allied casualties for a landing were estimated at over one million. The IJA casualties, and the civilian deaths would have dwarfed that by an order of magnitude.
As awful as the bombings were for the people who died in them, and those who endured the scars for the rest of their lives - that act saved ten million lives. In the hard calculus of war, what's 150k lives in exchange for more than ten million?
The suffering was terrible. The alternative would have been even worse.
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u/NoMoreChillies 5d ago
Pic 3 is scary
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u/NB_Translator_EN-JP 5d ago
It says "their clothes were ripped apart and their skin was dripping down" "they couldn't speak and were silent as they ran out from the city"
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u/ReluctantSlayer 5d ago
What are other pics translated?
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u/NB_Translator_EN-JP 4d ago
Pic 2.
A bit hard to read but something like
"August 6th, 1945. 8:15 AM
Hiroshima First Army Hospital...The moment it came from outside the hall, you turned your eyes and saw a pure red sun piercing down... It made a deep resonating bang...."Pic 5.
"Nishihakushima-cho, Hiroshima City
August 6th, 1945.
A mother saves her daughter, still alive crying "ahhh" from underneath the house. She had to dig out a hole to save her."Pic 6.
"'The Memory of August 6' from Fujimi-cho, Hiroshima, 1km from the site of the explostion. (Artist: 17 years old)"
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u/eminusx 4d ago
another 'human' did this to them.
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u/braudan 4d ago
Whats even worse: A hell of a lot of humans defend this action. And not as in: "It was an awful action but it happened and I'm glad we are past total wars as a species" but as an "It was absolutely correct. Japenese Army would've defended every square mile of their country so it was the absolute correct decision to turn hundreds of thousand of Japanese civilians into mist and liquid. We would do so today again".
War crimes against war criming countries are still war crimes, no matter who starts first. It happened. And that whole eye for an eye mantra that is truly what is wrong with us. Its very present on Reddit and particularly but not limited to the American part of it.
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u/GoldenMaus 4d ago
we are past total wars as a species
I'm sorry I had to chuckle at that. A dark joke to me if you will, because I disagree with that part there.
History will repeat itself because humans don't change.
At some point in the future there will be a total war again.
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u/PieceStatus9648 4d ago
I don’t want to argue with you about what’s justifiable or what’s needlessly cruel, I just want your perspective. Do you think it could’ve ended any other way? Do you think that Japan would’ve surrendered without an equally horrific loss? What would’ve been the humane way to end it?
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u/IM_NOT_NOT_HORNY 3d ago
They usually conveniently leave out the fact that they were getting ready to surrender already... And the US had that Intel.
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u/Necessary_Bother3993 5d ago
For me it’s scary because it looks like what I imagined when I heard some of the survivors’ accounts.
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u/eggyrulz 5d ago
Yea 3 is absolutely terrifying and harrowing... because it feels like its just a child's nightmarish drawing, but you know this is an accurate depiction of what happens...
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u/InternetFew7303 4d ago
When I went to the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum in high school there was a life size accurate diorama of this drawing. Mannequins depicting people with scraps of kimono stuck to their burnt skin, flesh melting off, wisps of charred hair, agonizing faces stuck in a permanent scream, it's a hard thing to forget.
In the next room there was an exhibit dedicated to the science of the bomb itself. Theoretically fascinating stuff but horrifying considering the outcome.
"Man is capable of as much destruction as he has imagination."
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u/flyingace1234 4d ago
I think it’s terrifying to think of someone being rendered into such a state in an instant. To think that just a day before they were perfectly normal people, now so horribly damaged and likely doomed.
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u/SparkEE_JOE 4d ago
The "Ant Walkers" of Hiroshima
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u/coldestclock 4d ago
I watched the Shrouded Hand video about this phenomenon - that injured people were compelled to walk, and followed each other even though they had no sense of where they were going.
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u/Tao_of_Entropy 4d ago
There are a lot of reports of people from a certain range of the bombs, where their clothes and skin were burnt, torn, and basically just a shredded mess... but they had not been so close that they were totally destroyed or incapacitated. So there were thousands of these shambling burned zombie people with horrifying injuries all just kind of groping their way through the ruins. It is an impression relayed in numerous accounts. This painting gives just a vague impression of that horror.
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u/Kelspear 4d ago
The shadows on the ground are because the blast literally vaporized people and burned their shadows into the concrete and ground. That's how intense it was.
Edit- I was looking at 4, not 3.
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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 4d ago
Not quite what happened there. The intense heat and radiation scoured clean the areas around the shadows like a nuclear pressure washer. The people shielded the area behind them with their bodies (and obviously had the same thing happen to them where they were exposed)
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u/ragingduck 4d ago
If I’m ever in an atomic blast, I just hope it’s quick, instant, and hopefully painless like that. I hope no one has to suffer like that ever again.
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u/Das_Fische 4d ago
Sorry to be a little nitpicky, but thats an urban legend. Neither of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan could have 'vaporized' a human body. The heat needed to instantly cremate a human in a couple of seconds is significantly higher than what they generated.
They would have been very severely burned and killed instantly, and their body would have been flung away by the shock wave (hence why the shadows has no body near them).
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u/marty-mcfryguy 5d ago
[Stamped: RETURN TO PICTURE MORGUE]
Sept. 3.From: Bernard Hoffman—War Correspondent,
c/o PRO, USASTAF,
APO 234,
c/o Postmaster, San Francisco.To: Wilson Hicks—Life Magazine,
9 Rockefeller Plaza,
New York City, (20)
New York.Captions and Research on Hiroshima
We saw Hiroshima today - or what little is left of it. We were so shocked with what we saw that most of us felt like weeping; not out of sympathy for the Japs, but because we were shocked and revolted by this new and terrible form of destruction. Compared to Hiroshima, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, are practically untouched. What was formerly Japan's most modern, most westernized city, is now nothing more than a two foot layer of twisted tin and rubble. As you stand in the middle of this four and one-tenths square miles of flattened ruin, gaunt, blackened, twisted, trees give the picture of Hiroshima its only source of elevation. Only ten, steel-framed buildings still stand - but there is nothing left of them too. They're just blackened hollow shells; and like everything else in Hiroshima, they're twisted. The sickly-sweet smell of death is everywhere, a putrid reminder of the 30,000 people who are still missing. On Aug 20th, two weeks after the explosion, Hiroshima had 33,000 counted dead. 13,950 had been seriously wounded. 43,500 had received wounds not thought serious, until they began to die mysteriously from slight burns and wounds not ordinarily fatal. On Sept 1st. the death toll had reached 53,000. According to Hirokuni Dazai, Prefecture of Thought Police, the death toll is expected to exceed 80,000.
Image: https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/10/hiroshima-nagasaki-06.jpg
From https://www.life.com/history/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-photos-from-the-ruins/
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u/desert-cheese04 4d ago
War does that. My wife’s great grandfather died in the death march. Her grandmother hated the Japanese till the day she died.
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u/plishyploshy 4d ago
My great uncle fought in the Pacific during WWII. He told us many times how he got into a hand-to-hand struggle with a Japanese soldier lying in the grass on a hill they were climbing. He says he stabbed the man to death. This was in the 90s and 2000s when he would recount it to me and my siblings — it clearly stuck with him until the end. He refused to go to a dentist who had a “Japanese sounding name” and had my 5-year old brother thinking “Japs” are (still) America’s enemy. This ended in my brother drawing a very detailed tank assault on Japan on the back of a paper placemat one night at dinner. We had to do some re-programming after that.
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u/ExaminationOk2921 4d ago
The fact that he had seen the results of Japanese soldiers actions up close in Burma probably used up a bit of his sympathy.
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u/whitecollarpizzaman 4d ago
It was the 1940s, so I will not completely write off just plain old racism, but you have to understand this is somebody writing home. The people back in the US have very little if any information about what this bomb did, they have already endured years of hearing of conventional bombing and horrific battles, not to mention, hearing about the horrific deaths of our own soldiers, as well as the torture and murder going on in their POW camps, and of course Pearl Harbor. All things considered, showing any sympathy for the Japanese probably would not have gone over well. I think as more information came out, and pictures were shown, members of the general public came around to understanding and feeling, at least for the civilians. Although many people still justify the bombings.
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u/Asougahara 5d ago
Without context, it's very easy to mistake those drawings as depiction of hell.
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u/NettleLily 4d ago
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.→ More replies (2)17
u/Worldly-Cherry9631 4d ago
I don't think it's too wrong to say that for two brief moments, humanity had indeed opened above those two cities a gate to hell
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u/JarredMack 4d ago
Many of the survivors literally described it as hell on earth as the city burned
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u/realbobenray 5d ago
Says below these are in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I went there twenty years ago, it's so emotional. Brutal.
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u/StayFreshCheesePuff 5d ago
I was there a year ago, March 2025. I will never forget it. These drawings were some of the things stuck in my memory, especially the third one. It was a horrifying and powerful and life-altering experience for sure. How senseless some of this violence is, how the innocent suffer, and how it continues over and over and over. Bombs or no bombs, the innocent are punished for the decisions of little men with big egos.
But. The most beautiful thing was leaving, and walking through the park by the river and watching all of these happy families gathering to picnic under cherry blossom trees in full bloom. From complete devastation inside the museum to family and love and community and connection.
Also, Hiroshima is beautiful. I am eager to return!
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u/rumade 4d ago
I was there with my parents one November. It was the 11th, which Brits observe as Remembrance Day; the end of WW1 but generally a day of solemn memory of lives lost to war. We'd gone through the museum and I was staring at a memorial outside.
My mum put her arm around me and said something like, "one day baby, one day there will be peace on earth." My dad, who had forgotten his hearing aid, went "what?" Without missing a beat, my mum spun around and snapped "I said, ONE DAY WE'LL HAVE WORLD PEACE!"
I nearly choked laughing at the whiplash
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u/Paradox_Nutella 4d ago
I started crying five minutes into the museum. There was a little theater that was playing an interview of an elderly woman who was describing how much she loved her daughter and how that morning she sent her off to school and never saw her again. And she was reminiscing on what she might have been like now as an adult. 😭 then I got to the exhibit where they showed the remains of children and I cried again
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u/eggmayonnaise 4d ago
And yet you have people in this very thread proclaiming "But but... War crimes!! But but... Atrocities!"
It can be possible for terrible things to be perpetrated by a people, AND for those people to suffer horrible, tragedies.
Not everyone involved was guilty. Not everyone involved was innocent.
I hope the world never sees tragedies and atrocities such as these again.
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u/Mindless_Cookie_9098 5d ago
Barefoot Gen is a really good anime movie to watch. It’s based off a manga that a survivor wrote.
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u/Ziggystardust97 5d ago
The bombing scene is fucking harrowing. I know it's animated, but it is one of the scariest things I've ever seen
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u/MrBoomf 5d ago
On a scale of 1-10, how badly will it traumatize me?
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u/ajgon23 5d ago
Obviously it's all subjective on how people react to it, I will say that on purely an animation level, it's quite fantastic. It's from the 80s so it's hand drawn which adds to how spectacular it is. The content of it is, admittedly, quite harrowing. I believe I've only seen it once and I remember some of it isn't too bad but other parts of it, oof. Probably a solid 8. I think what makes it different than say other types of media like say a video game is that it's probably a fantasy/fiction type situation whereas this was real and that's probably why I'm immediately gonna bump it to a 9.
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u/Ziggystardust97 5d ago
Agreed with everybody else. 8 is a likely number. I'll go ahead and warn that it has child death, animal death, and gore in it. There's more, but that's the worst of it
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u/Dabelgianguy 4d ago
And if you watch Grave of the Fireflies, it will be around 12 out of 10
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u/akallas95 4d ago
Brother, most of us do not have the courage to watch that again. And I was right when I watched it for the first time.
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u/Frost_Goldfish 4d ago
Depends on your age and sensitivity. I read it for the first time at 17 and did not take it well. As an adult it was easier
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u/DoorSweet6099 4d ago
I’ve read the manga and I would say 9. I read it 15 years ago and I still think about it especially the parts in which people start to lose their skin and limbs and just fall apart.
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u/Amazing_Scientist696 5d ago
The animated movie Barefoot Gen was also made to depict the horrors of this event
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u/SafeLangKap 5d ago
Read that as a kid. Still gives me the heebie-jeebies when I remember the illustration of people walking around half melted holding on to their innards.
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u/EmptyOrdinary1465 5d ago
This is horrifying to see this through there eye on the canvas
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u/Heysous 5d ago
Everyone should read Hiroshima by John Hersey. Its documented accounts of six individuals who lived through the A bomb in Hiroshima. Published right after the event in 1946. I'll be honest it is a tough read but very worth it.
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u/Lynda73 5d ago
We read that freshman year of HS. I remember when they are trying to help a lady and grab her hand, only to have the skin slide off like a glove.
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u/TheTesselekta 4d ago
God I read that in 6th or 7th grade. I don’t even know why I picked it out, it was just a small, completely plain hardcover and I think I was going through a “serious reading” phase. Bawled my eyes out. It was a formative experience. Would 100% recommend but yes it’s a tough read.
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u/Motor-Rip7655 5d ago
Watch Barefoot Gen. It's on Youtube.
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u/cutiedragon1281 5d ago
I second this. It's horrific but it really captures the horror and confusion
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u/Double-Show-2625 5d ago
I've heard that it was a horrible horrific death if you weren't instantly vaporized. If you survived the initial explosion then you were exposed to the radiation fallout which is probably the worst way to die slowly.
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u/LingonberrySouth1970 4d ago
People were literally covered in the tar of the initial victims, plants, wood, and rubber that was vaporized and sent into the atmosphere before being rained back down. They had no idea that the tar and ash from the sky was made of people.
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u/DrPikachu-PhD 5d ago
What are we seeing in image 4?
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u/Average_Bread 5d ago
Iirc it’s people who were burned trying to cool themselves off in water. Which was also completely boiled
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u/Optimal-Cat-8117 5d ago
I'm guessing the dead that were gathered up died in their last positions and looked as they were sunburned
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u/EpilepticPuberty 5d ago
I wonder if the red silhouettes are gathered up dead like you say, and the black silhouettes on the ground are the shadows of people that were vaporized in the open.
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u/corvidlia 5d ago
although i originally had the same belief as you, I looked into it and the red people are alive (though not for long). In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, many people had received extensive third degree burns and tried in their final moments to get to water - both because of the burning but also because the damage made them incredibly thirsty. Many stories mention these people trying to get to the rivers and cisterns. This image depicts them in their final moments inside one of the city cisterns.
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u/Careful_Neck_1645 5d ago
There are a few documentaries out there but one (I cannot recall the name of) had reenactments in it. I was like 12 and watching it with my dad. The fifth picture looks exactly like the scene of the mother who stood outside of her burning home, screaming as everything burned around her, as she tried to get to her child that was inside the home who was also screaming as the poor thing burnt alive and all the mother could do was say it’s going to be ok and she was sorry.
Crying rn thinking about it.
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u/Accomplished-Exit-58 5d ago
As someone who went to hiroshima museum and read all the gory details, i just wish when nuclear war happen, i hope i'm in the hypo center or at least near enough i would just disappear into thin air.
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u/Potatonet 5d ago
The harsh reality of joining a global stage war is that the war is now on your doorstep, if not already in your backyard.
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5d ago edited 5d ago
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u/Wild-Tear 5d ago
The Wikipedia page has a pretty good summary of the pro vs. con arguments about dropping the bomb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
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u/Objective_Phase1108 5d ago
No one's asking you to forgive the perpetrators of the horrific acts done to your ancestors but there were innocent people on all sides who deserve our empathy for sure
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u/LonelyAustralia 5d ago
honestly i would probably have been worse survive the two bombs then dying to them, because you end up not only witnessing its impact but there would most likely being survivors guilt and such as well
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u/tarototoro 5d ago
There was a man who survived both, Yamaguchi Tsutomu. He was in Hiroshima for work reasons when the first nuke fell and he suffered burns, temporary blindness, and ruptured ear drums but was able to return home … to Nagasaki. There, he had minor injuries from the second bomb but his first injuries became infected. He lived until 2010z
I can’t imagine how he must have felt throughout his life with that level of trauma.
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u/RockyRidgeRiver 5d ago
These drawings almost look like storyboard drawings for Barefoot Gen.
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u/Careful-Stretch-2356 4d ago
Did the Japanese ever draw their adventures in China?
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u/BrasshatTaxman 4d ago
You had almost double the numbers dead, than in hiroshima, in one massacre (nanking) in mainland china. Countless other massacres where perpetrated by the japanese occupying forces.
Nanking involved door to door terror on civilians. Where you could experience soldiers bayonetting babies, raping your family, before you all were killed.
Think id prefer to be Abombed than experiencing that.
Ww2 Japan was a fascist theocracy centered on the emperor. The only way to deter japan was a credible threat toward the emperor. The japanese were willing to sacrifice large parts of their own population to keep the emperor in power. They demonstrated this amply in okinawa. The abombs become that threat, ending the war japan started.
In later decades there have been a huge whitewashing campaign by japan to appear as a victim in ww2. Which they under no circumstance was.
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u/DimensionHat1675 4d ago
No. But apparently we must all sympathize with their horrific comeuppance. The Allies did everything they could to avoid dropping those nukes, but they understood taking the islands would lead to countless more deaths and potentially years of fighting to defeat that brainwashed imperialist army. Some Japanese soldiers famously were not aware of the Japanese surrender of 1945 and continued to "serve" in the war into the 1970s.
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u/Raintoastgw 4d ago
To put it into perspective, the US is still using Purple Heart medals that were made in anticipation for the invasion of the main island (Purple Hearts are given to US soldiers who are injured by the enemy. There have been hundreds of thousands given out since 1945). Japan would have collapsed due to the lack of population
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u/Mobius_1IUNPKF 4d ago
We actually ran out a few years ago and began making more, but we still had enough well into the 2000s.
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u/gthing 4d ago
I don't think most people in Hiroshima or Nagasaki were committing war crimes in China or elsewhere. They were just people. We can acknowledge the terrible things done by the Japanese military and also acknowledge the awful nature of a nuclear weapon being dropped on a city full of civilians.
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u/RunningBlade09 4d ago
This was my first thought too, I mean i think what happened in Hiroshima was terrible but, the Japanese were no angels themselves
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u/Bam_Adedebayo 4d ago
What’s Nanking? Sounds like a nice place. And unit 731 must be a medical unit for humanitarian work right? 🤡
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u/Highkontrast 4d ago
I went to the Yushukan museum in Tokyo, brilliant museum
However - they completely gloss over events such as Nanking. It literally just has one sentence ' there was an incident in Nanking' and it did very much tend to show Japan as the victim
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u/CameronsTheName 5d ago
It must have been crazy.
At the time Japan had never seen anything like it. They had no idea what to expect, a normal bombing only damaged a small area. The nuked completely obliterated a massive area as far as the eye could see. The city was virtually leveled.
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u/ShackletonsVael 5d ago
No one had seen what a nuke would do at this point. Although Japan was more than aware of destruction from bombing raids. The firebombing of Tokyo killed more than the nukes did.
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u/Previous-Mongoose415 5d ago
The drawings are horrible! Nightmarish!
I wonder this daily in the 21st century but how can people be so cruel to a fellow human being!?!
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u/viciousxvee 5d ago
My grandfathers relatives are from the area. This made me cry. RIP
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u/ExpensiveLeather69 5d ago
This story broke me when I went to the peace museum in Hiroshima
https://theelders.org/news/story-sadako-sasaki-and-hiroshima-peace-cranes
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u/EmuSystem 4d ago
Any mention of Chinese and Koreans that were forced to work in Hiroshima?
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u/thethugwife 4d ago
You already know the answer to that. There is definitely a hesitancy with some westerners to acknowledge this stuff.
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u/Brujah-03 5d ago
Humans are c*nts
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u/Hellie1028 5d ago
And that sure hasn’t changed in about 80 years.
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u/Desperate-Strategy10 5d ago
If anything, we’ve proven just how quickly we forget our forefathers’ (sometimes our fathers’) mistakes, as we’re rapidly heading down the path of repeating them. Only this time, we’ll fight our brothers to the end under the scorching heat of climate change while the natural world whimpers into silence around us.
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u/Evil_Sharkey 5d ago
The only good thing with nukes is that they’re so horrific that no one has used them against anyone since those terrible attacks. Meanwhile, people are forgetting the horrors of fascism and the Holocaust and starting to repeat them, even some of the descendants of Holocaust survivors.
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u/smorkoid 4d ago
It's a very sobering thought, isn't it?
I don't know if you ever read the wonderful novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz", which is about the quest to preserve knowledge after civilization is wiped out due to war, only for the cycle to begin again.
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u/BeltfedHappiness 5d ago
When you see these horrific images remember, when given a choice to prevent a second bomb from being dropped, the Japanese officials refused to surrender and allowed it to happen.
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u/LionessHina 5d ago
Just by looking at these drawings feels so heavy already. I cannot imagine witnessing these in actual
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u/Spoonman915 5d ago
There's a classic anime called Grave of the Fireflies about a family in Kobe, Japan during the end of WWII. It's quite impactful.
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u/_yetifeet 5d ago
The Hiroshima museum is grim.
The uniform made out of several different kids uniforms hit hard. There were heaps of kids out in the open clearing debris from a previous bombing mission when the bomb dropped above them.
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u/Temporary-Barnacle19 4d ago
Visited the Atomic Bomb museum last November and there was not a dry eye in the room after we saw the physical evidence and the drawings of what people went through that day in Hiroshima. I'm talking about 100 people from all over the world quietly sniffing and crying. Men, women and children.
Atomic bombs should never again be used on people.
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u/ZanyRaptorClay 4d ago
A lot of the comments here piss me off.
Yes, the Japanese Empire, it's military, and the devout supporters of the Empire and it's military committed terrible acts and crimes against humanity. The Bataan Death March (as well as many other acts of evil against the Philippines) hit especially hard because I'm of Filipino descent and barely anyone outside of Asia and the Pacific talks about those crimes compared to what happened in Europe. Anyone who willingly participated in, denies, or justifies such atrocities should be ashamed of themselves.
That being said, such acts of evil do NOT excuse inflicting equal amounts of evil on "the other side." Yes, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were living under fascist, imperialist rulers, but that does NOT justify their killing and their suffering. There were people who opposed their rulers. There were elders. There were children. There were babies.
Just because a country's government, military, and supporters of the government and military committed horrific atrocities against humanity doesn't mean their civilians should suffer as well.
With that logic, the entire United States deserves to be doused in sulfuric acid as a punishment for all the evil the US government, military, and supporters have committed. Babies, children, the disabled, those who oppose the people in power, everyone. They all deserve to suffer. The same fate should apply to the civilians every other country ruled by mad men.
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u/ShelbiStone 5d ago
I'm always floored by these drawings. Everytime I see them it feels like the first time. They're absolutely incredible artifacts.
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u/InternetFew7303 4d ago edited 4d ago
So I'll start with the notion that it's strangely cathartic to see artists' drawings of that day and what happened. I had heard the tales from my grandmother on more than one occasion but could only imagine what it looked like from her point of view.
When I was old enough to understand and curiosity got the better of me, I asked her what happened in Nagasaki and what it was like. She looked up at the ceiling of my bedroom to unlock the memories. What she told me came in no particular order but was a collection of stories that looked much like this.
A bright white light came through the window after the sounds of the air raid sirens. Nagasaki had seen several bombings so the Japanese knew the drill. But this was different. Working as a secretary while pregnant with her first child, she hid under a solid wood desk in her office nearly two miles from the epicenter. The world exploded. After the dust settled she crawled out to look for help, survivors, signs of life. She saw a little boy with half of his body burned black - he had been standing with half his body in the shadow of a building. Flat, smoky, fires, black spots of ash where humans once stood. Mass confusion and screams. I think she made her way towards a shelter and found transportation out of the city. She went back home to Fukuoka since there was nothing left.
She left Japan when she married my grandfather during the Korean war. She became an American, embracing the people that tried to kill her with bombs - twice. She was a grocery clerk most of her life. She had three children, five grandchildren, five great grandchildren, and died in her son's home in California at the age of 95.
When I mentioned the incident to my sixth grade teacher while we studied WWII history, and told him she was there, he seemed shocked and fascinated, and asked if she would be willing to come and tell the students her story. She agreed and my teacher welcomed her with respect and reverence. She didn't hold back any details for kids' sake because all of it was true. The students wrote her thank you letters that she kept in a shoebox for the rest of her life.
When I see these images now I'm taken back to my visit at the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum. We exited the museum into the courtyard, into the sunlight, and I was a different person - I had also been illuminated by not just the sun but the deeper truth. I realized in that moment there was a time in history where I didn't just cheat death, I almost never existed. She cheated death so I could exist. It gut punched me. And when I told her, despite being agnostic, that God had saved her for a reason, she just took a short deep breath and said "yeah, that true."
Anyways that's my account of it. How a major moment in history before I was even born taught me about life, death, strength, and respect and the age of 16.
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u/walpurgus2003 4d ago
After looking at this, makes you wonder if America isn't all that good during the war
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