The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Flash of Light,
Wall of Fire
Japanese Photographs Documenting the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski
Unit 5: Making War, Making Peace, Confronting Trauma
Trauma: Personal Memory v. Collective Remembrance
Hiroshima
● Population at the time: 350,000
○ Estimated death toll: 140,000 (+10,000)
Collection of photographs by Japanese photographers
- “we see postnuclear Hiroshima and Nagaski, both their built environments and the people
who inhabited them, through the lenses of the Japanese themselves”
- STATEMENT OF INTENT: “This introduction is meant to open the camera eye to give
readers a wider view of the contexts, historical and personal, within which these images
were made and continue to be employed”
The Cities
● “prefectural capitals, industrial hubs, and important seaports that drew their sustenance
from water, a special symbol of life for the Japanese”
● Hiroshima
○ Ujina Harbor
○ Center of military activity during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)
○ Headquarters of the Second General Army, the Chugoku Regional Army, and the
Army Marines
■ Garrisons contained some 43,000 soldiers
● Nagasaki
○ “Naples of Japan”
○ Only city where foreigners could trade
○ “Most international city in Japan” → opened in 1854 to foreigners (“British,
Russian, French, and Americans, along with the Chinese and Dutch, moved about
the city and lived wherever they pleased”)
Urakami Cathedral → “symbol of resurgent Catholic community in Nagasaki”
Pearl Harbor 1941, allies blockaded Japan’s coastal waters and shut down ports
“B-29”
, ● “Hiroshima and Nagaski had purposefully been spared to heighten the shock when the
atomic bombs finally came”
“Since its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japan had been fighting on and off for nearly fourteen
years”
● “The Allied blockade continued to choke commerce in a nation that relied on shipping to
conduct its business and feed its people”
○ “Operation Starvation” → “The rations for rice, a staple of the Japanese diet, fell
to a paltry two cups per person per month. By early August, the malnourished
Japanese were living on a meager diet of under 1,000 calories a day”
○ Privations: fuel oil and young men
April 1945 Peace Talks → hope to keep the sacred Showa Emperor on the Chrysanthemum
Throne
Tsutomu Yamaguchi and the Pika-Don
“‘Human torpedoes,’they were the undersea version of the deadly airborne kamikazes”
- Development of submarines to break the Allied blockade by carrying cargo under it
Pika-don : “flash-boom”
“Some people simply disappeared, atomized by the explosion and scattered like cosmic dust;
others became carbon shadows of themselves baked into sidewalks, buildings, and bridges; still
others were reduced to piles of smoking flesh”.
Radiation Sickness → “the result of transformations at the cellular level that could kill, maim,
and produce cancers of the thyroid, blood, and other parts of the body, sometimes years later”
- “dazed survivors wandered about in various states of affliction, some with skin that
seemed to be melting from their bodies, or eyeballs oozing from their sockets, or limbs
missing altogether”
- Muyu-byousha: “someone wandering about in an unconscious state of mind without any
sense of direction or purpose” → “psychic numbing”
“Survivors carried physical scars, often in the form of keloids from thermal burns, but also
emotional ones of guilt, depression, and suicidal impulses”
● “Hibakusha” – “bomb-affected persons” fear they bore a mutated genetic legacy.
○ “Some Japanese worried that radiation sickness itself was contagious”
● Yamaguchi: “He could not escape feeling that it had chased him from Hiroshima, as if to
mock the futility of flight”
Wall of Fire
Japanese Photographs Documenting the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski
Unit 5: Making War, Making Peace, Confronting Trauma
Trauma: Personal Memory v. Collective Remembrance
Hiroshima
● Population at the time: 350,000
○ Estimated death toll: 140,000 (+10,000)
Collection of photographs by Japanese photographers
- “we see postnuclear Hiroshima and Nagaski, both their built environments and the people
who inhabited them, through the lenses of the Japanese themselves”
- STATEMENT OF INTENT: “This introduction is meant to open the camera eye to give
readers a wider view of the contexts, historical and personal, within which these images
were made and continue to be employed”
The Cities
● “prefectural capitals, industrial hubs, and important seaports that drew their sustenance
from water, a special symbol of life for the Japanese”
● Hiroshima
○ Ujina Harbor
○ Center of military activity during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)
○ Headquarters of the Second General Army, the Chugoku Regional Army, and the
Army Marines
■ Garrisons contained some 43,000 soldiers
● Nagasaki
○ “Naples of Japan”
○ Only city where foreigners could trade
○ “Most international city in Japan” → opened in 1854 to foreigners (“British,
Russian, French, and Americans, along with the Chinese and Dutch, moved about
the city and lived wherever they pleased”)
Urakami Cathedral → “symbol of resurgent Catholic community in Nagasaki”
Pearl Harbor 1941, allies blockaded Japan’s coastal waters and shut down ports
“B-29”
, ● “Hiroshima and Nagaski had purposefully been spared to heighten the shock when the
atomic bombs finally came”
“Since its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japan had been fighting on and off for nearly fourteen
years”
● “The Allied blockade continued to choke commerce in a nation that relied on shipping to
conduct its business and feed its people”
○ “Operation Starvation” → “The rations for rice, a staple of the Japanese diet, fell
to a paltry two cups per person per month. By early August, the malnourished
Japanese were living on a meager diet of under 1,000 calories a day”
○ Privations: fuel oil and young men
April 1945 Peace Talks → hope to keep the sacred Showa Emperor on the Chrysanthemum
Throne
Tsutomu Yamaguchi and the Pika-Don
“‘Human torpedoes,’they were the undersea version of the deadly airborne kamikazes”
- Development of submarines to break the Allied blockade by carrying cargo under it
Pika-don : “flash-boom”
“Some people simply disappeared, atomized by the explosion and scattered like cosmic dust;
others became carbon shadows of themselves baked into sidewalks, buildings, and bridges; still
others were reduced to piles of smoking flesh”.
Radiation Sickness → “the result of transformations at the cellular level that could kill, maim,
and produce cancers of the thyroid, blood, and other parts of the body, sometimes years later”
- “dazed survivors wandered about in various states of affliction, some with skin that
seemed to be melting from their bodies, or eyeballs oozing from their sockets, or limbs
missing altogether”
- Muyu-byousha: “someone wandering about in an unconscious state of mind without any
sense of direction or purpose” → “psychic numbing”
“Survivors carried physical scars, often in the form of keloids from thermal burns, but also
emotional ones of guilt, depression, and suicidal impulses”
● “Hibakusha” – “bomb-affected persons” fear they bore a mutated genetic legacy.
○ “Some Japanese worried that radiation sickness itself was contagious”
● Yamaguchi: “He could not escape feeling that it had chased him from Hiroshima, as if to
mock the futility of flight”
