Renewable Revolution

“The Light Was Indescribable”

“It all happened in an instant,” Yoshida remembered. He had barely seen the blinding light half a mile away before a powerful force hit him on his right side and hurled him into the air. “The heat was so intense that I curled up like surume [dried grilled squid].” In what felt like dreamlike slow motion, Yoshida was blown backward 130 feet across a field, a road, and an irrigation channel, then plunged to the ground, landing on his back in a rice paddy flooded with shallow water.

Inside the Mitsubishi Ohashi weapons factory, Do-oh had been wiping perspiration from her face and concentrating on her work when PAAAAAHT TO!—an enormous blue-white flash of light burst into the building, followed by an earsplitting explosion. Thinking a torpedo had detonated inside the Mitsubishi plant, Do-oh threw herself onto the ground and covered her head with her arms just as the factory came crashing down on top of her.

In his short-sleeved shirt, trousers, gaiters, and cap, Taniguchi had been riding his bicycle through the hills in the northwest corner of the valley when a sudden burning wind rushed toward him from behind, propelling him into the air and slamming him facedown on the road. “The earth was shaking so hard that I hung on as hard as I could so I wouldn’t get blown away again.”

Nagano was standing inside the school gymnasium-turned-airplane-parts factory, protected to some degree by distance and the wooded mountains that stood between her and the bomb. “A light flashed—pi-KAAAAH!” she remembered. Nagano, too, thought a bomb had hit her building. She fell to the ground, covering her ears and eyes with her thumbs and fingers according to her training as windows crashed in all around her. She could hear pieces of tin and broken roof tiles swirling and colliding in the air outside.

Two miles southeast of the blast, Wada was sitting in the lounge of Hotarujaya Terminal with other drivers, discussing the earlier derailment. He saw the train cables flash. “The whole city of Nagasaki was—the light was indescribable—an unbelievably massive light lit up the whole city.” A violent explosion rocked the station. Wada and his friends dived for cover under tables and other furniture. In the next instant, he felt like he was floating in the air before being slapped down on the floor. Something heavy landed on his back, and he fell unconscious.

Beneath the still-rising mushroom cloud, a huge portion of Nagasaki had vanished. Tens of thousands throughout the city were dead or injured. On the floor of Hotarujaya Terminal, Wada lay beneath a fallen beam. Nagano was curled up on the floor of the airplane parts factory, her mouth filled with glass slivers and choking dust. Do-oh lay injured in the wreckage of the collapsed Mitsubishi factory, engulfed in smoke. Yoshida was lying in a muddy rice paddy, barely conscious, his body and face brutally scorched. Taniguchi clung to the searing pavement near his mangled bicycle, not yet realizing that his back was burned off. He lifted his eyes just long enough to see a young child “swept away like a fleck of dust.”

Sixty seconds had passed.