“You had to weave through the streets avoiding the bodies. Their skin, burst open, was hanging down in rags. Their faces were burnt black. I put my hand on my camera, but it was such a hellish apparition that I couldn’t press the shutter. I hesitated about twenty minutes before I finally pushed it and took the first picture.”1
On the morning of August 6, 1945, Hiroshima daily newspaper photographer Yoshito Matsushige captured hell on Earth — one of only a handful of people to photograph the nuclear attack from the ground.
Matsushige made only five photos on August 6. He recounted his experience in the 1995 book, Japan At War: An Oral History.
“I approached and took this second shot. It was such a cruel sight. The viewfinder was clouded with tears when I took it.”2
“I’m often asked why I didn’t take more pictures. Some even criticize me for that. How can they ask such a thing? They didn’t see the reality. It was too overwhelming.”3
Sixteen-year-old Toshio Fukada was less than two miles away from ground zero. “There was a flash and I was blown off my feet by the blast,” Fukada told The Chugoku Shimbun in 2005.
He then saw an ominous, orange cloud rising in the sky, grabbed his Konica Baby Pearl camera and made two photos (above, and below).
Two minutes after the blinding flash of light, Mitsuo Matsushige used a view camera he was borrowing from a friend and shot this photo of the atomic cloud, filled with glowing fireballs. Matsushige was 5 miles from the detonation site.
Masaki Oki was working at the Kure Naval Arsenal 12 miles from the epicenter, when he heard a roar. Oki said the atomic cloud was “glittering.”
Gonichi Kimura photographed the growing cloud 2.5 miles from the epicenter.
Kimura is more well-known for this photo of a burn victim — patterns from the kimono she was wearing were burned onto her skin.
Goro Oda told a Japanese newspaper in 1986 that he felt a flash in the kitchen of his home, then saw a cloud over the mountains that resembled a “peach-colored cream puff.”
“I saw a blue flash that looked like a short circuit, followed by the sound of a blast and a beautiful pink cloud in a shape of mushroom near the center of Hiroshima,” Nobuhiko Kodaira told the The Asahi Shimbun in 2010.
Seventeen-year-old Seiso Yamada captured the atomic cloud with his Baby Pearl. “The cloud looked sort of black or vermillion, and it billowed up in the sky. I had never seen a cloud like that,” Yamada recalled to The Chugoku Shimbun in 2005. “When I aimed my camera again at the cloud, it didn’t fit into the viewfinder.”
It’s unclear who shot this photograph of the atomic cloud, which resurfaced in 2013.
TIME inexplicably published what appears to be a color-treated version of the photo on their July 29, 1985 cover, credited to “K. TATUSHI.”
Yes I published this in my other piece but it should be seen again. And again.
Asahi Shimbun newspaper photographer Hajime Miyatake made this horrific image of one of the bomb victims.
Miyatake hid his negatives from the military under his porch for over six years, until the end of the American occupation. This photo was eventually published in the Asahi Picture News weekly magazine, August 6, 1952.
TIME should have considered this for their cover, instead of a manipulated, easily-digested, sanitized puffy cloud photo.
Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan At War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992), 392.
Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan At War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992), 393.
Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan At War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992), 395.