The Bombing of Nagasaki, Part Two
A Japanese military photographer documented the immediate aftermath of an atomic bomb, capturing a "monochromatic, soundless, hell."
Yosuke Yamahata arrived in Nagasaki by train at 3 a.m. on August 10, 1945, just hours after the city was decimated by an American atomic bomb. In total darkness, Yamahata trudged towards the epicenter of the blast, nearly tripping on the corpses of humans and animals along the way.
“A warm wind began to blow. Here and there in the distance I saw many small fires, like elf-fires, smoldering. Nagasaki had been completely destroyed,” Yamahata wrote. “It was truly a hell on earth.”1
Yamahata, a photographer with the Japanese Army’s News and Information Bureau, was sent to Nagasaki to create military propaganda. But the 119 images Yamahata made that day, some taken with the Leica his father gave him when he turned 18, became the definitive photographic record — evidence — of the devastating effects of a nuclear weapon.
Incredibly, Yamahata’s film was not confiscated by the Japanese or the Americans. He held onto the negatives, and with the exception of a few Japanese newspapers, his images went unseen for years until 1952, when his book, Atomized Nagasaki, was published.
The most well known photo taken by Yamahata in the aftermath was one of his first — a wounded, heavily-bandaged woman standing next to her son wearing a padded air raid hood, each of them holding a ball of rice.
There are multiple versions of this image, some cropped similar to this one from the National Archives (Yamahata is not credited).
Another variation shows their entire bodies and more of the ruined landscape. But notice the top of the image, it’s heavily dodged-out. This version and several others shot by Yamahata are in the Getty archive — again, sadly, uncredited.
Below is the original, uncropped image. Reportedly, one of Yamahata’s cameras was malfunctioning, so that could have caused the issue, though I believe some of this is a processing error. Notice how the two white spots to the right are hastily retouched. A malfunctioning shutter wouldn’t have cause those.
The Associated Press has a cropped version of this photo in their archive, inexplicably credited: “AP Photo/Str.” — Yamahata was certainly not a stringer for the AP.
In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the attack, Yamahata’s archive was resurrected for an exhibition, a book, a website, and a film. Yamahata’s negatives, damaged over time, were hand-delivered to the United States by his son, Shogo Yamahata. They were then drum-scanned and meticulously retouched.
The results are remarkable.
A Japanese public television network produced this fascinating video about the retouching process and the exhibition.
An alternate frame from this scene was used on the cover of Atomized Nagasaki, and in Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibition and book in 1955.
Yamahata documented the fallout alongside two News and Information Bureau colleagues: writer Jun Higashi and painter Eiji Yamada, who can be seen sketching on the left in this hellish landscape.
Yamada can also be seen on the left in this photo, in army fatigues, holding a sketchbook.
The drawing by Eiji Yamada from that scene is titled, This Woman is Alive, But Can’t Move.
One of Yamahata's most haunting and disturbing photos is of a girl, seemingly in shock, standing next to a charred body. The composition is jarring.
“From the outside, people seemed very serene and calm,” Yamahata recalled when describing this photo in an 1962 interview. “She stands there, simply staring, not even crying, as if waiting to see if any of her relatives will come home. She doesn’t look particularly sad. Her expression — it was just a blank.”2
The girl in the photo was later identified as 15-year-old Chieko Ryu. “I looked at this charred body and thought, ‘that was once my mother,’” Ryu said in a 2020 interview. “I briefly touched her foot and it just fell apart. Fell apart like dry sand.”
Yamahata’s body of work from August 10th is staggering and difficult to fully process. I keep coming back to this captivating photo of a girl emerging from a bomb shelter. It’s unexpected, complicated.
This was another heavily damaged negative.
The partial contact sheet shows the frame before — it’s unsalvageable.
The symbolism is overt. Outside of her puzzling expression, the bomb shelter is tomb-like — echoes of Rembrandt’s The Raising of Lazarus.
It was later revealed that Yamahata staged the photo. The woman, identified as Sanae Mishio, said in a 1995 interview with NHK that Yamahata directed her into the bomb shelter and asked her to smile.
“He told me he wanted a smile, and I forced myself to make one,” Mishio said.
I hold no judgement of Yamahata. He wasn’t a journalist, he was a military propagandist dropped into an unprecedented situation. Asking her to smile might have been a message to the Americans who dropped the bomb, or just…shock. It’s impossible to understand.
Regardless, here's how LIFE magazine introduced Yamahata's photos from Nagasaki to the American public in 1952. Apologies to Leonard McCombe, but Yamahata should have had the cover.
The caption on the photo of Mishio reads: “LUCKY GIRL, who had gone into shelter after earlier warning and not come out after all clear, emerges amid ruins unhurt and wearing an incongruous smile.”
There’s no doubt that Yamahata was deeply affected by what he experienced that day. In his 1962 interview with Hidezoh Kondo, Yamahata seemed to be wrestling with his memories. “In such a situation, which words cannot begin to describe, you must have been paralyzed with fright…” Kondo asked. Yamahata responded, “It is perhaps unforgivable, but in fact at the time I was completely calm and composed. In other words, perhaps it was just too much, too enormous to absorb.”
Yosuke Yamahata died from cancer in 1966.
Side note: Motion picture footage from Nagasaki (and Hiroshima) was suppressed from public view for decades. The only known footage of the immediate aftermath was captured by Japanese filmmaker Akira Iwasaki, but it was confiscated by American-led occupation forces. Iwasaki’s footage was buried until 1968, when filmmaker and historian Erik Barnouw obtained the film from the National Archives and created the documentary Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945.3
Munehito Kitajima (ed.), Atomized Nagasaki: The Bombing of Nagasaki — A Photographic Record (Tokyo: Daiichi Publishing, 1952).
Rupert Jenkins (ed.), Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata. August 10, 1945 (California: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995), 104.
Erik Barnouw, dir. Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945. 1970. Streaming on the Internet Archive.