Eighth of December. Early this morning, as I lay in bed thinking about all the things I had to do today and nursing Sonoko (our daughter, who was born in June of this year), I clearly heard the words coming from one of the neighbors’ radios.

The Imperial Headquarters of the Army and Navy have announced that as of shortly before dawn this morning, 8 December, the Imperial Army and Navy have entered a state of war with British and American forces in the western Pacific.

The words seeped through the slats in the rain shutters and into the darkness of my room with all the strength and vividness of sunlight. In the same crisp, clear voice, the announcement was repeated. As I lay there quietly listening to it, my entire life changed. It was as if I were bathed in a powerful beam of light that left my body transparent. Or as if the Holy Spirit had breathed through me, leaving a single, cold flower petal lodged in my heart. Nippon, too, has changed. From this morning on, it’s not the same Nippon.

—from Dazai Osamu, “December 8”

In 1945, my fourteen-year-old brother, Ishii Kohei, was a student at the First Xinjing Middle School in Manchuria, an area of China that had been occupied by Japan for nearly fifteen years. In order to help with the Japanese war effort—which was going badly by then—my brother and 120 of his classmates were sent to do manual labor on a National Service Farm in Dongning, near the then-Soviet border. There, on 9 August, my brother was caught up in the massive Soviet effort to drive the Japanese out of Manchuria.
     My brother was one of three million Japanese to die in the war, and as is the case with many Japanese casualties, no one knows the exact circumstances of his death. Many people still do not even know where the remains of their loved ones lie. And so my brother’s death is not only a part of my own family’s grieving but also a part of our nation’s history. In Japan, when someone dies in vain, he is said to have died "a dog’s death." If the circumstances that led to my brother’s death are not taught in schools—along with the truth of so many other deaths of the war years—his dying will indeed have been no different from that of a dog’s.

—from Ishii Shinpei, "The Canary That Forgot
Its Song: A Return to Wartime Manchuria"

Stills from Ogata Keiichi’s film
Hiroshima through Light

Whereas most conventional bombs produce only one destructive effect—the shock wave—nuclear weapons produce many destructive effects. At the moment of the explosion, when the temperature of the weapon material, instantly gasified, is at the superstellar level, the pressure is millions of times the normal atmospheric pressure. Immediately, radiation, consisting mainly of gamma rays, which are a very high-energy form of electromagnetic radiation, begins to stream outward into the environment. This is called the "initial nuclear radiation," and is the first of the destructive effects of a nuclear explosion. In an air burst of a one-megaton bomb—a bomb with the explosive yield of a million tons of TNT, which is a medium-sized weapon in present-day nuclear arsenals—the initial nuclear radiation can kill unprotected human beings in an area of some six square miles. Virtually simultaneously with the initial nuclear radiation, in a second destructive effect of the explosion, an electromagnetic pulse is generated by the intense gamma radiation acting on the air. In a high-altitude detonation, the pulse can knock out electrical equipment over a wide area by inducing a powerful surge of voltage through various conductors, such as antennas, overhead power lines, pipes, and railroad tracks....

When the fusion and fission reactions have blown themselves out, a fireball takes shape. As it expands, energy is absorbed in the form of X rays by the surrounding air, and then the air re-radiates a portion of that energy into the environment in the form of the thermal pulse—a wave of blinding light and intense heat—which is the third of the destructive effects of a nuclear explosion.…

The thermal pulse of a one-megaton bomb lasts for about ten seconds and can cause second-degree burns in exposed human beings at a distance of nine and a half miles, or in an area of more than two hundred and eighty square miles....

As the fireball expands, it also sends out a blast wave in all directions, and this is the fourth destructive effect of the explosion. The blast wave of an air-burst one-megaton bomb can flatten or severely damage all but the strongest buildings within a radius of four and a half miles....

As the fireball burns, it rises, condensing water from the surrounding atmosphere to form the characteristic mushroom cloud. If the bomb has been set off on the ground or close enough to it so that the fireball touches the surface, a so-called ground burst, a crater will be formed, and tons of dust and debris will be fused with the intensely radioactive fission products and sucked up into the mushroom cloud. This mixture will return to earth as radioactive fallout, most of it in the form of fine ash, in the fifth destructive effect of the explosion. Depending upon the composition of the surface, from 40 to 70 percent of this fallout—often called the "early" or "local" fallout—descends to earth within about a day of the explosion, in the vicinity of the blast and downwind from it, exposing human beings to radiation disease, an illness that is fatal when exposure is intense.