At 8:15 a.m. on August the 6th, 1945,

a single plane dropped a single bomb on

a single city on Japan's Honchu Island.

When that atomic bomb exploded over the

city of Hiroshima, it caused devastation

on an untold scale. The blast killed

more than a 100,000 people, left many

more with horrifying injuries, and

introduced the world to the power of a

nuclear weapon. 3 days later, at just

after 11:00 a.m. on August the 9th,

another plane dropped another bomb and

devastated another city. This time, it

was Nagasaki on Kyushu Island. This

second nuclear attack added tens of

thousands to the death toll and made it

very clear to Japan what kind of

weaponry they were facing.

But what came next? What happened after

all of this? Now you might already know

the answer to that. What came next was

the Soviet invasion of Manuria and the

Japanese surrender. What happened after

this was the beginning of the Cold War

and the age of nuclear anxiety.

But what about on the ground on what

used to be the streets of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki? Specifically, what happened to

the piles of bodies that were left

behind by the nuclear blasts? The

wounded, traumatized populations of two

cities now had to deal with the grim

logistics of handling all those dead.

But how would this even be possible in a

shattered, irradiated landscape? and

what lessons would be learned by

understanding how these people died.

Today, we're telling the story of the

bodies left behind at Hiroshima and

Nagasaki as we look into the aftermath

of the first and so far the only nuclear

attacks in human history and the grizzly

cleanup operation that followed.

Before we explore what happened to these

bodies, we need to get to grips with

just how many bodies were left after the

strikes. This is actually not an easy

question to answer. For Hiroshima, the

1945 population was around 340,000.

Around 40% of these people are believed

to have died by November of that same

year. As for Nagasaki, the details are a

little sketchier, but the best estimates

place the city's population between

195,000 and 240,000.

By the end of 1945,

somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000

people had lost their lives as a result

of the bombing. Addressing the

uncertainty, the Manhattan Project's

chief medical officer, Colonel Stafford

Warren, had this to say in a speech to

Congress in February 1946.

I'm embarrassed by the fact that we

could not come back with any definitive

figures that I'll be able to say were

more than a guess. The only actual fact

that we could get was that at the

beginning of October 1945, Nagasaki had

recorded the burning and cremation of

40,000 bodies. It's my belief that there

must have been 20 or 30,000 more in the

ruins, buried or consumed by the fire.

So, the simple answer of how many bodies

we're dealing with is we don't know.

This is why the estimated combined death

toll ranges from 110,000 to more than

210,000 with many more people dying

later on from related illnesses and

injuries. As well as uncertainties over

the population, the condition of the

bodies has also made accurate

assessments difficult. Some victims were

identified or died much later. And these

fatalities were fairly easy to count,

but many others were not identified.

Some were simply too close to the

hyperenter of the blast. In other words,

the place directly beneath the bombs as

they detonated. The bodies of these

people were almost completely and

instantly destroyed. They were not,

however, vaporized. It's a common

misconception that victims were reduced

to dust and vapor by the force of the

explosion, leaving no trace of the

physical person behind. This idea has

grown out of the disturbing shadows that

were found on the streets and walls of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath

of the bombing. But these shadows are

not the eerie remains of people.

Instead, they're the result of something

called thermal bleaching. The intense

blast scoured surfaces with thermal

energy. Any surface that was subjected

to this energy was bleached, becoming a

lighter color. If the thermal energy was

blocked though, for example, by a tree,

by a building, or by a person, then the

nearby surface was left untouched. This

resulted in disturbing shadows cast upon

the ground, which serve as frozen

imprints of the victim's last moments.

Rather than being vaporized, these

bodies would have been incinerated by

the heat. This means there would have

been traces of the victim left like

teeth or bone fragments. However, these

remains were often not identifiable as a

specific person or even a person at all.

This may have given the impression that

bodies closest to the hyperenter simply

vanished. Kumiko Arakawa experienced

this as she navigated the landscape of

destruction in Nagasaki. Kumiko

described an eerie scene. I don't recall

seeing a single corpse. It sounds

strange, I'm sure, but it is the truth.

There are countless tombstones all over

Nagasaki with a name inscription, but no

ikotssu cremated bone remains. But

Kumiko's experience is an unusual one.

Elsewhere in the city, bodies were

strewn across the ground. A huge number

of bodies. Shako Matsumoto was only a

young girl when the bomb hit. She

remembered the aftermath of the attack 3

days later.

I will never forget the hellscape that

awaited us. Half burnt bodies lay stiff

on the ground, eyeballs gleaming from

their sockets. Cattle lay dead along the

side of the road, their abdomen

grotesqually large and swollen.

Thousands of bodies bopped up and down

the river, bloated and purplish from

soaking up the water. This was a serious

issue for city authorities. If the two

municipalities were going to be reborn

in a post-war world, they'd first need

to deal with the thousands of bodies

that choked the streets. What's more,

this would need to be done quickly. The

bombs struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki on

August 6th and 9th with temperatures

reaching 32° C and an average relative

humidity of between 70 and 80%. August

is the hottest and most humid month of

the year in these parts of Japan. Bodies

decomposed rapidly in these conditions.

17-year-old Yoshiharu Tara remembered

the scenes from Nagasaki.

It was summer, so the corpses rotted

quickly. At first, the stench of the

decomposing corpses was terrible, but

after a while, I didn't notice it. But

how could the city authorities hope to

dispose of all these human remains so

quickly? How could they even get to the

bodies? Surely both cities were now

no-go areas racked with residual

radiation from the atomic blasts. Well,

actually, this wasn't a problem. It's

certainly true that many people received

critical doses of radiation poisoning,

but these victims were people who were

exposed to the initial blast itself. The

dangers of residual radiation weren't

quite so high. Remember, the Fat Man and

Little Boy bombs were the first of their

kind. This type of weapon had never been

used before and has mercifully never

been used again since. There were

certainly devastating bombs, but they

weren't exactly wellhoned killing

machines. The bombs exploded a

significant distance above the cities of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sending most of

the radiation away from the cities.

themselves. Jeffrey Hart of the

Radiation Effects Research Foundation

explained more. Because the burst

heights of the bombings of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki were at 600 m in the air and

503 m respectively, most of the

radiation, about 90%, was pulled up into

the atmosphere. Of course, there was

still a lot of radiation on the ground,

just not nearly as much as we might

expect. Also, any radiation that did

make it to the ground became relatively

safe quite quickly. The Hiroshima bomb

used uranium 235 to fuel its nuclear

chain reaction. The Nagasaki bomb used

plutonium 239. Both of these isotopes

have extremely long half- livives. The

plutonium half-life is 24,110

years, while the uranium has a halflife

of more than 700 million years. While

these are pretty dizzying numbers, they

don't tell us that much about how

dangerous the radiation was. Professor

Derek Hass explains more. Rate of decay

is inversely proportional to half-life.

So something with a long half-life is

not very radioactive.

The most dangerous isotope left over

from the bombs would have been iodine

131, but this has a very short halflife.

Professor H continues, "Within 1 day,

the radioactivity would have decayed by

a factor of 100,000. After 10 days, by a

factor of 1 million. After 10 years,

it's gone down by a factor of a

billion." So, in the days and weeks

following the blasts, wandering into the

disaster area wouldn't have been the

death sentence. We might assume residual

radiation actually wasn't a huge danger.

Far more dangerous was the wreckage and

rubble left behind by the explosion. As

Colonel Stafford Warren said, tens of

thousands of bodies were trapped within

destroyed buildings, and digging these

bodies out was a hazardous task. Rather

than risk Japanese lives with the job,

the authorities relied on forced

laborers from Korea. Shim Jinta was only

3 years old when the bomb fell on

Hiroshima, but his parents were both

Korean forced laborers and were

secondclass citizens in Japanese

society. Shim had this to say in a 2025

interview with the BBC. Korean workers

had to clean up the dead. At first, they

used stretchers, but there were too many

bodies. Eventually, they used dust pans

to gather corpses. Many forced laborers

died on these missions, which

contributed to the disproportionately

high death toll among Koreans in

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. is believed that

57% of the Koreans in Hiroshima died in

the bombing and its aftermath. By

comparison, the overall death toll in

both cities is thought to be just under

40%. But despite these hazardous

conditions, many bodies were recovered

and removed from the desolated cities.

So what actually happened to those

bodies? For the citizens left behind in

Nagasaki Androshima, they now wished to

process their grief and say full-on

goodbyes to loved ones taken too soon.

This meant holding funeral rights. In

Japan, theerary process begins very

quickly after death. Awake or a suya is

the first step in which friends and

family members offer their condolences

and honor the dead with prayers and

observances. Close family members may

remain with the dead body all night,

offering a final vigil as the deceased

makes their journey beyond the realm of

the living. Typically, the funeral

itself begins the day after the wake.

The deceased is given a new Buddhist

name which will prevent the dead

returning to the living world if their

old name is called. Flowers may be

placed around the head of the deceased

and then the casket is closed. The body

is then cremated. After cremation,

relatives use large pairs of chopsticks

to remove charred bone fragments from

the ash and transfer them to a

ceremonial urn. The process is bound up

with ritual and is conducted with great

care as friends and relatives give the

deceased the appropriate sendoff.

Colonel Warren's report tells us that

cremations were certainly taking place

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the

aftermath of the bombings, but as the

funeral process was so long and

meticulous, it was often impossible to

conduct properly. Yoshino Yamawaki was

11 in 1945 and remembered how he and his

brothers cremated his father's body.

Yamawaki's account is long and detailed,

but we've included a large portion of it

here because it gives a harrowing

depiction of what many residents would

have experienced in the aftermath of the

bombings. My brothers and I gently laid

his blackened, swollen body at top a

burnt beam in front of the factory where

we found him dead and set him a light,

his ankles juttered awkwardly as the

rest of his body was engulfed in flames.

When we returned the next morning to

collect his ashes, we discovered that

his body had been partially cremated.

Only his wrists, ankles, and part of his

gut were burnt properly. The rest of his

body lay raw and decomposed. Finally, my

oldest brother suggested that we take a

piece of his skull based on a common

practice in Japanese funerals in which

family members pass around a tiny piece

of the skull with chopsticks after

cremation. As soon as our chopsticks

touched the surface, however, the skull

cracked open like plaster and his halfc

cremated brains spilled out. My brothers

and I screamed and ran away, leaving our

father behind. We abandoned him in the

worst state possible. Yawaki's story is

horrific, but he was at least able to

find his father's body. Many other

bodies went unidentified and unclaimed.

Ko Agura remembered how bodies were

strewn around her neighborhood with no

one to name them or to tend to them. She

recalled rivers and channels packed

tightly with bodies, some without limbs

and all in extreme states of

decomposition.

8-year-old Kahuko was tasked with

helping carry bodies to mass cremation

sites. She said, "Even children like me

had to help carry bodies on straw mats."

Koko believed that her father cremated

700 people on the street in front of

their home. There would have been little

time for traditional rights or

observances. On the island of Ninoima,

Nihi Hiroshima, tens of thousands of

wounded were taken as doctors fought to

save their lives. Thousands of them

died. In the words of journalist Robert

Rand, their identities were lost in the

mayhem of emergency cremations and

burials. Noshima harbors the unmarked

graves of thousands of unidentified

bodies. University researcher Rebono

still returns to Noshima each year to

search for these graves. He believes

that locating remains and giving them a

proper funeral can help to bring peace

to the few survivors who remain. Ko says

until that happens, the war is not over

for these people. Now, cremating the

bodies was certainly an important task.

But for the victims who survived the

bombs, there was something else that was

even more important. Getting effective

treatment for the grim symptoms of a

nuclear attack. The people of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki had been exposed to a new

and terrible weapon, and no one was

quite sure of its true power. Across

both cities, people who'd survived the

force of the blasts started to succumb

to mysterious illnesses. Their bodies

seemed to be quite literally failing.

But I said Suttobinaga was 18 at the

time and had been living around 1

kilometer from the main strike of the

bomb that hit Nagasaki. He was severely

burned but made it to hospital. Here,

however, his fellow victims died one

after another, day after day. But I said

remembered the blood in my urine dyed

the white toilet bowl red. I'm the next

one. I thought I stared at the blood

with despair.

Over in Hiroshima, Kaiser Sawada was 9

years old and living 1.8 km from the

center of the blast. Kaiser recalled how

her three-year-old sister struggled to

survive. My sister's hair came out by

pulling lightly, and her cheek had a

hole large enough to expose her tongue,

which was split in half. A month later,

Kaiso's sister and her aunt, were both

dead. Over the next years, most of

Kaiso's family, including her younger

brother, would die of cancer, a brutal

remnant of the bomb's destructive power.

It was in everyone's interest to find

out what was going on and to understand

the true impact of the radiation.

Japanese doctors and scientists needed

to ascertain how they would treat the

survivors and prevent a longlasting

health catastrophe. American military

scientists wanted to know exactly what

their new weapon was capable of.

Radiation poisoning was not entirely

unheard of in the 1940s. As early as the

1920s, women working with radiumbased

paint at instrument factories in the

United States had begun to exhibit

disturbing symptoms. Workers had got

into the habit of licking their brushes

before painting the radium onto dials

and watch faces, which led to a buildup

of radium in the bones of the jaw. Many

suffered damage to their jaws through

radiation poisoning as the bones

fractured and degrading. At least 50

women died as a result. A decade later

in 1934, the pioneering scientist Mary

Cury died of a plastic anemia. Her death

was not fully understood at the time,

but was found to be the result of

long-term radiation poisoning. Mary

Cury's papers are still highly

radioactive and are too dangerous to be

handled without protective clothing and

equipment. However, even though

radiation poisoning had occurred before,

the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

were unprecedented. so unprecedented

that a new word was created to describe

the patients. They were the hibakusha or

the bombaffected people. To figure out

what was going on, doctors and coroners

conducted autopsies on many of the

bodies exhibiting the most extreme cases

of radiation damage. One of these bodies

was that of the 36-year-old stage

actress Midori Naka. Naka actually

survived the initial blast and was

pulled from the ruins of a destroyed

building. But her injuries were severe.

Open sores blooded her body and doctors

found themselves unable to battle her

baffling symptoms. The radiation

destroyed her white blood cells which

left her body with no way to stave off

infection. She died on August 24th and

became the first victim of the bombings

to have radiation poisoning officially

listed as her cause of death. Naka's

life was over, but her story was not.

Her body was simply too valuable to

medical science. As grim as it sounds,

knowledge gained from studying Naka's

remains may have helped many people to

get the treatment they needed to stay

alive. But Japanese doctors still had a

fight on their hands to gain the insight

they needed. Despite entering into a

partnership with Japan in the years

after the war, the Americans were not

too keen to share the results of their

own research. President Truman's Atomic

Bomb Casualty Commission or ABCC was

more concerned with safeguarding

valuable data on their new weapon rather

than actually treating its victims. As

author Susan South had said, even

Nagasaki and Hiroshima doctors treating

Hibakusha on a daily basis had no access

to these critical findings that could

have supported their diagnosis and care.

Nishimi, a physician working in

Nagasaki, expressed his anger against

the American policy. The ABCC's way of

doing research seemed to us full of

secrets. We Japanese doctors thought it

went against common sense. A doctor who

finds something new while conducting

research is obligated to make it public

for the benefit of all human beings.

Many of the tissue samples collected by

the ABCC, including hearts, lungs, and

brains of victims, remained in storage

in the USA for decades after the end of

the war. It wasn't until May of 1973

that the Americans began repatriating

these materials. By this time, many of

the samples had been mislabeled,

misidentified, or simply lost. The

atomic bombings of 1945 are still etched

into the identity of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. Journalist Justin McCur

described how even as late as 2016, the

bomb's hyperenter was still used as a

point of reference in Hiroshima. A

particular street is about 1.5 km away,

a building 500 m north. No further

explanation is required.

But despite the looming shadow of

nuclear destruction, both cities have

recovered. By the early 1950s, their

populations had returned to pre-war

levels, and both cities have become

cultural and economic hubs in the New

Japan. In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

there are somber memorials to the

destruction that was wrought here in

August 1945.

But perhaps the most important memorial

is the more subtle, the continued

existence of the cities themselves. For

a while in 1945, it looked like both

cities had been wiped off the map, but

they have both since recovered. This

recovery was always going to be a long

and painful road. But it would not have

been possible at all without that first

step. And this step was of course the

process of bearing away the bodies of

those who died. The first victims of a

new and terrible weapon.