99 Fun Facts About Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Which city did B-29s firebomb on 9–10 March 1945, burning out sixteen square miles overnight?

Tokyo: General Curtis LeMay sent the bombers in low at night with incendiaries because so much of Japan's war production was scattered through small workshops and homes. The raid left a million people homeless.

What was the code name of the gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima?

Little Boy's gun design, which fired one piece of its nuclear fuel into another, was thought so sure to work that it was never fully tested before it was dropped on Hiroshima.

Announcing Hiroshima, Truman said the US had spent how much on 'the greatest scientific gamble in history'?

$2 billion, Truman said, 'and won'. He added that few of the workers knew what they had been producing: they saw great quantities of material going into the plants and nothing coming out.

Which US Army Air Forces unit under Colonel Paul Tibbets was created to deliver the bombs?

The 509th Composite Group was 'composite' because it had its own transports and support units, which kept outsiders away from its secret. Most of its own airmen were never told what they were training to drop.

From which island in the Marianas did the atomic missions take off?

Tinian had been turned by Navy Seabees into the biggest air base in the world within months of its capture. Each atomic bomb was loaded from a pit, with the B-29 manoeuvred over the top of it.

Which city did Secretary of War Henry Stimson remove from the target list for its cultural significance?

Kyoto stayed off the list because Stimson, who had visited it in the 1920s, took his fight with General Groves to Truman, who backed him. The tale that he honeymooned there is probably a myth.

At which Allied conference did Truman tell Stalin of 'a new weapon of unusual destructive force'?

Potsdam: Stalin showed little interest, saying only that he hoped it would be put to good use against the Japanese. He could afford to stay calm, because his spies had told him about the bomb project long before.

Which test on 16 July 1945 proved the implosion bomb design in the New Mexico desert?

Trinity was held up by rain, and while the scientists waited Enrico Fermi offered bets on whether the blast would set the atmosphere alight and, if so, whether it would destroy only New Mexico or the whole world.

What is the literal meaning of 'mokusatsu', Prime Minister Suzuki's reply to the Allied ultimatum of July 1945?

Kill by silence is the literal sense of its two characters. In use the word runs from 'ignore' to 'treat with silent contempt', and the Allies took Suzuki's remark as a rejection.

Leo Szilard helped draft a 1939 letter warning Roosevelt of a German atomic bomb; which famous physicist signed it?

Albert Einstein signed it, yet he played no part in building the bomb: the Army denied him a security clearance in 1940 because of his pacifism. He later said he regretted signing.

The B-29 Enola Gay was named after whom?

The pilot's mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, got her name on the bomber only hours before the mission: her son Paul took the plane over and had a maintenance man paint it beneath his window.

Why did William Parsons arm the Hiroshima bomb in mid-air?

Fear of an accidental detonation on takeoff was well founded: Parsons had watched heavily loaded B-29s crash and burn on the runway. So he and an assistant finished assembling the bomb in the bomb bay once the plane was in the air.

Survivors called the Hiroshima bomb 'pikadon' after which two sensations?

Flash and boom: 'pika' is the flash and 'don' the blast that followed. Sunao Tsuboi, who survived as a student and became a teacher, earned the nickname 'Mr. Pikadon' by telling his classes about the bombing.

What landmark was the aiming point for the Hiroshima bomb?

The Aioi Bridge, an unusual T-shaped crossing where two rivers meet, was the mark the bombardier lined up on. The bomb drifted wide of it and burst in the air above a surgical hospital instead.

The Hiroshima bomb equalled about four times the tonnage dropped on which German city in February 1945?

Dresden's centre was burned out by Allied air raids. One atomic bomb matched their whole bomb load roughly four times over in an instant, though less than two percent of its nuclear fuel actually fissioned.

Who became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima?

Barack Obama laid a wreath in the Peace Park in 2016 and embraced an elderly survivor. As expected, he offered no apology for the bombing, which he described as the morning 'death fell from the sky'.

How soon after the atomic bomb were some of Hiroshima's streetcars running again?

Three days: the streetcars restarted on 9 August, even though the tram company had lost 185 employees and seen 108 of its 123 cars wrecked or damaged.

The Hiroshima Carp, founded four years after the bombing and rescued by fans' donations, play which sport?

Baseball: when the cash-strapped Carp faced being disbanded or merged in 1951, people in the recovering city dropped money into donation barrels to keep their team alive.

Airmen of which nationality, held prisoner near the hypocenter, were among those killed by the Hiroshima bomb?

American airmen held at a military police headquarters died with the city. A Hiroshima survivor, Shigeaki Mori, later spent decades tracing their families and getting their deaths officially recognised.

Why did Hiroshima make the oleander its official flower?

It was among the first to bloom: it had been feared that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for decades, so the sight of oleanders in flower gave the survivors heart.

Which aircraft dropped the Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki?

Bockscar puns on the name of its usual commander, Frederick Bock, who was not aboard. Charles Sweeney's crew borrowed the bomber because their own was still fitted with scientific instruments from the Hiroshima mission.

Which city was the primary target on 9 August, escaping when it was obscured by cloud and smoke?

Kokura lay under haze and smoke drifting from a fire raid on neighbouring Yahata the day before. The bomber made three runs over the city without once sighting its aiming point, then turned away.

Why did the Nagasaki bomber's crew fear having to ditch in the sea?

It was nearly out of fuel: a failed transfer pump had trapped 640 gallons in a reserve tank, and long waits at the rendezvous and over the first target burned much of the rest. One engine died of fuel starvation as it landed.

Why was the Nagasaki raid moved from 11 to 9 August?

To avoid five days of forecast bad weather, the crews on the island had the bomb ready two days early. Nobody in Washington had to approve: the July order already allowed further bombs as soon as they were ready.

Which element, bred in nuclear reactors, formed the core of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki?

Plutonium made in reactors could not be used in the simple gun-type design, so the scientists had to invent the far trickier implosion bomb to make it work.

Which Nobel Prize-winning novelist was born in Nagasaki nine years after the atomic bomb fell?

Kazuo Ishiguro left Nagasaki for England at five, yet when he began writing fiction he found himself drawn back to the city of his birth. His first novel is set there in the years of recovery after the bomb.

Fat Man was more powerful, yet which feature of Nagasaki kept its damage below Hiroshima's?

Its hills walled in the blast. The bomb burst over an industrial valley north of the downtown it was meant for, and the ridges between shielded much of the rest of Nagasaki.

Which manga series follows a boy through the Hiroshima bombing, as its author Keiji Nakazawa lived it at six?

Barefoot Gen came from anger: Nakazawa avoided the subject for years, until his mother's cremation in 1966 left only ash and almost no bones. He resolved then to put the bombing into his manga.

Where did the Nagasaki bomber make an emergency landing after the mission?

Okinawa had been fully in Allied hands for only a few weeks, and nobody there knew the bomber was coming. With the control tower silent, the crew fired flares to clear a way through the traffic.

Which organisation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize?

Nihon Hidankyo was formed in 1956, after a decade in which the survivors' suffering was largely hidden. The Nobel committee credited their testimony with helping to make any use of nuclear weapons a taboo.

The bomb caught worshippers in Nagasaki's Urakami Cathedral preparing for which feast?

The Assumption falls on 15 August, and parishioners had gathered in the cathedral ahead of the feast. Everyone inside was killed when the building, close to the hypocenter, was destroyed.

By the end of 1945, roughly how many had died from the Hiroshima bomb, by Japan's later estimate?

About 140,000 comes from a Japanese estimate made in the 1970s, roughly double the first US counts. No figure can be exact: wartime records were incomplete, and nobody is sure how many people were in the city that morning.

Japan's surrender was formally signed on 2 September 1945 aboard which US battleship?

USS Missouri was named for President Truman's home state and had been launched the year before by his daughter Margaret. The signing on its deck formally ended the war.

In his surrender broadcast, how did Emperor Hirohito describe what had struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

'A new and most cruel bomb' came in the first broadcast most Japanese had ever heard from their emperor. The night before, rebel officers had tried to seize the recording to stop it going out.

What does the Japanese word 'hibakusha' mean?

Explosion-affected people is the literal sense. Many survivors kept the label secret for years, because admitting it could cost them a job or a marriage.

Why was double-bombing survivor Tsutomu Yamaguchi in Hiroshima?

On a business trip for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, he was badly burned, spent the night in the city and went home to Nagasaki in time for the second bomb. He lived to 93 and told his story at the United Nations in 2006.

Sadako Sasaki, who died of leukaemia aged 12, is remembered for folding what?

More than a thousand paper cranes is the Peace Memorial Museum's count, from her family's testimony, though it is often said she died at 644. Her classmates then raised the money for the Children's Peace Monument.

Built to show off and sell local products, what was Hiroshima's Genbaku Dome called before the bombing?

The Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall stood almost directly under the blast. Many citizens wanted the painful ruin pulled down, and only in 1966 did the city resolve to preserve it for good.

Which two countries objected when the Genbaku Dome was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996?

The United States and China each put a statement on record. Washington dissociated itself, citing a lack of historical perspective on what led to the bombing; Beijing said other Asian peoples had suffered the greatest losses.

Where has the Nagasaki bomber stood since 1961?

The National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton took it in after years when the bomber sat largely forgotten in desert storage in Arizona. The Hiroshima plane went to the Smithsonian instead.

Veterans' groups attacked the Smithsonian's planned 1995 Enola Gay exhibition for dwelling too much on what?

The bomb's Japanese victims, shown in graphic photographs, angered veterans, and the Senate called the script revisionist. The full exhibition was cancelled, only the plane's nose went on show, and the museum's director resigned.

Which heavy cruiser carried the Hiroshima bomb's components from California to the Marianas in July 1945?

USS Indianapolis raced its secret cargo across the Pacific in ten days. Four days after the delivery a Japanese submarine sank the cruiser, and because nobody reported it missing, only 316 of its 1,195 men were rescued.

In the Silverplate cover story, 'Thin Man' and 'Fat Man' were which two leaders touring America by Pullman car?

Roosevelt and Churchill fitted names the bombs already had, chosen for the weapons' shapes. Airmen then used the code names on the telephone as though they were arranging a rail tour for the two leaders.

Thousands of the dead at Hiroshima were forced labourers and other migrants from which Japanese-ruled country?

Korea was under Japanese rule, and many Koreans had been brought over as wartime labour. Survivors who went home were cut off for decades from the medical support given to survivors in Japan, until lawsuits forced a change.

What struck Hiroshima six weeks after the atomic bomb, bringing down bridges across the ruined city?

A typhoon hit on 17 September 1945, and its floods and landslides killed about 2,000 people across Hiroshima Prefecture, deepening the misery of a region still reeling from the bomb.

John Hersey's 'Hiroshima' filled an entire issue of which magazine?

The New Yorker gave the whole issue to the one article because, its editors wrote, few people had yet grasped the bomb's destructive power. The issue sold out almost at once.

Which physicist did General Groves pick to run the secret Los Alamos bomb laboratory?

Robert Oppenheimer got the job despite never having run a large project, having no Nobel Prize and having Communist friends. His laboratory took over an isolated boys' school on a New Mexico mesa.

What did the 1945 Franck Report urge before any city was bombed?

A demonstration on empty land first, urged James Franck's committee of Chicago scientists, or a nuclear arms race would be inevitable. The government's scientific panel replied that no demonstration was likely to end the war.

The Peace Flame in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park is meant to keep burning until what happens?

All nuclear weapons are abolished: only then is the flame to go out. At the 2010 memorial ceremony, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world to reach that day within the survivors' lifetimes.

Ōkunoshima, an island near Hiroshima that once hid a poison-gas factory, is overrun by which animals?

Rabbits were released after the war, once the gas plant was gone and the island became a park; with no predators they multiplied and earned it the nickname Rabbit Island.

Which 1954 film monster was conceived as a metaphor for the weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Godzilla even wears the bombings on its body: the monster's rough skin was modelled on the keloid scars of Hiroshima survivors.

Masuji Ibuse's novel of a Hiroshima woman shunned over radiation rumours takes its title from what?

Black rain fell on Hiroshima within hours of the blast, a tarry mix of ash, radioactive fallout and water that the city's fires had lifted into the clouds.

Which dish does Hiroshima build in layers of batter, cabbage, pork and fried noodles on a griddle?

Okonomiyaki in Hiroshima grew out of a cheap thin pancake that helped feed survivors after the bomb, and the city layers its ingredients where Osaka mixes them.

Which shrine near Hiroshima is famous for a torii gate that seems to float at high tide?

Itsukushima stands on piers over the sea because the island was held so sacred that commoners were long forbidden to set foot on it.

Which country invaded Japanese-held Manchuria in the days between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings?

The Soviet Union struck on three fronts barely an hour after its declaration, sweeping into Manchuria on the same day the second bomb fell.

Six trees of which 'living fossil' species survived within two kilometres of the Hiroshima blast?

Ginkgo trees growing one to two kilometres from the hypocenter were among the few living things in the area to come through the blast, from a lineage more than 290 million years old.

What nickname did the heart of an unused third atomic bomb earn by killing two scientists in accidents?

The demon core went critical twice within a year, first when Harry Daghlian dropped a brick onto it and then when Louis Slotin's screwdriver slipped; both men died of radiation sickness.

Which US city with a large Japanese-descended community became Hiroshima's first sister city?

Honolulu, home of Pearl Harbor, proposed the tie itself: its council invited Hiroshima in May 1959 and the pact was sealed that June.

What do people float down Hiroshima's Motoyasu River each 6 August to send off the victims' spirits?

Lanterns carrying handwritten peace messages drift down the river that evening, hours after a bell and a minute's silence mark the moment the bomb fell.

Which toy in Hiroshima's peace museum was three-year-old Shinichi Tetsutani riding when the bomb fell?

A tricycle was what the boy loved most, and its burnt frame went on permanent display; a sculpture based on it stands in a museum in Geneva.

The 'Human Shadow Etched in Stone' in Hiroshima's peace museum was left on the front steps of what?

A bank, the Sumitomo branch 260 metres from the hypocenter, kept the shadow: someone is thought to have been sitting on its steps waiting for the doors to open.

The Hiroshima bomb drifted about 240 metres off its aiming point and exploded directly above what?

A surgical clinic, the Shima Hospital, lay directly beneath the fireball after a crosswind pushed the bomb off course; a plaque marks the spot.

The Hiroshima bomb's yield is usually given as about 15 kilotons of which conventional explosive?

TNT is only the yardstick: less than a kilogram of the bomb's uranium actually fissioned, and just 0.7 grams of matter became the energy that levelled the city.

Which battleship, heaviest ever built with her sister Musashi, was laid down at Kure near Hiroshima?

Yamato took shape in a dock at the Kure Naval Arsenal that had to be adapted for her enormous hull, and she carried the largest guns ever mounted on a warship.

Which British band had a 1980 hit with an anti-war synth-pop song named after the Hiroshima bomber?

OMD, in full Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, set Andy McCluskey's song about the bombing to a bright synthesiser melody with no sung chorus, the only single from the album Organisation.

The saddle-shaped arch in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park covers a cenotaph that holds what?

The victims' names rest under an arch meant to shelter their souls, aligned so that visitors look through it to the Peace Flame and the ruined dome.

The Shinkolobwe mine supplied rich uranium ore for the first atomic bombs from which African colony?

Belgian Congo ore was so rich, about 65 percent uranium oxide, that the United States bought 1,200 tons of it already sitting in a Staten Island warehouse.

By what name are the 25 bomb-scarred women flown to New York for surgery in 1955 remembered?

Hiroshima Maidens underwent 138 operations at Mount Sinai Hospital while lodging with Quaker host families, a trip arranged by a Methodist minister and a magazine editor.

Which Manhattan Project 'Secret City' separated the uranium-235 for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima?

Oak Ridge housed the Y-12 plant, where calutrons, giant electromagnetic separators, slowly pulled the rare uranium-235 away from ordinary uranium.

Which port on the Sea of Japan was on the final atomic target list yet was left off both missions?

Niigata was dropped before the first bomb flew, yet after the second its governor ordered an evacuation and the city sat almost deserted until the war ended.

Which architect, later a Pritzker Prize winner, designed Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park?

Kenzō Tange had gone to high school in Hiroshima, and the park that made his name was laid out over what had been the city's busiest downtown district.

Jan Letzel, architect of the building that became the Genbaku Dome, came from which present-day country?

Czechia, then the kingdom of Bohemia, was his birthplace; he died in 1925, twenty years before the bomb left his domed building a skeleton.

Theodore Van Kirk, last surviving member of the Hiroshima bomber's crew, did which job on board?

Navigator was his post on the flight, and he outlived every other crew member by more than four years, dying in 2014 at the age of 93.

Which French director made the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour from a screenplay by Marguerite Duras?

Alain Resnais made it as his first feature, following a French actress and a Japanese architect through a day of conversation, with brief flashbacks cutting in like sudden memories.

Which Polish composer renamed an abstract piece for 52 strings as a threnody to Hiroshima's victims?

Penderecki first titled it after its running time, 8'37", and added the dedication only once a performance showed him its emotional charge.

Which Japanese prime minister with family roots in Hiroshima hosted the 2023 G7 summit there?

Fumio Kishida, first elected for a Hiroshima district in 1993, opened the summit by welcoming the leaders to the Peace Memorial Park, where they laid wreaths at the cenotaph.

Sanfrecce Hiroshima football club is named after a warlord's lesson to his sons about three what?

Arrows snap easily one at a time but not three held together, the warlord Mōri Motonari is said to have told his sons, and the club joined the Japanese 'san' to the Italian 'frecce' in his honour.

Which Hiroshima landmark, an army headquarters in 1945, was rebuilt as a replica after the bomb?

The castle dated from the 1590s and held the regional army command when the bomb fell; its keep was rebuilt in 1958 as a museum of the city's earlier history.

During which war did Emperor Meiji and his government move temporarily to Hiroshima?

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 was directed from Hiroshima for seven months, and the first round of peace talks with China was held in the city too.

What does the name Hiroshima, given to a town founded on a river delta in 1589, mean?

Wide island suits a city founded by a warlord on the low delta of the Ōta River, where it runs out into the Seto Inland Sea.

Why did much of Hiroshima's Genbaku Dome stay standing so close to the centre of the explosion?

The blast came from overhead, almost straight down, so the building's vertical columns took the force along their length and parts of its brick and concrete walls held.

Which code name covered the planned Allied invasion of Japan's home islands, cancelled by the surrender?

Operation Downfall had two parts, Olympic and Coronet, and its opening landing on the southern island of Kyūshū was set for November 1945.

What did later editions of John Hersey's 1946 book Hiroshima add, forty years after the bombing?

A new final chapter traced what had become of the book's six survivors in the four decades since the morning the bomb fell.

Which Canadian-born author turned Sadako Sasaki's story into a 1977 children's novel?

Eleanor Coerr made the girl's story a classroom staple, though Sadako's family disputes the book's claim that she died before finishing her task.

Why did the US Army Air Forces agree to keep Hiroshima off their firebombing list in 1945?

To gauge the bomb's damage accurately, planners wanted targets with no earlier raid scars, so a handful of reserved cities were spared the firebombing that burned out most others.

Momiji manjū, the classic souvenir cake of Hiroshima Prefecture, is shaped like the leaf of which tree?

Maple leaves, momiji in Japanese, give the little sponge cake both its name and its shape; the classic filling is sweet red bean paste.

At what time is a bell rung at Hiroshima's annual peace ceremony to mark the moment of the bombing?

8:15 a.m. is when the bomb left the aircraft over the city; it fell for about 44 seconds before exploding some 580 metres above the ground.

Hiroshima lies on which of Japan's main islands, in the western region known as Chūgoku?

Honshu, the largest of the four, holds Hiroshima on its Seto Inland Sea coast, while Nagasaki lies on Kyushu to the south-west.

Which designer of Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks was a seven-year-old in Hiroshima when the bomb fell?

Issey Miyake was born in Hiroshima in 1938 and lost his mother to the bomb; he later became known for pleated clothes built for ease of movement.

Which revolutionary on a 1959 visit to Japan shunned its war memorial and went to Hiroshima instead?

Che Guevara refused to lay a wreath at Japan's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, toured the peace museum, and wrote home that fighting for peace begins with looking at Hiroshima.

Which 2016 animated film follows Suzu from Hiroshima into married life in wartime Kure?

In This Corner of the World opens in the 1930s, though most of it unfolds in 1944 and 1945 as air raids reach the naval port.

Why did Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Hiroshima bomber, ask for no funeral and no headstone?

He feared protests there, or outright destruction, by opponents of the bombing, so his ashes were scattered over the English Channel, which he had crossed many times in the war.

Marcel Junod, first foreign doctor to reach Hiroshima after the bomb, was a delegate of which body?

The Red Cross delegate arrived on 8 September with 15 tons of medical supplies, and his photographs were among the first of the ruined city to reach Europe.

Yoshito Matsushige, who took the only known photos of Hiroshima's wounded on the day of the bomb, worked for what?

A local newspaper, the Chugoku Shimbun, had taken him on two years earlier; he managed just five frames that day before he could not go on.

Which B-29 flew as the blast-measuring instrument plane on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions?

The Great Artiste was meant to carry the second bomb itself, but its instruments had not been removed in time, so its crew swapped aircraft instead.

Rebel army officers held the Imperial Palace overnight on 14 August 1945 while searching for what?

The recorded speech announcing the surrender was hidden in the palace and the rebels never found it; by eight the next morning their coup had collapsed.

On which US TV show did Hiroshima survivor Kiyoshi Tanimoto meet the bomber's co-pilot in 1955?

This Is Your Life lured the minister on air with the promise of a news interview, then replayed the bombing with sound effects before bringing out the co-pilot.

Shukkei-en, begun in Hiroshima in 1620 on the orders of the ruling daimyō, is what kind of historic site?

A garden, it lies beside the prefectural art museum, and Emperor Meiji briefly lodged at its villa when his headquarters moved to the city.

The boats that soldiers at Hiroshima's Ujina harbour used to ferry the wounded had been built for what?

Suicide attacks on an invasion fleet were what the explosive motorboats were for; after the bomb they carried the injured down the rivers to a military hospital.