The doctor who survived Nagasaki – and the horrors he saw

Telegraph

28-07-2025

On August 9 1945, Takashi Nagai, a doctor, inspected the air-raid equipment at Nagasaki Medical College. The buckets were full of water; the hoses were uncoiled; students scurried around with first-aid kits. If American planes bombed the site and its hospital, Nagai thought, it would be well prepared. Yet, he later recalled, as he passed a cluster of blood-red oleanders, a shiver of fear ran through him.
Later that morning, the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Factories and homes were flattened, mighty pine trees were uprooted. Mount Inasa was stripped of every blade of its glittering, emerald grass. Nagai's neighbourhood of Urakami was obliterated. The scorched bodies of the dead lay as far as the eye could see. The doctor was buried alive, his face in a pool of shattered glass – though he eventually forced his way out.
The bomb killed an estimated 75,000 people. Tens of thousands perished instantly, others died from festering wounds or radiation sickness weeks or months afterwards. Nagai's two small children, who had been sent to the countryside, survived, but his wife Midori was reduced to 'a bucketful of soft ashes' and a clod of melted rosary beads.
Four years later, Nagai published a haunting eyewitness account of the bombing and its aftermath, The Bells of Nagasaki. It's being republished this week, in English translation, by Vintage Classics. Eighty years after the atrocity, as the clouds of conflict gather once again, his book is a crushing reminder of the obscenity of nuclear war.
In the wake of the bomb, Nagai recounts, the survivors looked upon a desert of naked corpses. A professor cradled the charred bodies of his dying students. Their flesh was peeling off 'like the skin of a peach'; blood flowed from their ears and noses. One student, who was 'swollen like a pumpkin', took his last breath: 'There's no hope for me. Thanks for everything.' All the while, distant cries of agony echoed in the wind. A child's voice screamed, 'I'm burning! Throw water on me!… Mummy! Mummy!' Then, silence. One nurse could only compare Nagasaki to hell.
Nagai, and a small group of surviving doctors, nurses and medical students, tried to treat the mass of wounded with only the most basic medical equipment. Nagai worked with one hand pressed against his own lacerated forehead to stop blood spurting out of a severed artery. His patients' injuries were graver still. Two plump nurses, nicknamed Little Barrel and Little Bean, felt 'ecstatic joy' as they crawled through burning rooms to rescue survivors.
As flames enveloped the hospital, the medics made for safety up the hill with the wounded on their backs. Using the blood dripping from his chin as paint, Nagai 'traced a huge circular sun' on a white sheet to create a Japanese flag; with this held high, they abandoned their college. Later, Nagai's lionhearted troupe – stumbling, limping, deathly pale, in bloodstained skirts and ragged trousers – would trudge from village to village to heal the sick and chronicle their torments for the future benefit of science.
For a while, they had no word from the outside world. But when American planes scattered leaflets announcing the atomic bomb's devastation 'to the People of Japan', the political situation became dreadfully clear. The message: surrender, or we will 'use this bomb… to bring this war to a swift, irresistible conclusion'.
The weapon made a mockery of Japan's war effort. 'The bamboo spear against the atomic bomb! What a tragic comedy this was!' Nagai despaired. 'This was no longer a war. Would we Japanese… be annihilated without a word of protest?' On August 14, Japan surrendered. 'We all held hands and wept,' he recalled. 'The sun set and the moon rose; but we could not stop weeping.' For what had their friends and family died for?
Despite his anguish, Nagai couldn't help but admire this 'victory of science'. In one rather unnerving scene, the wretched medics gather in a dugout for a reverent discussion about nuclear physics. 'We can't deny that it is a tremendous scientific achievement, this atom bomb,' one said, as they talked shop in an atomic hellscape. Later in the book, Nagai tells his children that the atomic age could still be glorious, if nuclear energy were to replace coal, oil and electricity, and its military uses were curtailed. 'If we use its power well, it will bring a tremendous leap forward in human civilisation. If we use it badly, we will destroy the earth.'
The month after Japan's surrender, Nagai 'collapsed into bed like a stone falling into the valley'. He lapsed into a coma. By some miracle, he awoke, but he knew his destiny: at the time of the bombing, he had already been dying of leukemia, caused by exposure to X-rays during a mass screening programme for tuberculosis. The second torrent of radiation quickened his decline. Soon, he knew, his children would be orphans. He described his five-year-old daughter playing alone with her toys: the head of a doll, some bottles, a mirror frame. She had no option. 'All her friends are dead,' Nagai wrote. She chattered with ghosts.
Soon after, Nagai moved to a tiny hut near the centre of the explosion. From his sickbed, his spleen swelling up, he wrote a series of bestselling books. The Bells of Nagasaki was completed in 1946 and published three years later. In 1949, Nagai was Japan's most-read author, and by then he was a celebrity of sorts. He was also a devout Catholic: Eva Perón sent him a statue of the Virgin, Pope Pius XII a rosary. Hirohito, the emperor of defeated Japan, paid him a visit.
By this point, however, Nagai was a divisive figure. Three months after the bombing, he had given a speech in the red ruins of the once-majestic Urakami Cathedral, in which he cast the event not as a monstrous war crime, but as a grace from God, for which the city should give thanks. To his mind, Urakami, home to the largest Christian community in Japan, had been chosen as 'a victim, a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War'. It was due to the sacrifice of 8,000 pure Catholics that God had finally brought the war to an end.
In that address, which is reprinted in The Bells of Nagasaki, Nagai drew on a long local history of martyrdom. Christian missionaries had travelled to Japan in the 16th century, on Dutch and Portuguese ships; and their word quickly spread. In 1597, 26 Catholics had been crucified in Urakami as the shogunate suppressed Christianity; for centuries after, persecuted 'Hidden Christians' had been forced to worship in secret. Now, Nagai painted the city's Christians as martyrs once more: 'How noble, how splendid was that holocaust of August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling the darkness of war and bringing the light of peace!'
In sanctifying the atomic bomb, Nagai appalled many of his countrymen. The Americans had justified their mass slaughter of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by arguing that the bombs put an end to the war, and thus prevented further bloodshed; Nagai's talk of a heavenly inferno seemed to strengthen their defence. As the veteran journalist Richard Lloyd Parry puts it, in his introduction to the new edition of The Bells of Nagasaki: 'Without setting out to do so, Nagai provided the Americans with the home-grown expression of ideas they needed to shore up their moral authority.' Perhaps this is why Nagai's book slipped past the occupying US censors.
Nonetheless, in Nagasaki, Nagai was celebrated as a quasi-saint. In a wasteland yearning for meaning, he offered a comforting alternative to a tale of pointless and excruciating suffering. And he did so in a way, Parry tells me, that suggested 'that rather than being the concluding acts of a 15-year war of colonisation into which Japan had enthusiastically marched, the atomic bombings were almost like a natural disaster, literally an act of God, over which the Japanese had no control and for which they bore no responsibility'. In the book, Nagai presents his speech to an old friend who'd lost his cherished wife and five children; the friend is greatly consoled. The book also contains a poignant sketch by Nagai of his wife ascending to Heaven on the tip of a mushroom cloud: a reminder that this grieving widower was seeking solace himself.
Yet many on the Left, Parry tells me, regarded Nagai as 'at best a naïve enabler of the Americans and conservative Japanese, at worst a reactionary collaborator, whose writing 'anaesthetised' its readers and prevented them from identifying those responsible for the war'. While Hiroshima became the cradle of a furious peace movement, which was determined to abolish nuclear weapons, Nagasaki withdrew in stoic sorrow.
Few could read The Bells of Nagasaki today and not tremble at the thought of another nuclear conflict. At one point, Nagai is visited by two former students, returning from the war with bitter hearts. 'We must get our revenge,' they say. 'Even if it takes ten years, we'll win this war.' But Nagai tells them: 'If you had seen the hell that opened up on earth before our eyes, you would never, never entertain the crazy thought of another war. If there is another war, atomic bombs will explode everywhere, and innumerable ordinary people will be annihilated in the flash of a split second.'
On May 1 1951, Nagai died, aged 43. Around 20,000 mourners attended his funeral, swarming the entrance to Urakami Cathedral. Today, as belligerent nations pack their armouries with nuclear warheads, his book offers an urgent warning. 'Men and women of the world, never again plan war!' he implores us from the grave. 'Grant that Urakami may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world.'