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Part 3 Rescue and Medical Relief

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The local rescue headquarters in Ibinokuchi (Chief Toyoshima Tokuji) was mainly composed of prefectural guard units, members of the criminal section, police officers and the Nagasaki city defense units. In addition, rescue units from local governments and schools, as well as reinforcement units, army units and police support parties, arrived at the rescue center from Saga, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Oita, Miyazaki and Kagoshima prefectures.
　Their mission was mainly to rescue ordinary citizens, that is, people trapped under the debris of collapsed houses and injured people who had evacuated to the surrounding mountains and hills including Mt. Kompira and Mt. Inasa. They also handled the unearthing, examination, and disposal of the corpses of atomic bomb victims, the collection of ashes of people who had burned to death, and the clearing of roads. In addition, they also distributed emergency supplies of hardtack and rice balls.
　Matters to be attended to in dealing with the injured were outlined as follows:
・Top priority should be placed on rescuing the survivors
・Rescue operations should be conducted in reverse order of injury level; those able to walk should be urged to do so
・Rescue operations for people with burn injuries to 50% of their bodies should be left until later
・Trucks mobilized in Nagasaki and from surrounding urban areas should be used to transport
the injured 40

The following measures were taken with regard to corpses
a) Excavation
　Contacting with the autopsy team, the Local Rescue Headquarters should perform the unearthing operations as long as possible.
b) Postmortem examination
　The local rescue headquarters should enter the affected site with the excavation team, perform examinations on the spot, and identify the bodies, for as long a time as possible.
c) Disposal of corpses
　The retrieved corpses should be disposed of as follows:
① Identified bodies should be handed over to the bereaved families.
② Unidentified bodies and those that go unclaimed should be taken immediately to City Hall.
③ At City Hall, the bodies that had been identified but gone unclaimed should be cremated at the crematory or other appropriate place, and should be respectfully taken care of. Unidentified bodies should be temporarily buried at the predetermined places.
④ Bodies of persons associated with factories should be taken care of by workers of Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard and subsidiary factories. The surviving workers should also give assistance to the work agency of the 21st Naval Arsenal Division.
　The circumstances of outdoor cremation are described as follows by Sumita Masanosuke, former chief of the Nagasaki Prefecture General Affairs Division:

Governor Nagano first objected to the proposal of Mayor Okada regarding outdoor cremation. It was before dawn on the 10th when the mayor visited the governor in the defense unit, after shuttling between City Hall and his home (his family members were all killed at the site of the present-day Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum), passing through the affected zone in the middle of the night. The governor estimated that the damage to the buildings was extensive (the overall picture of the damage had been determined at 8:00 the previous night) but the fatalities numbered only about 3,000. This differed greatly with the mayor’s opinion. The mayor estimated the fatalities to be around 50,000, judging from the state of the neighborhoods surrounding his home and the areas he had passed on his way to City Hall. The mayor emphasized that since the Urakami District had been devastated, outdoor cremation was the only realistic way to dispose of the bodies. Although the argument continued for a while, the governor ultimately approved the mayor’s proposal.

Governor Nagano went to the local rescue headquarters in Ibinokuchi on the morning of the 10th and inspected the devastated site.
　Outdoor cremation was conducted in various places under the coordination of the postmortem examination team. Apart from the general devastation, in other places in the old part of the city, fires unrelated to those of the day before broke out in vacant spaces in school yards and first-aid stations where victims had died one after another, and on the sites of evacuated buildings.
　Coffins were hastily put together at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard, Mitsubishi Nagasaki Electric Works, Kawanami Shipyard on Kōyagishima and other factories. While coffins were made for dead workers in the two Mitsubishi-related factories, 500 caskets were made daily at Kawanami Shipyard on Kōyagishima by mobilized women’s volunteer labor unit members and provided to ordinary citizens and bereaved families arriving from neighboring towns and villages.
　Outdoor cremation was still being conducted after the announcement of surrender on August 15. Nagasaki Prefecture reported a total of 19,743 cremations as of September 1, 1945.
　Taguchi Tōtarō, formerly an employee at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard Tategami Steel Section, described the situation as follows:

My duty after the atomic bombing was to clear destroyed houses on the factory premises and to cremate corpses under command of a naval officer. At that time, many schoolgirls were working as volunteers at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Arms Factory Ōhashimachi Plant. I saw a girl of 17 or 18 years of age die with her legs caught under a collapsed house.
　Seeing the girl’s agonizing death, I felt so sorry that I wanted to flee. How many other corpses did I have to cremate? I dealt with the dead day in and day out. Although it was an order from my company, in an emergency situation, it was not something a person can do in a sober state. My coworkers and I received two bottles of whiskey from a naval officer and drank them before we set to work.
　Three buildings being used temporarily by the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Arms Factory Precision Machinery Section stood in a row on the site of the present-day gymnasium of Nagasaki Commercial School in Aburagi-machi (today the Nagasaki Prefectural Gymnasium and Nagasaki Science Museum).
　One day we had to cremate as many as 19 burned corpses in addition to two unburned bodies. We first made a stretcher by binding bamboo to a bulrush mat (similar to a straw mat) in order to carry the two bodies. The moment I touched the bodies, shivers went down my spine. Little white creatures were swarming under the bodies. They were infested with maggots!
　The stench was unbearable. One of my tender-minded coworkers fainted just from looking at the scene.
　The faces of all my coworkers were as white as sheets and their expressions were frozen. All of us sobbed and cried at the thought that these people had worked with vigor like us a few days earlier and now were dead and cold. That day, we went through a lot and ended
the work. 41

Ono Kannosuke, an employee in the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard Hull Engineering Division, remembered as follows:

I went to the police box established by the Inasa Police Station in the air-raid shelter under Shiroyama Elementary School to obtain a cremation permit. The police officer asked me to use a piece of paper from my notebook. I tore out a page and filled it out as he told me. This slip of paper would serve as a death and cremation notification to be submitted to City Hall. We gathered up pieces of wood from around the neighborhood and conducted the cremation. However, we did not have any cinerary urns. After much consideration, I remembered that I had dug a shelter under the floor and buried crockery in it. Although I thought that there would be something useful among the crockery, all of it was smashed to pieces and the aluminum pots were flat as though pressed. Seeing the crockery, I was surprised at the power of the bomb blast. I managed to hammer a steam pan into nearly its original shape and to place ashes into it.
　Sunset illuminated the scorched wasteland where people were working like ants, people disposing of corpses and relatives searching for the bodies of their missing family members.
　Members of the defense unit, who had come from rural districts to help us, gathered corpses in nearby fields by dragging them with hooks. A liquid like black oil stained the tracks created by dragging the corpses. Women averted their eyes from the horrible sight. 42

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40 Shirabe Raisuke ed., Nagasaki: Bakushinchi fukugen no kiroku (Nagasaki: A Record of the Restoration of the Hypocenter Area) (Nagasaki Hōsōkyōkai, 1972), pp.117-8 ^
41 Sōkagakkai Seinenbu Hansen Shuppankai ed., Peace from Nagasaki (Daisan Bunmeisha, 1974), pp.183-5 ^
42 Ono Kannosuke, Genbaku zengo (Before and After the Atomic Bombing), edited by Shirai Hideo (1969), Vol.16 ^

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