Hiroshima is a place burned into our collective conscious, the site of the first atomic bombing. Many people know of Nagasaki, yet for whatever reason it does not seem to have quite the same resonance. Much less known is the name of another Japanese city, Kokura, a place that is now part of Kitakyushu. But Kokura is a name worth keeping in mind, as it offers a reminder of the powerful hand of Fortuna. Indeed, there is a phrase ‘the luck of Kokura’ or ‘Kokura luck’ which ‘suggests a circumstance where one escapes some vast misfortune without even knowing it had been headed one’s way.’
The Second World War was a total war, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being a ghastly end to a conflict without precedent. Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kokura and Niigata had been placed on a ‘reserved list’ to be spared from conventional bombing, preserved so that they would remain clean targets, making it easier to assess the power of the new atomic weapon. Nagasaki appears to have been added at the last minute, an addition made by hand. Those penstrokes would prove to be particularly heavy. When Bockscar, the B-29 Superfortress carrying the ‘Fat Man’ bomb, took off early on the morning of 9 August 1945, its course was set for Kokura. On arrival, the crew was unable to clearly sight their target, and having been given explicit instructions to target visually, they moved onto their secondary target of Nagasaki and dropped the payload there. And so it was Nagasaki that experienced the second and last nuclear attack, and Kokura was spared.
New York Times reporter William Laurence determined at the time, ‘the winds of destiny seemed to favor certain Japanese cities’. Perhaps, but only a very select few like Kokura and Kyoto were able to escape being bombed. Less fortunate was Nagasaki, with estimates placing the death toll between 40,000 and 70,000; and Hiroshima, where between 70,000 – 140,000 perished. And before them, much of the country had been torched by relentless firebombing raids. This commenced with the firebombing of Tokyo on 9-10 March 1945, estimated to have killed 100,000 people, potentially up to 200,000. US Air Force general Curtis LeMay, the man responsible for the attack, later reflected that they had ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night ... than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined’. Again weather would play a determinative factor, with strong winds fanning the flames across the flammable structures of Tokyo. Reflecting on his experiences bombing Japan, one former crew-member asked, ‘Can you imagine standing in front of an open bomb-bay door and smelling a city burn up?’ A Japanese victim recalled that ‘an indescribable stench filled the air’, and another explained that, ‘I don’t have the words to describe that gruesome sight….It was like a scene from hell.’ Wind and fire together, Tokyo in flames.
Moving beyond the realities of total war, there is something profoundly absurd about the way chance intervened to determined which cities were hit and who perished. The vagaries of the weather meant Kokura was spared and Tokyo experienced maximum damage. At Nazi concentration camps, the arbitrariness of life and death sometimes was reduced to the moods of guards, with the bombing of the Japan it was cloud and wind. What meaning or comprehension can be taken from such extreme moments, where life is reduced to chance in the most brutal ways? On this, Benjamin Barber talks of the ‘grotesque haphazardness’ of such outcomes, with the mismatch of severity and triviality defying all attempts at rationalisation or explanation. Sometimes it is simply that Fortuna is harsh and unforgiving.
Returning to Kokura and that fateful day, one of the city’s residents later recalled, ‘I clearly remember the sky that day … It was a light gray, thick cloud, but not a rain cloud. From the ground I could see blue sky in places.’
Cloudy and gray, but blue in some places.