Early in the morning on August 8, 1945, an American warplane cut through the cloudless sky over Hiroshima and dropped a single, devastating bomb, obliterating the hospital directly below the “Little Boy’s” path and much of the surrounding city. Two days later, as Hiroshima still burned, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. At least 100,000 people were killed instantly in both attacks, and many more died of blast injuries or radiation sickness in the weeks and months that followed.
In a cruel — and often unacknowledged — twist of irony, among the nearly half a million atomic bomb victims and survivors were thousands of Japanese American citizens of the United States.
No conclusive number indicating just how many Japanese Americans were affected by the atomic bombings exists today — although an estimated 11,000 people born in Hawai`i or the United States were in Hiroshima alone. More pre-war Japanese immigrants came from Hiroshima than from any other prefecture. Nagasaki also sent a high number of immigrants to the U.S. It was a common practice for these Issei immigrants to send their U.S. citizen children to Japan to visit relatives and receive a Japanese education, and many Japanese Americans were stranded in Japan when war broke out in 1941. Consequently, thousands of Nisei and Kibei children of Japanese immigrants were in their parents’ hometowns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the attacks, and became war casualties of their own birth country.
Approximately 3,000 Japanese American survivors of the two atomic bombings returned to the U.S. after the war. They were soon followed by Japanese citizens who migrated as war brides, or simply as immigrants seeking better opportunities than post-war Japan could offer.
Despite sharing a common identity as hibakusha — literally “bomb impacted people” — these U.S. survivors had vastly different experiences. For some, their arrival in America marked a much anticipated return to their home and their families, while others came as war refugees displaced from the only home they knew. Even American citizens like Yuriko Furubayashi, born in Waimea, Hawai`i in 1927 and sent to live in Japan when she was 10 years old, struggled to adapt. “I was in Japan ten years, so my English was so bad,” she told historian Naoko Wake in a 2013 interview.