Kinoshita’s film about Dr. Nagai Takashi (1908-51), “Children of Nagasaki” (Kono ko o nokoshite, 1983), is based on Nagai’s Leaving These Children Behind. None of the characters remarks on the US choice of a concentration of Christians (in Urakami, living around its Roman Catholic cathedral) on whom to drop the second atomic bomb, three days after the one dropped on Hiroshima. (The real target of the mission was the Kokura steelworks portrayed in Kinoshita’s “The Eternal Rainbow” (1958) but it was too obscured by smoke from the previous day’s fire-bombing of Yawata for American bombers to distinguish.) I’m not sure that targeting the center of Japanese Christendom was an irony, but the irony that a radiologist of the Nagasaki Medical College Hospital who was already dying of radiation poisoning should survive the dropping of a nuclear bomb that kills his healthy wife, Maria Midori, is not lost on the doctor, who meticulously documented the radiation poisoning from the bomb. (Nagai was a real person, a Christian radiologist some of whose books, such as The Bells of Nagasaki, are available in English. It was filmed in 1950.)
(the real Nagais)
Eventually his son, Makoto, becomes the narrator, a somewhat awkward transition, though the perspective of the child who saw the flash eight kilometers away, having just been evacuated to his mother’s mother’s place in the countryside, is sometimes counterpoised to that of his even more stoic father. (Makoto is pretty stoic, growing up overnight when his grandmother brings his mother (and her rosary) in a cylindrical metal container.
The grandmother moves into a shack in the burnt-out (and radioactive!) ruins to take care of her stolid son-in-law and two grandchildren (the younger Kayano and Makoto), as their father prepares them for the hard life as orphans. He hopes his writing will provide them some income, but the US Occupation censors don’t allow any of it to be published until 1951, which is also when he succumbs.
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