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  • ESSAY

‘The Sun had fallen to Earth’ — a survivor’s recollection of the Hiroshima bombing

Eighty years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, it is crucial that witness accounts are saved. Here is what one man told me.
By
  1. Mordecai Sheftall

    1. Mordecai Sheftall is a historian at Shizuoka University, Shizuoka, Japan. He is the author of Hiroshima (2024) and Nagasaki (2025).

Seiko Komatsu stands in front of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan.

Seiko Komatsu was injured by the bomb blast in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Credit: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Alamy

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By the summer of 1945, after peace was declared in Europe, Japan was the only power of the military coalition with Germany and Italy still at war. In Japan’s blockaded Home Islands, dwindling food supplies were prioritized for soldiers. Meanwhile, emperor Hirohito encouraged the country’s slowly starving civilians to gird for imminent invasion by Allied forces and to be prepared to give up their lives in the upcoming decisive battle that would determine Japan’s fate.

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Nature 644, 29-32 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02460-7

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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