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The US bombed Hiroshima with the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, on August 6th, 1945 and bombed Nagasaki with Fat Man on three days later on August 9th. On August 15th, Hirohito, Japans emperor, surrendered.

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Table of Contents

1. Hirohito: The Early Years

2. Hirohito as Emperor and the Rise of Japanese Militarism

3. Japan's Involvement in World War II

4. Life for Hirohito After the War

Hirohito (1901-1989) was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his death in 1989. He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism. During World War II (1939-45), Japan attacked nearly all of its Asian neighbors, allied itself with Nazi Germany and launched a surprise assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. Though Hirohito later portrayed himself as a virtually powerless constitutional monarch, many scholars have come to believe he played an active role in the war effort. After Japan's surrender in 1945, he became a figurehead with no political power.

Hirohito: The Early Years

Hirohito, the eldest son of Crown Prince Yoshihito, was born on April 29, 1901, within the confines of the Aoyama Palace in Tokyo. According to custom, imperial family members were not raised by their parents. Instead, Hirohito spent his early years in the care of first a retired vice-admiral and then an imperial attendant. From age 7 to 19, Hirohito attended schools set up for the children of nobility. He received rigorous instruction in military and religious matters, along with other subjects such as math and physics. In 1921, Hirohito and a 34-man entourage traveled to Western Europe for a six-month tour; it was the first time a Japanese crown prince had ever gone abroad.

Did you know? Hirohito's son Akihito, the current emperor of Japan, broke with 1,500 years of tradition by marrying a commoner in 1959.

Upon his return to Japan, Hirohito became regent for his chronically ill father and assumed the duties of emperor. In September 1923, an earthquake struck the Tokyo area, killing about 100,000 people and destroying 63 percent of the city's houses. Rampaging Japanese mobs subsequently murdered several thousand ethnic Koreans and leftists, who were accused of setting fires and looting in the quake's aftermath. That December, Hirohito survived an assassination attempt, and the following month he married Princess Nagako, with whom he would have seven children. At around the same time, he ended the practice of imperial concubinage. Hirohito officially became emperor when his father died in December 1926. He chose Showa, which roughly translates to "enlightened harmony," as his reign name.

Hirohito as Emperor and the Rise of Japanese Militarism

When Hirohito assumed the throne, a universal male suffrage law had just passed, and political parties were near the height of their prewar powers. However, a plunging economy, rising militarism and a series of political assassinations soon caused a crisis for the pro-democracy movement. Hirohito, who as emperor was the nation's highest spiritual authority and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, essentially fired the prime minister in 1929. The next prime minister was shot and mortally wounded, and in 1932 yet another prime minister was assassinated by naval officers upset about a treaty limiting the number of Japanese warships. From then on, almost all prime ministers came from the military rather than from the political parties, which were disbanded altogether in 1940. More political violence occurred in 1935, when a lieutenant colonel slashed a general to death with a samurai sword. And in 1936, over 1,400 soldiers mutinied in Tokyo, seizing the army ministry and murdering several high-ranking politicians.

Meanwhile, Japan's conflict with China was growing. In 1931, Japanese army officers initiated the so-called Manchurian Incident by detonating a railway explosion and blaming it on Chinese bandits. They then used the event as an excuse to take over Manchuria in northeastern China and set up a puppet state there. Excursions into other areas of the country soon followed, and by 1937 war had broken out. That winter, the Japanese army massacred an estimated 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war in and around the city of Nanking. Rape is thought to have been commonplace, and women throughout Japanese-controlled regions of Asia were brought in to serve as prostitutes. Hirohito did not condone the invasion's more repugnant aspects, but-perhaps because he worried the military would make him abdicate-he failed to punish those responsible. He also sanctioned the use of chemical warfare and the uprooting of peasants.

Japan's Involvement in World War II

In September 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in which they agreed to assist one another should any of them be attacked by a country not already involved in the war. Japan sent troops to occupy French Indochina that same month, and the United States responded with economic sanctions, including an embargo on oil and steel. A little over a year later, Hirohito consented to the decision of his government to battle the Americans. On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes bombarded the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii, destroying or crippling 18 ships and killing almost 2,500 men. The United States declared war one day later.

Over the next seven months, Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies, British Singapore, New Guinea, the Philippines and a number of other locations in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. But the tide started turning at the June 1942 Battle of Midway and soon after at Guadalcanal. By mid-1944, Japan's military leaders recognized that victory was unlikely, yet the country did not stop fighting until after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following August. On August 15, 1945, Hirohito made a radio broadcast announcing Japan's surrender.

Life for Hirohito After the War

A postwar constitution preserved the monarchy but defined the emperor as a mere symbol of the state. All political power went to elected representatives. Unlike many among his top military brass, Hirohito was not indicted as a war criminal, in part because U.S. authorities feared it could throw their occupation into chaos. From 1945 to 1951, Hirohito toured the country and oversaw reconstruction efforts. The American occupation ended in 1952, after which Hirohito served largely in the background while Japan went through a period of rapid economic growth. He died on January 7, 1989, having spent nearly 64 years on the throne-the longest imperial reign in Japanese history. To this day, Hirohito's wartime record remains a subject of much debate.

Fact Check

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Hirohito was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his death in 1989. He oversaw the country during World War II and the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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''If I live a hundred years, I'll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind. Everyone on the ship is actually dumbstruck even though we had expected something fierce." said Capt. Robert A. Lewis.

Lewis, Caron and the others, however, would later say they had no regrets about dropping the bomb. It had hastened the end of the war and saved the lives of US troops who were then preparing for the invasion of Japan.

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"I thought, yes, we're going to kill a lot of people, but by God we're going to save a lot of lives" That was a quote from the pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb onto Hiroshima

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Our presidant at the time Harry Truman authorized the atom bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima.

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On August 6th, 1945, the US bombed Hiroshima, and on the 9th, they bombed Nagasaki. WWII ended on September 2, 1945. The US bombing Japan was a crucial step in ending WWII.

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Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Causes, Impact & Lives Lost

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On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, immediately killing 80,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people.

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This looked like a good source:)

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As a survivor of history's deadliest atomic bombing, Setsuko Thurlow has a powerful case to make against nuclear weapons.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, the 13-year-old Thurlow reported to a military office in Hiroshima, along with other girls recruited to help with Japan's wartime code breaking. While listening to an officer speak, she saw a burst of light out the window, and was hit with a blast that catapulted her through the air. When she came to, she was pinned under parts of the building she'd been in.

Thurlow is one of the survivors of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II that killed an estimated 90,000 to 120,000 people, according to the journal . The military office she worked in stood less than two miles from where the bomb hit. Three days later, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing another 60,000 to 70,000 people.

The two attacks left hundreds of thousands of survivors with physical injuries, lasting health problems and severe trauma. Over the next several decades, some of these "hibakusha," or people affected by the bomb, became vocal activists, criss-crossing the world to condemn the weapons that had so drastically altered their lives. Together, they helped to introduce a major United Nations treaty, an effort that garnered the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
WATCH: Hiroshima: 75 Years Later on HISTORY Vault.
Sharing Their Stories With the World

Thurlow began speaking publicly against nuclear weapons as early as 1954, when she came to the United States to attend a university in Virginia. Local reporters asked for her reaction to U.S. hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific that had killed a Japanese fisherman by giving him radiation poisoning.

"I feel angry," she said. When her response appeared in a newspaper, she started receiving hate mail telling her to go back to Japan, or asserting that Japan had deserved the bombing.

Stunned by the backlash, Thurlow resolved to speak out about the horrific effects of nuclear weapons-and call for their elimination. "As a survivor of Hiroshima, it was my moral responsibility to keep telling the world about it so that knowledge could prevent a similar thing from happening again," she said.

Now age 90, she has told her story in venues all over the world, recalling how when she escaped from the rubble of the building that day, she saw people with their skin hanging off and organs falling out. Several of her family members died, both from the initial blast and the radiation sickness it unleashed.

Sharing these details with the world can be incredibly painful for hibakusha. For one of the Nagasaki bombing survivors who became an anti-nuclear weapons activist, telling his story involved sharing graphic pictures of how the bomb maimed him.

Sumiteru Taniguchi was 16 years old on August 9, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. He was delivering mail on his bicycle in the city when the bomb hit. The blast threw him to the ground and stripped the skin from his back. He was in a hospital for more than three and a half years, two of which he spent lying on his stomach as doctors tried to treat his injuries and the resulting infections.

Over the next several decades, Taniguchi-who died of cancer in 2017 at age 88-used his personal story to argue for the elimination of nuclear weapons. At a 2010 United Nations conference on nuclear arms, he held up graphic pictures of what the atomic bomb had done to his back to make his point.
READ MORE: The Man Who Survived Two Atomic Bombs
Calling for an End to Nuclear Weapons

Thurlow, Taniguchi and other hibakusha have played an important role in advocating for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The United Nations adopted the treaty a month before Taniguchi's death in 2017. Later that year, Thurlow accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

As of June 2022, 66 sovereign states have signed and ratified the UN treaty or acceded to it after it went into effect in 2021. Prominent hibakusha have criticized the United States and the eight other nuclear powers for refusing to sign the treaty. Thurlow has also criticized Japan, which has no nuclear weapons, for not signing the treaty in order to appease the United States.

As first-hand witnesses to the horrors of nuclear weapons, hibakusha have been powerful voices in the anti-nuclear arms movement. As this population ages, many activists-including hibakusha themselves-have expressed worry about a near future in which these survivors are no longer around to remind the world of why atomic weaponry poses such a grave threat to the world.

In 2017, the anti-nuclear arms movement lost both Taniguchi and 100-year-old Shuntaro Hida, a doctor who survived the Hiroshima attack, helped treat other victims and spoke internationally about the impact of nuclear weapons. In 2021, the activist Sunao Tsuboi, who was a university student in Hiroshima when the bomb hit, died at age 96.

"I am worried about what will happen to the world," Taniguchi said before his own death, "when there are no more atomic bomb survivors."

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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How Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Organized for Nuclear Disarmament

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As a survivor of history's deadliest atomic bombing, Setsuko Thurlow has a powerful case to make against nuclear weapons. On the morning of August 6, 1945, the 13-year-old Thurlow reported to a military office in Hiroshima, along with other girls recruited to help with Japan's wartime code breaking.

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The pilot of the Enola Gay named Paul Tibbets who had dropped the nuclear bomb onto Hiroshima on August 6th 1945 says he had no regrets about dropping the nearly five-ton nuclear bomb named "Little Boy"

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This article says what happened in Hiroshima with timestamps.

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The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (U.S. National Park Service)

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MyBib is a free bibliography and citation generator that makes accurate citations for you to copy straight into your academic assignments and papers. If you're a student, academic, or teacher, and you're tired of the other bibliography and citation tools out there, then you're going to love MyBib.