JAPAN: Report from Nagasaki

The second A-bomb used in war, much less publicized but far more powerful than the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima, fell on Nagasaki (pop. 250,000). Last week, 3½ years after the city's fiery ordeal, TIME Correspondent Sam Welles paid it a visit. His report:

Nagasaki is surprisingly full of smiles and surprisingly empty of hate. The A-bomb epicenter is a small park of less than an acre around a low, earthen mound topped by a plain wooden shaft. Seven young arborvitae trees circle the mound. A sign in English and Japanese states that 18,409 homes were destroyed, 29,739 people killed and 91,081 injured when a compact mass of plutonium "exploded in the air just above here" on Aug. 9, 1945.

Mixed Feelings. Of many new houses near the park, the closest belongs to straggle-bearded Akira Yamamoto, 37, a sewing-machine merchant whose back stoop is only 80 feet from the shaft. During the war Yamamoto worked in a munitions plant ten miles away, while his wife and older children were in the country, but his parents lived in the target area and were killed.

"Why did you return here?" I asked.

"This district has always been my home," he answered. He seemed surprised at this question.

"Are there many visitors to the site?" I asked.

"Often Americans stop by my shop, and I would like to talk to them, but they have no interpreters."

"What would you like to ask an American?"

"I have wondered what they think, and why they come here."

"Many of them have mixed feelings about the A-bomb," I said. "They probably want to see for themselves what its use is like."

"Thank you very much for helping me understand," he said. "I thought Americans considered the Japanese fools for even starting war against a country that could make A-bombs. I am glad to learn that many Americans have these mixed feelings."

In the front yard of one of many rows of neat new grey tile-roofed houses near the epicenter, I saw a young man doing his own laundry. He was Shinji Hamaguchi, 23, a former medical student and now a drugstore clerk. The A-bomb killed his parents and nine other relatives. "I still long to be a doctor," he said, "but it is financially impossible. If my family were living it would be different.

"I should be bitter," he went on. "But the bomb brought immediate surrender, which saved many more lives than were lost. While it destroyed materially, it did not destroy spiritually. It has meant that we Japanese who are left can build a better and freer country than the one our militarists took to war."

Fuller Lives. The American Military Government has spurred local people to take steadily increasing responsibility. Nagasaki's normal cheerfulness has been largely restored by giving personal needs priority over industrial recovery. Food is nearly up to prewar level, with one-seventh the supply provided by America. Department stores are well stocked, especially compared to Europe. Steady progress has been made toward rebuilding the destroyed 47% of the city's housing.