Meanwhile, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura is tired from the air-raid sirens that signaled false alarms during the night. When the all-clear sounds around 8 a.m., she lets her three children sleep. The bomb explodes, and Mrs. Nakamura sees a tremendous white flash and is hurled across the room, along with parts of her house. She is stunned but is not deeply covered in debris. She can hear one of her children crying and sees that another, her youngest daughter, is buried up to her chest in debris and unable to move. From her other children, Mrs. Nakamura hears nothing.
The third survivor, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a prosperous doctor, has arisen early to see a friend off on a train. When the first siren sounds at 7 a.m., he is back home and undressed down to his underwear, reading the paper on his porch. Suddenly, he sees a flash of brilliant yellow, and he is hurled into the river, his house turned into debris. Everything happens so quickly. Dr. Fujii feels the water and discovers that he is still alive, but he is squeezed between two timbers; the physician's head is above water, but his body is wedged tightly beneath it.
This same morning, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge is resting on a cot on the third floor of the mission house of the Society of Jesus. He sees a terrible flash, like a meteor colliding with the earth. For a few moments, the priest remembers nothing. He then he awakens in the vegetable garden of the mission, bleeding from small cuts on his left side and wearing nothing but his underwear.
