Kokura's luck

In Fluke: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, Brian Klaas says that we give simplified, rational explanations for the world. We like to imagine that we can understand, predict, and control the world. We tend to ignore or minimize the importance of arbitrary, tiny changes that can have a huge impact on our lives. Some of these events we will never realize were consequential. Yet, when we try to explain the world, we ignore a truth: but for a few small changes, our lives and our societies could be very different. 

He gives an example. On October 30, 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson checked into Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. During their six-day stay, they soaked the beautiful sights in Kyoto - its historic temples, lovely gardens, the mudstone hill, the Japanese maples and ginkgo trees in full bloom... But that tourist visit turned out to be the most consequential sightseeing trip in human history.

Fast forward nineteen years. The Nazis surrendered on May 7, 1945. The focus now shifted to the Pacific where the Asian leg of the war showed no sign of ending. But in the hills of New Mexico, the scientists and soldiers saw a potential savior: the atomic bomb, a new weapon of unimaginable destruction. No successful test had yet been carried out to demonstrate the weapon’s full potential, but everyone involved knew they were getting close. 

On May 10, a group of 13 physicists and generals gathered at a top-secret location code-named Site Y three days after the Nazis had surrendered. This group would decide which cities should be chosen to introduce the bomb to the world. They thought that targeting Tokyo wasn’t a good idea, as heavy bombing had already devastated the new capital. After weighing up the alternatives, they decided that the first bomb would be dropped on Kyoto.

Why Kyoto? It was home to new wartime factories, including one that could churn out four hundred aircraft engines per month. Furthermore, leveling a former capital would deal a crushing blow to Japan’s morale. Kyoto was an intellectual hub with an educated population, home to the prestigious Kyoto University. Those who survived would, the committee supposed, recognize that this weapon represented a new era in human history and that the war had already been lost. 

The committee also agreed on three backup targets: Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. The target list was sent to President Truman. On July 16, 1945, a successful test explosion of the atom bomb was carried out in rural New Mexico. Military strategists consulted detailed maps of Kyoto and decided on ground zero for the explosion: the city’s railway yards. But, on August 6, 1945, the bomb code-named Little Boy fell from the sky not on Kyoto, but on Hiroshima killing 140,000 people, most of them civilians. 

Three days later, on August 9, another atom bomb code named Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, adding roughly 80,000 casualties to the horrifying death toll. But why was Kyoto spared? And why was Nagasaki — a city that hadn’t even been considered a top-tier bombing target — destroyed? Astonishingly, whether over 200,000 people lived or died depended on the nostalgia of a tourist couple and a cloud.

The intended blast in Kyoto site was only half a mile away from the Miyako Hotel, where Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Stimson had stayed two decades earlier. By 1945, Mr. H. (Henry) L. Stimson had become America’s secretary of war, the top civilian overseeing wartime operations. When the Target Committee picked Kyoto for destruction, Stimson put his foot down. He insisted that there was “one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.” Yet, despite his insistence, Kyoto kept reappearing on the targeting list. 

The Generals kept saying that Kyoto was a nerve center of the Japanese war machine and needed to be bombed. Stimson went straight to the top. He met with President Truman twice in late July 1945, each time outlining his vehement opposition to destroying Kyoto. Truman finally relented and Kyoto was taken out of consideration. The final targeting list contained four cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and a late addition, Nagasaki. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead of the original target of Kyoto. 

The second bomb was to be dropped on the city of Kokura on August 9. But as the B-29 bomber approached the city, an unexpected cloud cover made it dicult to see the ground below. The pilot circled, hoping the clouds would clear. When they didn’t, the crew decided to attack a secondary target rather than risking a botched drop. As they approached Nagasaki, that city was also obscured by cloud cover. With fuel running low, they made one last pass, the clouds parted at the last possible minute and the bomb was released. 

Nagasaki’s civilians were doubly unlucky: the city was a last-minute addition to the backup targeting list, and it was leveled because of a tiny window of poor weather over another city. If the bomber had taken off a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, countless residents of Kokura might have been incinerated instead. To this day, the Japanese refer to “Kokura’s luck” whenever someone unknowingly escapes from disaster.