Those caught in the open were lifted off their feet and carried through the air. Michiko Yamaoka, a fifteen-year-old girl on her way to her job at the telephone exchange, was looking up at the planes overhead when the bomb exploded. “You can’t really say it washed over me,” she recalled years later. “It’s hard to describe. I simply fainted. I remember my body floating in the air. That was probably the blast, but I don’t know how far I was blown.”13 Fragments of glass and wooden splinters tore into flesh.
