Although little-known, an estimated 3,000 Japanese Americans—second-generation American citizens—along with several hundred Japanese who became American citizens and residents after migrating to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, were hibakusha . Hiroshima is the prefecture in Japan that sent the largest number of immigrants to the United States before the war. Nagasaki, too, is among the Southwestern prefectures of Japan that ranked high in the number of residents who migrated to America. Since it was common among first-generation immigrants to send their children to the old country for a few years of education, a number of Japanese American children were in Japan and, indeed, in their parents' hometown of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, when the war broke out in 1941. Although a total figure is impossible to come up with, there were an estimated 11,000 American- and Hawai'i-born people in Hiroshima alone. An unknown number of them died in the bombing. About 3,000 in total survived and returned to the United States after the war from both of the ruined cities. The other group of U.S. survivors, who came to America in the 1950s and 1960s, included "war brides," women who married American men when Japan was under the massive influence of the American military. Also included in this group were those whom we might call "opportunity seekers," Japanese people who came to the United States in order to pursue educational or employment opportunities not readily available in their country still reeling from a war. In 2014, as of this writing, there are about 1,000 known survivors living in the United States.

Together, these hibakusha have formed a unique identity that crossed national boundaries. For example, their wartime memories reveal that their citizenship at the time of the bombing was an incidental result of their families' back-and-forth travels between Japan and America more than a consequence of a carefully calculated decision. The range of individual experiences was surprisingly wide. In some cases U.S.-born survivors who were U.S. citizens in 1945 had no memory of their childhood in America because they came to Japan very young, while in other cases they had clear memories of having difficulty with learning Japanese because their primary language had been English. There were American citizens who eagerly participated in Japan's wartime student mobilization, but there also were those who thought of B-29s as "my friends" or "Angels" because the bombers, too, were from their home country America. [1]

When one of these "friends" from America dropped the bomb, Japanese Americans often relied on, or benefited from, their cross-national backgrounds for survival. For instance, a female survivor in Hiroshima remembers how she was rescued by her friend, a Japanese American girl, when she fainted after the bomb's explosion. The friend, because she had come to know this survivor as another girl from America, dragged her into the bomb shelter. In other instances, Japanese Americans' English-speaking ability gave them privileged access to the occupiers' resources after Japan surrendered. A survivor recalled: "We were lucky, . . . We know a little English, so two soldiers from the Allied Forces came to us. . . . [T]hey got all kinds of food, so we were lucky—we were able to get their food."