"It was pitch dark in that underground shelter, and I was scared," said Mrs. Okamoto, now a pharmacist. "But I could never have imagined that the damage would be so bad."

Mr. Yoshio feels the close call as much as anyone, because his only protection was white clothes. After the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, the Government told people to stop wearing dark clothes -- which previously were preferred because they were supposedly less visible from the sky -- and to wear white.

The idea was that white clothes would not absorb the heat of the explosion, but of course they would not have prevented Mr. Yoshio from being vaporized or incinerated. He had quarreled with some other workers at the national railway, where he worked, and so as punishment he had been assigned the job of looking at the sky for the flash of America's terrible new bomb.

"If I saw the flash, I was supposed to run off and warn everyone to get in the shelter," said Mr. Yoshio, who had just graduated from elementary school and, like many other wartime children, had taken a job. "Of course, I didn't know then that it was an atomic bomb they were talking about."

"I clearly remember the sky that day," Mr. Yoshio added. "Sometimes when I look up now and see some clouds, I think it's the same as Aug. 9. It was a light gray, thick cloud, but not a rain cloud. From the ground I could see blue sky in places."

That cloud helped make Kokura perhaps the luckiest Japanese city in the war. Not only was it saved from the atomic bombing, but Kokura also never experienced the worst of the conventional bombs.

After the United States selected its targets for atomic bombing in late April 1945, it banned conventional attacks on those cities -- in part so it would be easier to measure the destruction from the atomic bomb. So as neighboring cities were destroyed, Kokura pulled through the summer of 1945 almost intact.