Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb.
My award-winning film “The Atomic Bowl” started streaming on PBS.org and PBS apps last week and via Vimeo (you can easily watch it via links here), plus it is airing over many PBS stations. In addition, my previous film, “Atomic Cover-up,” is receiving free PBS showing here in its “short” (28 minutes) version. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for FREE. And there is now a companion e-book for “The Atomic Bowl” with the same title, more here or order.
As you probably know by now, my current PBS film (see links above) revolves around the January 1, 1946 all-star U.S. military football game played in, of all places, Nagasaki less than five months after one of our new weapons destroyed half the city and killed at least 75,000, overwhelmingly civilians.
Beyond the Atomic Bowl, there was a second highly revealing (of American occupation attitudes) episode a few months after that.
By the summer of 1946, most of the Marine occupiers of Nagasaki had been sent home. Before departing, some helped promote and/or served as judges for a Miss Nagasaki beauty pageant, which they took to calling the “Miss Atom Bomb” contest. The contestants, whose ages ranged from 17 to 25, were young Japanese women, surely some of them widows or daughters of men killed in the Pacific war or in the atomic bombing. They had entered by responding to ads in the three leading local newspapers calling for young women who symbolized “Nagasaki rising from the ruins.”
Three U.S. Marines were among the ten judges in a competition that somehow took three days to complete (April 29-May 1). It was staged in a dance hall in the southern part of the city, well outside the zone of worst destruction. (Remember, the bomb exploded more than a mile off target, so “only” half the city was wiped out.) The hall had become slightly notorious as it was a prime site for occupying troops to pay money to dance with and maybe woo local women.
Presenting roses to the winner (above) was Marine Sgt. Robert McMenimen, who had earlier served as one of the referees at the Atomic Bowl.
Here is a clipping from Pacific Stars & Stripes, covering it at the time, and more photos that my research team found in U.S. archives.
And a photo taken in that period at the same dance hall:
And there is now a companion e-book for “The Atomic Bowl” with the same title, more here or order.
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” and the recent award-winning The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and has directed three documentary films since 2021, including two for PBS (plus award-winning “Atomic Cover-up”). He has written widely about the atomic bomb and atomic bombings, and their aftermath, for over forty years. He writes often at Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb.
