The nightmare returns: Chilling echoes of Hiroshima’s destruction...

Mangaloretoday News Network

Japan, March 14:  It is the worst disaster to hit Japan since the Second World War.

And the pictures of the devastation following Friday’s tsunami bear a chilling resemblance to shots taken after the country’s worst human catastrophe - the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Some 70,000 Japanese died instantly when the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 1945, and three days later another 75,000 died when a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

 

1945 left and 2011 right: Shinto shrines represent the spiritual connection between the people and the land. The traditional Toril entrance gates to these shrines were among the few structures to survive in Hiroshima 66 years ago and in the village of Otsuchi last Friday

 

Inferno: A fire engine in the ruins of Hiroshima, left. The atomic firestorm could not be quenched. Right one of the emergency vehicles called out to fight gas fires in Minamisoma

At least 10,000 victims are thought to have died when the tsunami hit north east Japan on Friday - but the death toll could rise much higher.

And dozens of coastal towns have been flattened in much the same way as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wiped out by the nuclear bombs.

Writing for the Daily Mail, reporter Alex Thompson told how he had seen the effects of 20 wars, but he had never seen anything on the scale of the destruction in Minami Sanriku.

’The scene is reminiscent of the photographs of Nagasaki or Hiroshima after the A bombs were dropped during the Second World War. The occasional concrete structure has survived, but nothing else,’ he said.

Wiped out: The vast of expanse of broken homes in Minami Sinraku is almost hard to distinguish from the scene in Hiroshima decades earlier

 

Ruins: Hiroshima was one of Japan’s most industrialised cities before the nuclear bomb was dropped. American generals had avoided bombing it before the nuclear bomb so that the effects of the nuclear blast could be fully measured

 

A life in ruins: An elderly survivor in 1945 searches the rubble of her Hiroshima home, left, and right, the wooden homes were smashed into matchwood in Rikuzentakata

Terrifying: The tsunami washed away most of Rikuzentakata within minutes, left. Right: nuclear wasteland - entire blocks of Hiroshima disappeared in the atomic blast