Hungnam and the Japanese atomic bomb: Recent historiography of a postwar Myth

Since 1946, journalists in the US have alleged that Japanese scientists successfully built and tested an atomic bomb hear the city of Hungnam, Korea, during the closing days of World War II. Based upon reports from US military intelligence investigations conducted after the war, as well as from Japanese corporate histories and memoirs, the present essay attempts to dispel the myth of Japans atomic bomb by providing a detailed examination of the events that occurred in Hungnam in the final days of the war. Reasons for the endurance of the myth in the historiography of modern Japan are also considered.