Kokura—and not Nagasaki—was the original destination of the B-29 bomber convoy that flew over Japan 70 years ago on the morning of August 9, 1945. The city of 130,000 on the southern island of ...

It was founded only in 1963, combining five smaller towns in the region. One of these was called Kokura. Kitakyushu is a lovely city, a modern city, with Kokura’s ancient castle at its heart.

History, however, had other plans for Kokura, a city on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, whose story is indelibly linked with the infamous fates that befell two nearby cities—Hiroshima and ...

But just hours earlier, a B29 bomber carrying the "Fat Man" plutonium juggernaut was hovering over Kokura—a city at the northern tip of Kyushu island and home to one of the largest arsenals in ...

Nagasaki wasn’t the original target for the bomb that morning — that was Kokura, a city to its north, which was spared only because mishaps led the Bockscar airplane to arrive at its target ...