BOOK REVIEW : A Nation Blossoms From the Ashes : SONG AMONG THE RUINS <i> by William J. Schull</i> , Harvard University Press, $25, 305 pages

On Aug. 9, 1945, an air-raid warning sounded in the bustling city of Nagasaki, and a young Japanese man called Gus sought refuge in a bomb shelter at the steel factory where he worked. When no bombers appeared, the all-clear sounded, but Gus lingered in the shelter for a catnap. Then a single bomb fell from a single airplane, and Gus awoke to the utterly new sound of the atomic bomb. His parents, his sisters, his friends and neighbors--and, in a sense, a era in the history of human civilization--were dead.

“To all of us who live to be old, there comes a time when, among the people we have known, the dead outnumber the living,” writes William J. Schull in “Song Among the Ruins.” “(T)o Gus and the other survivors, this moment came early.”

William Schull met Gus in Nagasaki in the early 1950s, when Schull served as a member of a scientific survey organized by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission to study the genetic effects of radiation on the victims of the atomic bomb. Schull arrived in Japan in 1949, when the country was only beginning to stir from the devastation of World War II, and he has returned again and again over a lifetime of research and study. Today, Schull, a geneticist at the University of Texas, writes as a firsthand witness to the rebirth of Japan from the ashes of war.

“Song Among the Ruins” is a particularly vivid and forthcoming account of Schull’s work as a scientist on the ragged edge of the Nuclear Age. Schull describes the protocol and politics that afflicted the work of Japanese and American scientists in the postwar years; he shares the moral and psychological burdens of the scientist for whom a sick child is an object of study as well as pity. And Schull decries “hucksterism” and “pandering” in contemporary science, where “publicity is pursued as avidly as truth.”

He concludes his quiet, painstaking account of a 40-year scientific study that went almost wholly unnoticed with the poignant observation that “our age demands scientific heroes and scapegoats, as though each new idea arose unaided from some primordial ooze and was not beholden to the times or what preceded it.”

At the same time, “Song” is a sensitive study of Japanese life and culture by a man who has spent four decades in intimate contact with its people. Schull was sent to Japan to gather scientific data on the incidence of genetic mutation in bomb victims, but he appears to have noticed and appreciated everything that he saw and experienced in Japan--not only the familiar rituals of the tea ceremony and the Kabuki theater but also the obeisance of a defeated soldier to his emperor, the drinking games in a geisha house, the precise method of planting a seedling in a rice paddy, the function of the tatami straw mat in Nippon architecture.

Schull does not apologize for the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (“At the time of the bombing, both of these cities were actively and significantly engaged in the Japanese war effort.”) He recalls the “inhuman” conduct of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific Theater (“I had lost friends and patched the wounds of women and children who suffered only because they were inadvertently caught in the outburst of senseless violence wrought by the Japanese”), and he is candid in expressing his own views about the country and the people to whom he has devoted so much of his life and work.

“After more than four decades of acquaintance with Japan and its culture,” Schull concludes, “they remain enigmatic to me, simultaneously enchanting and inscrutably opaque. Clearly, the self-centeredness, even paranoia, that fueled Japanese imperialism persists.”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Where I Fell to Earth” by Peter Conrad.