UPLAND - Sumi Umemoto has no memory of the destruction that descended on her hometown of Hiroshima 65 years ago today. She was just 4 months old, a baby girl born at the dawn of the nuclear age.
Although she never saw the mushroom cloud, she definitely heard about it when she was old enough to understand.
"It was a different kind of bombing," Umemoto said. "That mushroom cloud was something different, and everybody was so scared."
The nightmare lasted long after World War II ended, and Umemoto remembers the aftermath - her blood-stained walls, the post-war hunger and countless checkups by doctors studying the effects of radiation.
Umemoto, now an Upland resident, grew up in a home more than a mile from ground zero. But on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, she was at her grandmother's house, about 20 miles away. Her father and cousin were home and both miraculously survived.
That day, Umemoto and her family became hibakushas, or survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place three days later on Aug. 9.
Hibakushas are entitled to government compensation and health care in Japan. To this day, Umemoto meets with visiting Japanese doctors in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo for physicals on an occasional basis. Her cousin, who suffered severe burns after the bomb, was worried over the stigma of radiation exposure and never applied for hibakusha status.
World leaders, including the U.S. ambassador to Japan, will mark the anniversary in the port city where the American plane dropped a 9,700-pound bomb 65 years ago. The event, claiming some 140,000 lives in the months following the Hiroshima bombing and some 80,000 more after the Nagasaki bombing, led to the Japanese surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, thus ending the deadliest war in history. It forever changed Japan, bringing a pacifist identity to national discourse and its constitution.
More at the link.
Readers might recall my discussion last weekend of the case study method. (I had shown the opening scenes of "The Paper Chase" during summer school, including the part where Professor Kingsfield discusses the Socratic method). Well, for a time I organized my World Politics classes around case study analysis, and I used Carolyn Rhodes', Pivotal Decisions: Select Cases In Twentieth Century International Politics. One of the best chapters is "The Decision to Drop the Bomb on Japan." A lot of students were overwhelmed by the case studies, and I imagine that's because Rhodes' cases were extremely in-depth and rigorous, and thus required more advanced training than many entry-level students possessed. That said, there were some beefy discussions. I can remember at least one student --- and a couple of others to a lesser degree --- who basically broke down during the discussion of whether the U.S. should have used nuclear weapons to end the war. I mean, really, the discussions were almost traumatizing for some. So while the article above notes that the Japanese are perhaps the world's most pacifist people, especially with regards to nuclear weapons, some the post-'60s cohorts of neo-socialist youth have internalized tremendously strong feelings about this as well. Of course, I don't think such ideological sentiment leads to rigorous thinking, but at least those views are deeply held.
More on this at NYT (FWIW), Kenzaburo Oe, "Hiroshima and the Art of Outrage."
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