“There was hatred in some glances, but generally more curiosity than hatred. We were representatives of an enemy power that had employed a weapon far more terrible and deadly than poison gas, yet in the four hours we spent in Hiroshima none so much as spat at us, nor threw a stone.
We later asked the naval lieutenant, who once lived in Sacramento, to halt some pedestrians and obtain eyewitness accounts of the blast. He was very reluctant to do so.
‘They may not want to talk to you,’ he said. But finally he stopped an old man, who bared his gold teeth in an apparent gesture of friendship.
“I am a Christian,” said the old man, making the sign of the cross. He pointed to his ear, indicating deafness, and the lieutenant, after futile attempts to make him hear, told us that the old man, like many others, apparently had suffered permanent loss of his hearing when the crashing blast of the atomic bomb shattered his eardrums.”
Homer Bigart, from the New York Herald Tribune, September 5, 1945
A movie. What movie? Starts with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. News comes in on the radio in black and white. Announcement interrupts a little boogie-woogie. Later, there’s a USO dance in a high-school gym. The handsome boys are officers now, home for Christmas.
Japanese film. Kids go to see their grandmother for a visit on her farm, and she takes them over to the Hiroshima memorial park. The movie follows the old woman and her grandchildren around, she was a child during the blast. She’s crying, I love her, I want to live in their wide-open Japanese house and wear straw flip-flops. I get a glimpse into everything I don’t know about surviving a nuclear blast. It was five miles high, a “superfortress.”
Education is supposed to improve citizenry, citizenship, citizenhood.
History: American, European, Ancient, Modern, World, World, World.
Dribs and drabs.
We don’t have time to learn it all.
But I did watch every episode of every season of Roseanne.
Now we have Good Luck, Charlie. The baby is a boy.