According to an excerpt from her essay, “In Hiroshima, Japan, a Teenager Finds an Unexpected Home,” Daisy Okazaki went “to the Peace Park for the memorial of the 74th anniversary of the bombing” Aug. 6, 2019. The Aug. 9 virtual “Remembrance for Peace” event — presented by the Nichi Bei Foundation and Friends of Hibakusha […]
What my grandma left behind
August 2, 2018 by Leave a Comment
My grandmother and I were always very close. But she had never spoke of her experience of the atomic bomb. “It is too painful for your grandma to talk about it,” my mother once told me. My grandma lost her mom on the day of the bomb, and her husband and siblings in later years. […]
Compassion abounds in intimate journey
July 20, 2017 by Leave a Comment
GENTLY TO NAGASAKI By Joy Kogawa (Halfmoon Bay, B.C.: Caitlin Press Inc., 2016, 214 pp., $25.95 CAD, paper) “Gently to Nagasaki” is filled with honesty, fragility and deep questioning of opposing forces and ironic encounters that bring writer Joy Kogawa to unravel her truth. Before the memoir begins, Kogawa calls upon the Goddess of Mercy, […]
Obama reiterates call for world without nuclear in historic Hiroshima visit
June 9, 2016 by Leave a Comment
HIROSHIMA — U.S. President Barack Obama on May 27 became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, where he reiterated his call for a “world without nuclear weapons” during his speech at the Peace Memorial Park in the city devastated by the world’s first atomic bomb 71 years ago. “Among those nations like my […]
Kerry becomes 1st U.S. sec. of state to visit Hiroshima A-bomb park
April 14, 2016 by Leave a Comment
HIROSHIMA — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on April 11 visited a peace park marking the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing in the western Japan city of Hiroshima, the first top U.S. diplomat to do so, focusing attention on whether President Barack Obama will follow suit when he visits Japan later in the year. In […]
U.S. designates WWII nuke projects sites as nat’l park
November 19, 2015 by Leave a Comment
WASHINGTON — The United States on Nov. 10 designated three sites related to its nuclear weapons program in the 1940s as a national park, stepping up preparations to open it to the public over the next few years. Some U.S. officials told a designation ceremony that the National Park Service, the operator of the park, […]
‘Urban Samurai’: One atomic bomb survivor’s journey to forgiveness
July 23, 2015 by Leave a Comment
At the age of 8, Takashi Thomas Tanemori lost most of his family in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. His mother and his 14-month-old sister were never found. His eldest sister and father succumbed to radiation poisoning less than a month after the blast. Their deaths left Tanemori, his two older sisters and his younger […]
Looking onward from the year of infamy
July 23, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Accomplished jazz musician and composer Anthony Brown will debut his “life’s work to date” in remembrance of both the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Sunday, Aug. 2 in San Francisco’s Japantown. Brown, founder of Fifth Stream Music, composed “1945: Year of Infamy.” Unlike his 1995 instrumental piece, “Never […]
1st A-bomb exhibition in 20 years in Washington begins
June 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment
WASHINGTON — An exhibition underscoring the woe of the U.S. atomic bombings of two Japanese cities in 1945 during World War II began June 13 in Washington for the first time in 20 years in the U.S. capital. Two survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki pleaded for efforts toward the abolition of nuclear weapons before some […]
Eliminate inhumane nuclear weapons now!
Editor’s Note: The following is the text of the speech Rev. Nobuaki Hanaoka gave Aug. 6, 2019 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. On Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the first atomic bomb was detonated in the sky above Hiroshima, the second and hopefully the last nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. I was […]