Film captures hibakusha’s decades-long effort to honor U.S. POWs killed in Hiroshima

Shigeaki Mori, 8 years old, miraculously escaped death on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, when the U.S. detonated an atomic bomb over Hiroshima. He was crossing a bridge when the force of the blast threw him into a river, engulfing him in darkness. Seventy-one years later, Mori found himself in newspaper photos around the […]

THE KAERU KID: On the silk road in Uzbekistan

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth part of a series. I have had the most exciting discoveries many times when it was least expected. On the other hand, many places that I’ve looked forward to visiting and read about extensively were disappointing because I had built up an image that was difficult to achieve in person. Uzbekistan […]

Mitsubishi Materials makes historic apology to ex-POW forced laborers

LOS ANGELES — A top executive from Japan’s Mitsubishi Materials Corp. delivered July 19 a historic apology to former American prisoners of war who were used as forced labor during World War II. Hikaru Kimura, senior executive officer at the company, said through a translator that the company expressed “our most remorseful apology” to the […]

The internment camp in West Oahu’s backyard

“There are still scholarly works that say there were no internment camps in Hawai‘i,” observes archaeologist Mary Farrell. In fact, there were at least 14 places in the islands where people were detained during World War II. The Honouliuli camp, located in a gulch cutting through agricultural land of Central Oahu, was the largest and […]

Honda introduces POW bill

WASHINGTON — Rep. Michael Honda (D-San Jose) introduced a bipartisan resolution honoring U.S. veterans who were held as prisoners of war during World War II, according to a statement his office issued June 22. The resolution commemorates the men and women who were taken as U.S. prisoners of war in the Pacific. It also commends […]