Jane Braxton: Coming of Age with Hiroshima's Mourning
[After teaching at Wakayama University, Jane Braxton Little earned a Harvard M.A. in Japanese cultural history.]
...I might not have noticed the woman with the cropped hair and ill-fitting gray silk dress if a cameraman hadn't zoomed in on her. She was stooped, seated in a cobblestone courtyard on folded legs before a black-and-white family photograph flanked by vases of golden chrysanthemums. In my eyes she looked old but she could have been middle-aged, a young mother on Aug. 6, 1945....
In the shadow of the bombed-out hulk of the six-story Atomic Dome — one block from the Peace Museum entombing the outlines of children's bodies radiated into the sidewalks where they happened to be captured at 8:15 a.m. on their way to school — there in the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, I became this woman's token American aggressor.
It was my government, my president who unleashed the horror of the atom bomb on Japan. It was my country, my people who turned her home into an inferno roiling with flames that seared the living and the unborn alike. We — I — had murdered her daughter, her only son, her aged father and over 100,000 members of her national family. Her voice swelled from tight-lipped anger into furious rage before it struck a high-pitched frenzy, keening from word to word like an atomic wind leveling everything in its path....
Read entire article at Japan Times
...I might not have noticed the woman with the cropped hair and ill-fitting gray silk dress if a cameraman hadn't zoomed in on her. She was stooped, seated in a cobblestone courtyard on folded legs before a black-and-white family photograph flanked by vases of golden chrysanthemums. In my eyes she looked old but she could have been middle-aged, a young mother on Aug. 6, 1945....
In the shadow of the bombed-out hulk of the six-story Atomic Dome — one block from the Peace Museum entombing the outlines of children's bodies radiated into the sidewalks where they happened to be captured at 8:15 a.m. on their way to school — there in the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, I became this woman's token American aggressor.
It was my government, my president who unleashed the horror of the atom bomb on Japan. It was my country, my people who turned her home into an inferno roiling with flames that seared the living and the unborn alike. We — I — had murdered her daughter, her only son, her aged father and over 100,000 members of her national family. Her voice swelled from tight-lipped anger into furious rage before it struck a high-pitched frenzy, keening from word to word like an atomic wind leveling everything in its path....