Japan

Yesterday was the 64th anniversary of the atomic destruction of the city of Nagasaki, Japan. Over the period of less than a week, more than 250,000 Japanese died in 1945 due to the bombing and radiation from those two massive blasts. At the same time that protests were taking place across the United States -- at places like Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratories in California; the Nevada Test Site; and other sources of U.S. nuclear weapons development and testing -- several U.S. peace activist colleagues of the Fellowship of Reconciliation were in Japan during the past few days.

John Richard Hersey, son of China missionaries, was perhaps able to bring a personal history of growing up in Asia to an unimaginable event in terms and tones that are both haunting and yet accessible. His story carries a quiet, deep respect for the Japanese victims, a humanizing story of their lives that brings them immediately and intimately to life. This is part of the power of his telling, which appeared as an article in The New Yorker in 1946. Doctors, secretaries, seamstress, mothers, priests, soldiers, and urban mix of everyday lives carry this cautionary tale.