The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are hot button topics even now, sixty-five years later, evoking passionate reactions among those who believe the bombings were the right thing to do at the time.  Many people express intense feelings relating to Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor and the atrocities the Japanese military committed in China and throughout the Pacific Theatre during the war.  Others (like many of us) have been taught the historical narrative, carefully-crafted by our government both before and after the bombings, that the atomic bombs ended the war before the planned Allied invasion of Japan’s home islands and thereby saved a million American soldiers’ lives.  Additionally, the suffering experienced by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is so horrific that many people would, consciously or not, prefer to turn away and not think about this part of our history.

In my book, Nagasaki, I’ll flesh out these complex reactions to the atomic bombs.  But since I started the project seven years ago, I’ve wondered if there’s a way to tell the stories of Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors without provoking the outrage of those in our country who strongly agree with our choice to use the bombs.  And I’ve struggled with how to handle the gruesome details of injury, radiation, and extraordinary suffering of atomic bomb victims without alienating readers — either while they’re reading or before they pick up the book in the first place.

Thinking about the complex responses readers may have to my book has helped me clarify some ethical and artistic guidelines in my writing. The first is to fully acknowledge the Japanese military’s massacres, rapes, and beheadings of civilians in China, Japan’s choice to bomb Pearl Harbor, and the torture, starvation, and killing of Allied POWs by Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War.  In later chapters of Nagasaki when I write about U.S. censorship and denial of the effects of the atomic bombings, I’ll also address Japan’s denial and censorship of its war crimes, which continue in some political arenas even now.

Additionally, I have found documentation that the torpedoes used in the Pearl Harbor attack may have been manufactured in Nagasaki.  Whether or not to include this information in my book took some time to decide; if I do include it, this fact alone might give readers a further sense of justification for having used the atomic bombs.  But not including it would be a conscious suppression of an important fact, which overrides other considerations for me — so I’ll include this information in the book.

My second ethical consideration has emerged slowly over time as I come to understand and appreciate some of the sentiments of the men and women in our military and at home during the war.  In August 1945, the long war in Europe, which took an enormous toll on our country, had been over for just three months, and the war in the Pacific was continuing to amass thousands of military deaths and casualties.  In both our country and in Japan, racist and demeaning perceptions of the enemy were commonly accepted and publicly supported by the media.  The American people weren’t told that Japan was on the verge of complete collapse and surrender.  Although the feelings of both soldiers and their families and communities at home were layered and can’t be quickly categorized, I think it’s safe to say that everyone was exhausted, countless people had lost loved ones, and hatred toward the Japanese felt justified.

I wholeheartedly understand everyone’s passionate desire — at the time and now, looking back — to prevent any further death and injury to our military personnel.  At the same time, I can see that in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than 310,000 men, women, and children, nearly all civilians, died grisly deaths or survived with critical burns and cruel aftereffects from toxic doses of radiation.  This suffering, too, I wish to see prevented.  I’m exploring how these seemingly opposing sides of history can coexist, neither overriding the other.  Holding both of them together allows me to tell the story of Nagasaki in a way that is true to the survivor’s experiences but does not denigrate the feelings of those who believe the bombing was right.

My final consideration relates to how much horrific detail of the Nagasaki atomic bombing I bring to the page.  This question has come up often as I write about the hours, days, and weeks that followed the attack — and I’m asking it again this week as I prepare for a meeting with my editor at Viking regarding photographs for the book.  Many post-bomb photographs depict charred corpses of infants and children, beheaded bodies, and limbs lying unattached to their bodies in the atomic rubble; images that may cause readers to put down the book before they’ve even started reading.  Do I include the photographs anyway, or do I leave them out and partially sanitize the immensity of horror, destruction, and suffering that the atomic bombs caused?

I’m still thinking about this, but right now I’m inclined to leave out the most horrifying photos.  Because so little has been written about the bombings and what happened to the people beneath the atomic clouds, if I alienate readers before they start the book, my purpose in telling the story would be defeated. My goal for Nagasaki is to honor the stories of lifelong survival of nuclear war as truthfully as I can in a way that invites readers to turn each page, understand the survivors’ stories, and appreciate this critical event in our history that has long remained suppressed.

In Buddhism, there is a mindfulness practice called, “Right Speech.”  With appreciation for how words can create suffering or evoke happiness, this practice encourages speech that is both truthful and promotes inclusiveness.  Though I am not Buddhist, I actively think about the ethics of speech, and I’ve been thinking about how to write this book truthfully while diminishing the separations that language often creates.  In writing Nagasaki,  my task is to appreciate but not get hooked into my own or anyone else’s anger, reactivity, defensiveness, or justifications that exist on either side of the complex issue of our country’s use of the atomic bombs.  Several veterans have read portions of my manuscript and expressed surprise that in my telling of the survivors’ stories, there is a balanced tone that includes Japan’s wartime atrocities and no condemnation of the United States.  I’m sure there are many ways I could tell this story, but this seems to be my way, and I fervently hope that the book will illuminate this untold story, celebrate the lives of the survivors, promote reflection and discussion about our use of the atomic bombs, and excite readers to think more deeply about how history is created.

I was seventeen – a senior in high school – when I first learned about the atomic bombs dropped over Japan.  Yes, I’d heard about the bombs, vaguely, something about the bombs and the end of World War II, and yes, I went to Scarsdale High School, one of the most prestigious public high schools in the country.  Still, in my mind at the time, World War II was a large, imprecise blob of history that happened before I was born, except for the little I knew about Hitler and the concentration camps.  I couldn’t have differentiated the war in Europe from the war with Japan – nor did I have even one clear image of the immense suffering caused by the atomic bombs.

So, as it happened, I learned about the atomic bombs not in the United States, but in Japan.  In March 1973, I left New York for a year-long study abroad program in Yokohama, a city just south of Tokyo, the largest port city in Japan.  I lived with a conservative Japanese family with four daughters who were being raised to strictly honor their parents’ directives.  My school was arguably one of the most conservative girls’ high schools in the country, selected by my host parents because the school’s mission was to cultivate in its students a spirit of gratitude and service.  We wore long, navy, pleated wool skirts, navy wool sailor tops with green polyester ties, bobby socks, and black shoes.  Petticoats were required, no lace allowed.  Hair longer than one’s ear lobes had to be tied in pigtails, and any pigtails more than three or four inches long had to be braided tightly behind the ears.  Our teachers held surprise uniform checks in the gymnasium to make sure we complied with these rules.

Every year, the senior class went on a weeklong field trip.  Our trip that year was to Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island.  Seven classes of fifty students each – three hundred and fifty girls in all – boarded seven charter buses.  As we traveled hundreds of miles south to the tip of the main island of Honshu and crossed through an underwater tunnel to Kyushu, my friends and I peered out of the bus windows at the Japanese countryside, slept on each other’s shoulders, admired souvenirs in the local shops, and broke the rules by talking late at night in the dormitory-like institutional hostels where we slept and ate breakfast.  Fifty girls at a time, we posed in front of monuments, famous hot springs, and Meiji-era castles.  On the last day of the trip, all three hundred and fifty of us gathered for a final photo – a large mass of navy blue uniforms and black braids.  I’m the one with brown hair and paler skin, not noticeable except with a magnifying glass.

As we traveled all around Kyushu, we stopped for one afternoon in Nagasaki.  I had heard of Hiroshima and knew, in a most general way, that Hiroshima was where an atomic bomb had been dropped.  And though perhaps I’d heard of Nagasaki, I don’t think I knew that there had been a second atomic bomb attack in Japan, and I certainly did not connect that event to the place we were scheduled to visit that day.   So I was caught off-guard when we entered the exhibit area of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.

My friends and I walked arm-in-arm, as Japanese schoolgirls did back then, and stood side by side in front of glass cases, staring at photos of blackened bodies of adults and children lying in the rubble of the destroyed city, and a woman whose burns across her back matched the pattern of her kimono.  Thirty years after the Pacific War had ended, we gaped at remnants of melted glass, metal, roof tiles, and the helmet of a soldier, the charred flesh of his scalp still stuck inside.  None of us seemed to breathe.  I wanted to disappear, to no longer be an American or in any way connected to the country that had inflicted this harm on Japan, a country whose language, culture, and people I now loved.

I was young then, and I had never visualized our two countries at war or the horrors that war inflicts on both soldiers and innocent civilians.  It would be many years before I learned about Japan’s war atrocities in China and throughout the Pacific Theatre – and because of Japan’s denial of these crimes, it’s likely that none of my school friends at the time knew of them, either.  In silence, we stood before the exhibits, pulling each other closer, trying to stave off our sadness and fear and hold on to our connection to one another.

I couldn’t find a way to accept that it was human imagining – in particular the purposeful imagining of leaders in my own country – that caused the skin of thousands of people to melt off their bodies.  Part of me would have loved to run away, to escape this new knowledge.  Instead, as I stood there shivering, something changed inside me.  A deep, abiding commitment to nonviolence was born in me – even before I had heard about this way of living, and long before I could comprehend and practice it myself.

I am mystified how a single moment when I was seventeen, in the middle of a long and challenging year across the world from my home, could transform my outlook so profoundly as to inspire me to action so many years later.  Now, I am no longer naïve about the politics and economy of war, the lust for power which exists in all of us, and the many ways our emotions can justify violence and celebrate righteousness.  I do not presume simplicity in relation to the complexities of warfare, relationships between peoples and nations, and nonviolent action.  But still I remain completely transformed, as though I have no choice, by the few minutes I spent in the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum thirty-six years ago.

Do you remember a moment that changed your life forever?  If you are willing to post, I’d love to hear your stories.

It’s Saturday, October 9, 2010. Across the United States, men, women, and children of all social and economic backgrounds are going about their daily lives. Many of them – more than we may want to acknowledge – are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I would venture to guess that each of us has personally experienced, or knows of family members, friends, or colleagues who have experienced the harrowing aftereffects of war, abuse, rape, violence, or sudden profound loss. As common as trauma is in our  families and communities, most of us remain silent. “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness,” writes Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery. “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud; this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”

Saturday afternoon here is early Sunday morning in Japan. Across that small island nation, thousands of aging survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombings are sleeping. The Japanese have a word for survivors of nuclear war: hibakusha, they are called – people affected by the atomic bomb. In their sleep and in their waking hours, hibakusha still live with extreme physical trauma from punishing injuries and severe burns across their entire bodies. Their bodies still hold the emotional memories of lying on the ground motionless sixty-five years ago, surrounded by scorched corpses, hoping someone would find them – or lying on the wooden floor of  schoolhouses-turned-temporary relief stations with no medical care for months because nearly all the medicine in the city had been destroyed, and most of the physicians and nurses in their cities had died in the bombing.

Survivors also experienced the sudden loss of family members – sometimes entire families were killed, leaving only one child, or one parent, alone – and the instantaneous disappearance of the entire social structure. In the years that followed the bombings, every survivor lived with ongoing fear of the unknown, long-term effects of radiation that penetrated their bodies at the time of the explosion or in the days and months afterward as they walked through the rubble of their annihilated city, combing the ashes for family members. Would they, like so many others, develop the horrific symptoms of radiation disease that would ravage their bodies, and cause death within a week? Would they be one of those who developed leukemia, or one of dozens of other cancers attributed to radiation exposure?

Like most survivors of trauma, most hibakusha rarely speak about their atomic bomb memories. Why are they silent? Why are we silent? Though cultural influences in our two countries may differ, I believe that as human beings our reasons for staying mute or denying what happened are  fundamentally the same: Victims don’t want to remember or relive the  horrors they experienced. They don’t want to inflict their pain on others. In some cases, they don’t want anyone to identify them as victims. Trauma  victims also face the possibility of immediate forgetfulness or denial by their community, which can reinforce feelings of invisibility and worthlessness. “The knowledge of horrible events,” Herman writes, “periodically intrudes into public awareness but is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level.”

My book, Nagasaki, is the story of five survivors who chose to speak out. Taniguchi Sumiteru was a sixteen-year-old postal worker delivering mail on his bicycle at the time of the bomb. He was thrown off his bicycle and his entire back was burned off. Now eighty-one, Taniguchi has traveled to more than twenty countries to tell his story and appeal for the abolishment of nuclear weapons. Nagano Etsuko’s home was close to the hypocenter, and she lost her younger siblings in the attack. Also eighty-one, Nagano stands in front of groups of school children who listen intently to her story and carry with them the personal impact of nuclear war.

Koichi Wada, now eighty-three, chose to speak publicly about his experience when he held his first grandchild in his arms and remembered the scorched corpse of a baby he had stepped over in the days following the attack. He decided that more than anything, he wanted to help create a safer world for future generations. Fiercely independent Doh-oh Mineko remained hidden in her house with severe injuries and hair loss for ten years after the attack. Then, against societal norms and her parents’ wishes – and in an era when women did not hold executive positions – she left for Tokyo and became a senior executive in the cosmetics industry. Doh-oh stands tall and proud in front of groups of young people who visit the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and inspires them to “become who you are.” Yoshida Katsuji was only thirteen at the time of the bomb, and his entire face was burned. He disarms young people who hear him speak by joking about his disfigured face, calling himself “Kimutaku,” a young, handsome movie star in Japan.

These five, and a small group of others in Nagasaki who have survived nuclear war, seem to have found meaning in using their stories to encourage their audiences to think deeply about peace. My job in bringing their stories to a wider audience is to invite readers into their atomic memories in such a way that readers can overcome their inherent desire to turn away from the horror of nuclear war and the terrorizing side of human nature. I am guided by their courage, humor, compassion, and unique personal perspectives on surviving nuclear devastation.

Judith Herman writes that “remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.” By speaking out, Taniguchi, Nagano, Wada, Doh-oh, and Yoshida remind us that they are still here. Today, as we go about our afternoons here in the United States, they, are waking up in Nagasaki, taking care of their families, and using their lives to the best of their abilities to transform profound suffering into social healing and engaged activism.

All around us, too, our family members, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who have suffered from trauma are still here. Taniguchi, Nagano, Wada, Doh-oh, and Yoshida urge us to not look away from suffering, and to face the unspeakable violations that occur between nations and within our families and communities. They implore us to seriously consider – with deep intelligence and intention – what it takes to create and sustain peace.

Just before 8 a.m. on May 9, 2009, my research historian, Robin LaVoie, and I arrive by taxi at the front entrance of Shiroyama Elementary School in  Nagasaki. We’re there to participate in the school’s monthly commemoration of the atomic bombing and to observe its longstanding peace education program. As we wait outside for our host, children with backpacks crowd into the main lobby. Many carry bouquets of fresh flowers. They stare at us and giggle as they remove their shoes, place them on shelves lining the walls, and put on indoor slippers before heading to their classrooms.

Situated on top of a hill just west of the Urakami River, Shiroyama  Elementary School overlooks the valley that was decimated in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki sixty-five years ago. At the west end of the school property, cherry trees planted in memory of the students who died in the bombing are now mature and elegant. During the war, people had dug small air raid shelters into the hillside along the northern edge of the school property and on the slope bordering the driveway that curves up the hill from the main road. Some are filled in now, and others are covered by boards or chain link fencing. They remind me of the primitive means of protection available to the people of Nagasaki during the war. Those who hid in east-facing shelters were killed instantly from the blast force and heat of the atomic bomb.

Dressed in a utilitarian black suit, Vice Principal Sakata greets Robin and me and leads us through the middle of the campus to a large, aging gymnasium. He offers us chairs against the back wall, facing the stage. Over the next ten minutes, more than 450 students in first through sixth grade enter with their teachers and sit on the floor in long rows. Vice Principal Sakata welcomes everyone, announces the activities of the day, and cues a teacher to begin the film.

Together, we watch a documentary about Hayashi Kayoko, a girl famous to  everyone in the school community. In 1945, sixteen-year-old Kayoko was a fourth year student at Nagasaki Girls’ High School. But across Japan, students fourteen and older were mandated to work for the war effort. Kayoko was assigned a job in the Nagasaki Arms Works’ accounting office, which had been relocated from a nearby factory to Shiroyama Elementary School.

Constructed in 1922, the school was a three-story reinforced concrete building. Because food was tightly rationed during the war and no one had enough to eat, teachers and staff transformed the school’s large dirt  playground into a field of potatoes and other vegetables to stave off constant hunger. On the morning of August 9, 1945, it was already hot when Kayoko arrived. She climbed the cement stairs to the third floor to begin work.

A few hours later, the atomic bomb was dropped over Nagasaki, exploding just a third of a mile away from the school. Within seconds, the blast force of the bomb caused the school walls to blow inward and then up and out through the roof. Later that day, fires destroyed anything that had remained. Twenty-nine teachers and 110 mobilized student workers, including Kayoko, perished inside the school. In the surrounding neighborhoods, fourteen hundred elementary students and countless family members died inside their homes, on the streets, or inside air raid shelters.

Kayoko’s parents spent weeks searching for their daughter’s remains in the irradiated ruins of the school. “There were no landmarks to tell direction,” Mrs. Hayashi writes. “I would often stand still in a daze, trying to figure out which direction to go. Whenever I was too tired to walk, I crawled on all fours over the rubble, checking burnt dead bodies one by one.”

In a final determined effort, on the morning of August 30, Mrs. Hayashi  managed to climb through the burned and crumbled remains of a stairwell to reach the collapsed upper floors of the school. There, she spotted an air raid hood she had sewn for her daughter, and she found Kayoko’s body crushed beneath the fallen ceiling. She and her husband carried their daughter to the playground and cremated her there, watching the smoke rise and disappear into the sky.

Six years later, while the United States still occupied post-war Japan, the newly rebuilt Shiroyama Elementary School initiated a monthly peace education day. Starting on August 9, 1951 and held on the ninth of every month thereafter, activities have included presentations by survivors, remembrance of those who died, war and peace-related research, discussion groups, and the creation of commemorative art. The day we visited was the school’s 694th consecutive monthly event.

As we watch the film in the gymnasium, some children fidget, but most watch intently. When the assembly concludes, the students stand together facing and bow to the east – in the direction of the atomic bomb hypocenter – to honor those who died and to hold the vision of a world without war or nuclear weapons. Then they file out by class through doors at each corner of the gym and gather around different monuments and memorials across the school grounds. Robin and I stand to the side of a class of first graders who have placed their flowers in a courtyard to honor the students who died. We listen as the teacher guides a simple discussion: What do you think Kayoko’s mother felt? she asks. Sad, one tiny boy answers.

Ten times a year for the first six years of their school lives, the children at Shiroyama Elementary School think about, study, and discuss peace. How would our lives be different if we did the same? Might the ways we relate to ourselves, our families, our communities, and those whom we perceive as the enemy shift in some way? As the ninth anniversary of September 11 approaches, how might the contemplation of peace affect how we remember and speak about the horrors of that day?

Over the past two decades, Yoshida Katsuji, one of the survivors whose story I tell in my book,  has spoken to hundreds of school groups visiting the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. One day when we were talking, Yoshida expressed to me strong feelings about the need for conscientious attention to peace.

“This is what I say to children,” he told me. “‘Have you ever looked up “heiwa” – “peace” – in the dictionary?’ They never have. They’ve never looked it up because we don’t need to know what peace is during peacetime. ‘Let’s look it up together,’ I tell them. Our greatest enemy is carelessness. We need to pay attention to peace.”

Sixty-five years ago today, on August 9, 1945 – three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima – the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. Located on the southwest coast of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, Nagasaki is a small port city with a long history of international trade. Nagasaki Bay carves a finger-shaped indentation into the coastland, and at the head of the bay, two river valleys stretch to the north and east.

Green hills surround the city, creating a sense of warmth and intimacy. In 1945, approximately 240,000 people lived in the two valleys and alongside the bay, in small neighborhoods called machi. All eligible Japanese men had been drafted into the military, so the majority of people living in Nagasaki at the time of the bomb were women, children, and grandparents.

When the atomic bomb exploded a third of a mile above of the city, a white light brighter than the sun lit up the sky, and an explosion equal to 22,000 tons of TNT pulverized the city below. Tens of thousands of people were burned alive by the heat of the atomic blast or died beneath collapsed buildings and in the fires that raged through the city after the explosion. Others lost all their family members. When the first casualty count was conducted in December 1945, an estimated 75,000 people had died in Nagasaki from the atomic bomb, and an additional 74,000 were injured. Radiation doses larger than any human had ever received had penetrated the bodies of people and animals, causing cellular changes that led to death, disease, and life-altering medical conditions in the weeks, months, and years after the attack.

Can we, as a nation and as individuals, set aside – just for a moment – our opinions about the political and military dynamics of war – and that war in particular – and listen to the stories of the survivors? In discussions of World War II commemorations, many people have expressed  their concern that listening to the survivors’ stories is comparable to apologizing to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After years of research, I have lived with accounts of Pacific War battles long enough to viscerally understand the immense relief our military and everyone at home felt when the war ended, and how many Americans hated the Japanese for bombing Pearl Harbor and committing numerous atrocities during the war. At the same time, I believe that listening to the survivors’ stories, with respect both for the survivors and for ourselves, opens us to greater capacity for understanding the complexity of human existence, and how easy it can be to confidently perceive ourselves as right and the other as wrong.

Listening to the survivors’ stories may or may not change your feelings about our country’s choice to use the atomic bombs over Japan, but the discussion of that choice cannot be complete without understanding what happened beneath the atomic clouds to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in the face of current nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, and more than 23,000 nuclear warheads deployed across the globe, I believe that it is critical that people throughout the world resist vague impressions and grasp the horrific result of nuclear war. Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only people who can give us firsthand accounts of atomic warfare and nuclear survival.

I have spent much of the past seven years listening to survivors tell me their stories, translating their words into English, and writing Nagasaki. The five survivors whose stories are featured in my book are among the few who speak publicly about their experiences. I have also spoken with survivors who had never met an American before or told their stories to anyone outside of their immediate family. The survivors tell me their stories with the fervent hope that their own grandchildren and the children of future generations across the world will never experience the overwhelming horror of nuclear weapons.

I hope you will join me over the coming months in discussing the issues that surrounded the attacks and the personal stories of those who survived. I’m excited to introduce to you Doh-oh Mineko, Nagano Etsuko, Taniguchi Sumiteru, Wada Koichi, and Yoshida Katsuji, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the bomb. Meanwhile, in Nagasaki today, a huge formal commemoration will take place at 11:02 a.m. It will be a hot summer morning, like it was sixty-five years ago. Survivors who have made it this far, and family members of those who died, will remember and pray for peace. What keeps us from listening? I welcome your thoughts.