Lost stories of Nagasaki

In year 6 or 7, I wrote the first short story that I was really proud of. It was about the death of a kid, about my age at the time, in Hiroshima. We’d been studying the second world war and the atomic bomb as part of our history course – fairly heavy stuff, in retrospect. To make it more poignant, I made the kid half-American, the son of an American sea captain, who fell in love with a Japanese woman. I wrote his story, from the time the bomb hit to when he lay down on the banks of the river for a quick nap that he never woke up from.

I thought about this story while I was in Hiroshima walking through Peace Park, seeing the building they kept as a reminder. (As an aside, it’s interesting that Hiroshima has that building, Berlin has the Emperor Wilhelm Church or “Gedächtniskirche”. Humble ruins as reminders of wars. New York is deleting their reminder and building what will be the world’s tallest building overtop of it – a sign of swaggering bravado if I’d ever seen on).

I’m reminded of my Hiroshima story again today, when stories from Pulitzer-prize winning journalist George Weller (RIP) were published on the Mainichi News site. He snuck into Nagasaki a month after the bomb was dropped there, and wrote about what he saw. Unfortunately, (and somewhat predictably) the US censors destroyed the story. Weller’s son found some carbon copies in his attic, and has released them to be published, 60 years after they were written. It’s a wonderful historical document.