Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox runs The World's language desk. He reports and edits stories about the globalization of English, the bilingual brain, translation technology and more. He also hosts The World's podcast on language, The World in Words.

Hiroshima’s Survivors: The Last Generation

August 6, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment
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On August 6 1945, a US warplane dropped an atomic bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Little Boy was followed three days later by “Fat Man,” which exploded over Nagasaki.

Six days after that Japan surrendered to U.S. forces. The Pacific War was over.Between them the two bombs killed 120,000 people outright and close to a quarter million more over time. Tens of thousands died from radiation sickness.

This series focuses survivors of the Hiroshima blast. Most of them were children in 1945. Some are Japanese, some are Korean. Some still live in Hiroshima, others live in the United States and elsewhere. What they experienced on the morning of August 6th changed them for ever. But suprisingly, little is known about their psychological condition.

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Discussion

5 comments for “Hiroshima’s Survivors: The Last Generation”

  • olivia

    this is horrible!! how could america think that we are so much better than everyone else, when we did such a think to hiroshima and the people who lived there?

  • Lyle Inncovert

    Your report would have been more balanced if your reporter had mentioned the Pearl Harbor memorial. Japan was not an innocent victim. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the US response of bombing Hiroshima caused Japan to almost immediately surrender, thereby saving untold thousands of lives. While bombing of any kind is abhorrent, let us not forget Japan’s culpability in the bombing of Hiroshima.

  • Clark Guelde

    The other day I watched a documentry on Hiroshima survivors on HBO. In the past I felt they “had it coming” but after watching “White sun black rain” I felt true sadness at what had happened. I dont know if we did the right thing in using the bomb, especially in the manner in which it was used. Having said all that the Japanese leadership and government was more culpiple than any other single entity in this tradgety. Fifty years of time fogs reality on the ground a bit, if truman had refused to drop the bomb and invaded Japan the American people would have been outraged as their sons continued to die as we sat on a weapon that could end the war in a week.

  • Izzy

    This attack effectively stopped the war. Who knows how many more innocent civilians would have died if the war had continued? The US would not have dropped the bomb if they did not believe it was saving more lives than it stole.

  • Jayde

    I agree and disagree with both sides but overall i think its stupid that a war started in the first place