Pika-don

I may have touched on this once before. If I have, please forgive me and read it again. It deserves repeated reads.

This link Luckiest or Unluckiest Man Alive? will take you to an article about Tsutomu Yamaguchi and two of his friends who all survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb attacks. Many might think it almost unimaginable that he survived even one attack. But I have done some reading on the war with Japan, on the two A-bomb attacks, and on circumstances surrounding them. The thing that always comes to mind is the woman who, as a young girl, survived the A-bomb explosion at Hiroshima even though she was in the building that sat at Ground Zero.

I am unsure of her name, I believe it to be Emiko Okada. Growing up during the 50s, through the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation, I was led to believe that survival within the area of ground zero was impossible. Perhaps so, for the later nuclear weapons. Perhaps the first two, and only, atomic bombs dropped in war were different. Perhaps, if you believe in God, they were spared for some kind of lesson to the rest of us. Or, perhaps, it was just random chance.

But I urge you to set aside some time to read the article about Mr. Yamaguchi and his two colleagues. And to read through the comments that follow the story. There are many of them so it will take some time. It is the comments which most interest me. They reveal quite a bit about the nature of human beings. And humans fascinate me.

My own personal feelings about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are complex. I believe they were necessary, both of them. I believe that the loss of life, on both sides, if they had not been dropped would have numbered in the millions. I believe that had the bombs not been developed and dropped by the US, the world would be much worse off today than it is.

In any event, I urge you to read the article and I apologize for bringing such a somber subject. I just think we all need to re-examine those things in our past in as much depth as possible. If it instigates a desire in you to read more about the war with Japan then I urge you to follow that desire. Follow its beginnings which were much earlier than December 7, 1941. I also recommend the book Flyboys by James Bradley which provides a lot of historical data about the events leading up to and during the Pacific War.

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