Today is a day I try never to forget.
Why should an event that happened before I was born be one that figures annually in my consciousness?
6 August 1945 was the day that we, the western world, Australia as guilty as the rest, attempted to end the war in the Pacific by dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And when that didn’t bring surrender from the Japanese government we dropped another on Nagasaki on 9 August. You can probably tell from my emotive language that it is something I feel strongly about.
It is not a day to celebrate, but one to remember and observe, to reflect carefully on the history of the world. It above all else is an excellent argument for why our students should study history. Of course it is not enough to just know the date, or to be able to associate an event with the date. The true study of history will involve the long term and short term causes of this event, why it occurred, where it fits in the overall scheme of things. People who tell me that they hated studying history at school because it is all dates, sadly missed the point of the subject entirely, but so perhaps did their teachers.
The blog posting that got me going today is not an educational one, but one about a book. In True Stories of Six Who Survived When the Atomic Bomb Fell on Hiroshima Janice Harayda is reviewing a book by John Hersey: Hiroshima: A New Edition With a Final Chapter Written Forty Years After the Explosion. Vintage, 152 pp., paperback. The original was written by John Hersey in 1946. His account of the bombing first appeared in the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker and then his book followed. The 1989 Vintage paperback includes a chapter on the survivors’ lives 40 years later. Read Janice’s review to get more information about the book and the one with follow up chapter and then look for the book.
And if you are looking for resources to use with students, then this edna search points to some. Perhaps you could start with the story Sadako and the Thousand Cranes and do your little bit for our student’s sense of history, and their understanding of why it is important to observe events that happened decades before they were born.
edna’s Schools Calendar helps you find other events to observe.
4 Comments
Hello Kerrie
Heartiest congratulations on your promotion. You are a dynamic role model to us all and I can personally testify to having learnt so much from your guidance over the years. Well done. Camilla
Not so much a promotion as a sideways step into another area Camilla. Thanks for the kind comments. I am still doing workshops and presentations where I can. Am in Darwin at present having done the edna workshop on Tuesday and the edna consultation yesterday. Back in good old Adelaide this afternoon.
Kerrie,
You have the good guys and bad guys mixed up. The Japanese were the aggressors in WWII, not the West. They were insanely determined to press on with their war of aggression against all the odds. While you are reviewing accounts of the survivors of Hiroshima, you might review accounts of the survivors of Japanese massacres, of which there were many. You might query the families of Aussies who were beheaded for sport by the Japanese. You might examine the affadavits of Aussies who discovered that the Japanese had harvested the Australian dead from the battlefield, cooked them, and ate them. No, it’s not propaganda, it’s all too true.
The Japanese were killing the equivalent of the population of Hiroshima every two weeks in China. Some say they killed ten million Chinese. The Chinese say thirty million. Had the war proceeded conventionally, the Japanese would have killed many times the population of Hiroshima in China. Why do you mourn the Japanese aggressors and ignore their victims? Shouldn’t the Japanese who began the war bear the brunt of its costs in human life? Why is one Japanese city more valuable to you than dozens of their occupied cities?
When you oppose the atom bombings, you implicitly support winning the war by conventional means, a course of action that would have killed millions. That is an inferior moral choice which you should reject.
Hi Kerrie,
thanks for your article.
I agree with it.Also I am born on aug 6th but in 1949 and from as far as I can remember I was reminded of this very sad event in which many people have died.
As of this date I haven’t been in hiroshima yet but I want to go there and put my experience on canvas and like for others that are born on the 6th of August to do the same.
I like to put a blog up on this subject and set a day to do this.Invite all 6 augusters to come and join and keep this day a true day of remembrance
thanks again for encouraging us all to remember this day as a sin to humanity
Harrie
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