When I met Maiden J.’s family, they said, “We can be your friends, but if you want to understand what happened you must meet Hibakusha who will tell you first hand.”Ī reporter from Japan’s Asahi Shimbun introduced me to film director and visual artist Shinpei Takeda. “ The Nuclear Family” available on Amazon now, and Kindle August 10. As the news unfolded of what would become the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster, I decided not to give up my trip to Japan.įive months later, I began the research for a book that took me five years to complete. It was already March 11 in Japan, a night when distaster struck. On March 10, 2011, I won a research grant to write a book about my family connections. I met her when I was a child and was awestruck about knowing people from both sides of the bomb. She eventually settled in Baltimore where she worked alongside my future grandfather Aaron Cohen. She left Hiroshima in the late 60s to marry an American who courted her while she lived in New York where she received reconstructive surgery with the famous Hiroshima Maidens. Her family was upset I started to write about her, until they realized they knew me. They were burned by Japanese media in the past who wanted to dramatize her love story. Her surviving family is very protective of her legacy. I wrote about this coincidental connection in 2010, and mentioned Maiden J. publicly (and I will not use her name again). Jacob Beser poses in front of the Enola Gay before its historic bomb run.
Many people know that my grandfather was on the airplanes, but few know that my family also has a connection to someone who was underneath the mushroom cloud. In essence he helped build and monitor the radar-detonated fuse for the so called “gimmick.” He was the radar countermeasures officer. My grandfather was Jacob Beser, the only man in the world to fly as a serviceman on both planes that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I wasn’t just a web reporter documenting Peace Boat’s Hibakusha Project. Miyata-san wasn’t the only one who could see connections. It’s how I learned about it in school when I was her age. A monument to memorialize all of the child victims was erected by Sadako’s classmates, and years later her story was told around the world. Every family that survived Hiroshima had a Sadako, an unknown victim who was not made famous for their grace under pressure. In 1955 Sadako Sasaki tried everything, including the legend, to cure her leukemia ten years after she was exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. In Japanese “Orizuru” means “Paper Crane.” They say in Japan if you fold one thousand paper cranes you receive a wish. Passengers on the ship called us the Orizuru Project. Teruko Yahata describes the moment she saw a flash at the El Salvadorian Foreign Ministry in San Salvadore.
A tour guide leads Miyata and company through the National History Museum in Singapore. Hibakusha members sit at the front of a Hindu Temple in Kochi India. Thousands of people will now forever be able to say they met someone who survived the bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and heard their testimony.Ĭounter clockwise from top: A boy at the Da Nang Victims of Agent Orange Association insisted I took his photo during his peers’ performance. Over 85 days we spoke at city halls, foreign ministries, schools, and temples in more than 19 countries. We shared testimony with a Hungarian-Polish Auschwitz survivor at the center for Dialogue in Poland, and befriended El Salvadorian revolutionaries in Central America. We confronted Japan’s own violent past in Singapore at the National History Museum. Our journey in 2013 started in Da Nang, Vietnam, where we spent the day with victims of Agent Orange who have experienced generational effects of the chemicals wartime use. The Hibakusha Project was participating in a Peace Boat voyage for the sixth time.
Peace Boat, part cruise ship, part political lobby, was on its 80 th voyage in 30 years. Some spoke publicly for the first time in their lives. They shared their cautionary tales of nuclear power in each port of call along the way. “Jewish scientists escaped the Nazis, helped America build an atomic bomb, and it was dropped on me.”Īnyone who entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki within two weeks of the release of the only two atom bombs detonated over people were designated as Hibakusha: “Exposed to the atomic bomb/radiation.” Miyata, and eight other members of the Peace Boat Hibakusha Project, had traveled halfway around the world from Japan.
“Everything is connected,” exclaimed Takeshi Miyata as he walked along the railway at the Auschwitz death camps, almost 70 years after Jews were carted off to slaughter in the same location.