Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War

by Susan Southard

Even young children without physical injury or illness experienced ongoing distress. One day in her second-grade Japanese literature class, a Nagasaki teacher led her students in reading and discussing a popular story about five children growing up together with the loving care and support of their parents. A small girl raised her hand. “These children are really happy, aren’t they?” she asked, her voice filled with melancholy. The teacher quickly remembered that the parents of this girl and many others in the class had died in the bombing, and she marveled that even she, who spent every day with them, could so easily forget the depth of their losses. During the lesson, some children would not look at the blackboard where the words “mother” and “father” were written. Others bit their lips, scribbled in their notebooks, or gazed blankly out the window.