The character so far that has been most interesting to me is Dr. Sasaki because I think his responsibility as a doctor makes his character so much more complex. His moral obligation to help people is only intensified by the fact that these people with horrific injuries are people of his community. At the same time, with such a traumatic event occurring, he probably just wants to sit down and have someone take care of him, and worry about his family and his needs, but he can't. It's also incredible that the ratio was eight doctors for 10,000 patients. Anywhere those doctors looked, there were probably seemingly infinite amounts of people needing their help and knowledge. Also, his position is interesting because the hospital workers had a clue before many others that the bomb that was dropped was extremely different than other bombs. "...the vice-chief of the hospital went down in the basement to the vault where the X-ray plates were stored and found the whole stock exposed as they lay." This peculiar information is unique to a hospital setting and led many to believe something was different and in some way they didn't understand yet, more powerful than anything they knew of.
Part Two
I'd like to know more about how Hiroshima and the surrounding areas recovered from such a traumatic and devastating event, and how the Marshall Plan played into that recovery. The Marshall Plan was announced by George C. Marshall, who was Secretary of the State at the time, to help with the widespread devastation following WWII. $17 billion dollars was committed to helping Europe through The Marshall Plan. Directly following the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the city's population was down to 83,000. Many that had evacuated the city due to the bomb, returned within the year, without much progress being made toward rebuilding. Because of this, there was a chronic food shortage so 50,000 people had to be evacuated out of the city again to make room for reconstruction. According to my research, the Marshall Plan did little to help out the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; their reconstruction was based mainly off of their own national government's legislation. However, in the following years, President Truman contributed a lot to researching the long-term affects on people after exposure to radiation.
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| Hiroshima in the aftermath of the Atomic Bomb |
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