Journal Seven: Michael Trawinski

Part One: I think Reverend Tanimoto has been the most interesting character so far because we follow him around like the other characters after the bomb dropped. He helps some of the people who are injured get to Asano Park, a place far from the disaster where refugees came to. Being a Reverend at the Hiroshima Methodist Church, Tanimoto has to confront the biggest disaster of all time and at some points throughout the story he seems to experience instances where he doesn't seem to be what a typical religious person should be like. This is evident at one point when he thinks about a naval hospital ship which doesn't arrive to save the injured people, "and he had for a moment a feeling of blind, murderous rage at the crew of the ship, and then at all doctors. Why didn't they come to help these people?" Mr. Tanimoto suddenly feels anger at how some people are being neglected, despite their severe wounds, but he is still a good man because he feels that rage because he cares about the lives of people, especially his family.

Part Two: I tried to look up a little insight on other people's experiences of when the bomb dropped and what they actually thought the disaster was, but it was a bit hard. In the book victims of the attack believed that the destruction may have been due to things such as the Americans dropping gas down on the city, but then they are shocked to find out that it was in fact an atomic bomb that was much bigger than a normal one. Though it was hard to look up, I did read one account by a survivor who thought that the explosion was due to a malfunction at a power plant, but not a bomb, which I found interesting to read. After the victims learned of what had been dropped on them they couldn't believe that the Americans actually had the firepower to do such damage. It wasn't just the Japanese who felt this way. Back home in America, people learned of the bomb the next day and they too were absolutely horrified that their own country could wipe out an entire city very brutally, and how it would lead to how inhumane it is to kill millions of people with a powerful weapon, which I found to be an interesting thing to read about as well to build into the false theories of the bombing.
















After the bomb dropped on Hiroshima





















This photo was taken by an unknown photographer and depicts the death toll of the bombing.