Journal 8

I felt very drawn to Mrs. Nakamura and Miss. Sasaki just for the fact that it gave me better insight to the feelings and emotions of a women in this event in history. Mrs. Nakamura was a women who seemed to have every reason to give up but persevered and brought up her children and seemed to find peace at the end of the book. As for Miss. Sasaki I found her story heart wrenching the thought that the person you were supposed to live the rest of your life with can abandon you because of vanity and the fact that you are some how "damaged goods" it proves that the character of some people is deplorable. And this is a sad fact in countries all over the world that if a women become injured in some way she is deemed to be unfit for marriage.

Just the sheer pain you feel when you hear the stories of the aftermath of the victims. The death of thousands of people and there is no way to help, at the beginning of the book the two girls that were saved the girl just kept complaining of how she cold she was and then she finally died minutes later the loss os life from war is something that is very close to my heart and I can not condone the loss of civilian life for any reason even though we have been conditioned to believe it is inevitable fact of war.

"A year after the bomb was dropped Miss. Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once was capable to do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto's church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality"

"His memory, like the world's, was getting spotty."

" The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same."


I choose these three quotes because it shows us how we have to be thankful for what we have and remember to look at those less fortunate then us. I think this book is trying to teach us that we need to look back and remember the events of the past so that we are able to avoid repeating them in the future. This book goes into detail of the human condition after a catastrophe and maybe it is a warning to us all of the effects warfare has on the civilian population.