Today, we went to Nagasaki. We had heard earlier last week from Omura – san, a representative from the local community, about his troubles finding a survivor of the atomic bomb in the town that we are staying in, Omura.
No one of the people that he asked wanted to speak about the experience, due to their fear of discrimination, and, for some of them, the hate towards foreigners. Yesterday, I heard from my host – grandfather that he was a survivor of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. He shoved me a notebook containing his information from when the bombs were dropped.
In the notebook I could see that he was 3 years old when the atomic bombs were dropped. I assumed that the notebook was some kind of way for the Japanese governement to keep track of survivors and reunite their families. My host – grandfather diden’t tell me a lot about his experience, probably because of the strong feelings that he is still harburing in connection with the experience.
I knew that when we whent to Nagasaki City we would go to the atomic bomb and listen to a survivor telling us about her experience.
Both the museum and the survivors speech were emidiadly educational.
While I had learned about the atomic bombs in school back in Sweden, it was a whole different experience seeing the destruction in the museum and hearing about the effects directly from a survivor. Listening to the survivor and seeing the remains of both people and rabble in the museum changed my impression of the bombing experience.
I knew what happend was horrible but i believed that no one, exept the survivors, would actually be able to know exactly how horrible the atomic bombings actually were.
Thinging back upon what I have learned, heard and experienced today, I have decided to start i new project. I will create a video to show to the world, accompanied by music, using the materials that i gathered today.
This is for myself to show my appretiation to the people making this possible, and to sharewhat I have learned and experienced today with other people in the world.
Joel (Sweden)