NHK WORLD PRIME: 2x19

Hearing the Voices of Nagasaki Survivors

American writer Susan Southard’s Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War has garnered wide acclaim. The book project developed from the author’s encounter with “red back” Sumiteru Taniguchi, a hibakusha (atomic-bomb survivor) who is famous from photographs of his severe burns, caused by thermal radiation. 5 hibakusha and their troubled lives in the aftermath of the Bomb are vividly depicted, in a history of Nagasaki that continues to move many Americans. The program follows the story to a college in the Midwest, where students are using the book as a text. In a region where it is widely believed that “dropping the Bomb was unavoidable”, what lessons do young Americans discover in Southard’s book?