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Zusatztext 50255252 Informationen zum Autor Susan Southard holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University! Los Angeles! and was a nonfiction fellow at the Norman Mailer Center in Provincetown! Massachusetts. Southard’s work has appeared in the New York Times! the Los Angeles Times! Politico! and Lapham’s Quarterly . She has taught nonfiction classes at Arizona State University’s Piper Writers Studio and the University of Georgia! and directed creative writing programs for incarcerated youth and at a federal prison for women outside Phoenix. Southard is the founder and artistic director of Essential Theatre. PREFACE In the summer of 1986, I received a last-minute call asking me to step in as a substitute interpreter for Taniguchi Sumiteru, a fifty-seven-year-old survivor of the 1945 Nagasaki atomic bombing. Taniguchi was in Washington, D.C., as part of a speaking tour in the United States. I had just met him the night before when I attended one of his talks. Over the next two days, I spent more than twenty hours with Taniguchi, listening to and interpreting his story in public presentations and private conversations. Years earlier I had lived in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, as an international scholarship student. At sixteen, I was placed with a traditional Japanese family and attended an all-girls high school in the neighboring city of Kamakura, Japan’s ancient capital. Nearly everything was foreign to me, including the language—and I had little knowledge of the Pacific War and the atomic bombings that had taken place thirty years earlier. Later that year, after my language skills and integration into Japanese life had improved, I traveled to Nagasaki for the first time during my high school’s senior class trip to southern Japan. Inside the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, I stood arm in arm with friends who had embraced me as their own, staring at photographs of burned adults and children and the crushed and melted household items on display. In one of the glass cases, a helmet still had the charred flesh of a person’s scalp stuck inside. The memory of Nagasaki stayed with me into adulthood. And yet, as I listened to Taniguchi speak in a dimly lit church hall near downtown D.C., I realized how ignorant I still was of the history of the Pacific War, the development of the atomic bombs, and the human consequences of their use. Taniguchi was sharply dressed in a gray suit, a white dress shirt, and a deep purple and navy striped tie. On his left lapel he wore a pin—a white origami crane set against a red background. His thick black hair was combed neatly to the side. Small—maybe five foot six—and noticeably thin, he told his story quietly, the syllables toppling one upon another: At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, sixteen-year-old Taniguchi was on his bicycle delivering mail in the northwestern section of the city when a plutonium bomb fell from the sky and exploded over a Nagasaki neighborhood of about thirty thousand residents. “In the flash of the explosion,” he said, his voice trembling, “I was blown off the bicycle from behind and slapped down against the ground. The earth seemed to shiver like an earthquake.” Although he was over a mile away, the extraordinary heat of the bomb torched Taniguchi’s back. After a few moments, he lifted his head to see that the children who had been playing near him were dead. As he spoke, Taniguchi held up a photograph of himself taken five months after the blast during his protracted stay at a hospital north of Nagasaki. In the photograph he is lying on his stomach, emaciated. Down one arm and from neck to buttocks where his back would be, there is no skin or flesh, only exposed muscle and tissue, raw and red. As Taniguchi finished his speech, he made eye contact with his audience for the first time. “Let there be no more Nagasakis,” he appealed. “I call on you to work together to bui...
