Hiroshima No Pika

Rating:
Summary: Dark, stark, and unforgettably impactful
Review: "Hiroshima No Pika" is a beautiful book about an ugly topic. The delicate watercolors adorning the pages of this thin volume are heavy with horror, and they give a real, first-person, child's perspective on the unprecedented nightmare that was the bombing of Hiroshima.

I don't like the way that so many reviewers attempt to diminish the power of this book, by placing it in certain contexts which implicitly subtract from its immediacy. Why not at least partly read it as it was intended -- as a testimonial of the confusing, unexpected, heartbreaking experiences of a seven year old girl trying to deal with an atom bomb destroying her hometown, her home, and much of her family? Your heart will break for little Mii, wandering among the ruins, and half-sleeping in a frightened daze for several days on a nearby beach.

Just to make sure that you are prepared for anything, you might want to know that most of the illustrations depict survivors with all their clothes burned off. Most of the book has nude images, so... know your audience! If you plan to share this with particularly immature boys, for example, you might want to be aware of this little fact in advance. The horror of the whole setting is so powerful that many readers will hardly even notice this, but I thought it bore mentioning.

Young readers today overwhelmingly tend to have little or no sense of the range of nuclear weapons, in terms of destructive power. I would like to encourage librarians, parents, or teachers who purchase this excellent book, to explain to their frightened little audiences that this is an account of a particular, specific, historic atomic blast. The power of such weapons today has an exponential range. For example, a small "dirty bomb" could literally constitute a couple of sticks of regular dynamite, combined with a few grams of radioactive strontium 90. At the other end of the spectrum, today's gigantic multi-megaton weapons, particularly those with multiple warheads, could deliver several thousand times as much destructive force as the Hiroshima bomb, in a single nanosecond. If you would like to prepare yourself to better answer such questions on the part of young readers, I would like to encourage you in the strongest imaginable terms to purchase a copy of "The New Nuclear Danger," by the pediatrician and human rights activist Dr. Helen Caldicott. "The New Nuclear Danger" has a really terrific bibliography at the end, including both websites and books.

The majority of people reading this review are likely to be from the USA, so I'd just like to quickly inject here a couple of relevant comments. World War II is an increasingly distant, misty memory for Americans on the whole. I think that this book makes us see how a horrible war can tend to define us, as little as we like to think that this can happen, in the eyes of ourselves and of others. Vietnam clearly engaged America as a divided "society," as opposed to engaging us as a united "nation." People enjoy the memories of the feeling of rebelling against the authority of our government -- hey, the 60s were an exhilarating time to be alive in the USA. Thinking about World War II, instead of Vietnam, can help us to see that, ultimately, the act of coming to terms with the wars we might wage should not be all about their divisive effect upon our own society, so much as it should be about the absolutely hideous, nightmarish, lethal horrors we can unleash upon the members of the societies we are attacking. "Hiroshima No Pika" makes this point both starkly and accessibly, and for this reason, among many others, it should be included in as many public and private collections as possible.

Rating:
Summary: Dark, stark, and unforgettably impactful
Review: "Hiroshima No Pika" is a beautiful book about an ugly topic. The delicate watercolors adorning the pages of this thin volume are heavy with horror, and they give a real, first-person, child's perspective on the unprecedented nightmare that was the bombing of Hiroshima.

I don't like the way that so many reviewers attempt to diminish the power of this book, by placing it in certain contexts which implicitly subtract from its immediacy. Why not at least partly read it as it was intended -- as a testimonial of the confusing, unexpected, heartbreaking experiences of a seven year old girl trying to deal with an atom bomb destroying her hometown, her home, and much of her family? Your heart will break for little Mii, wandering among the ruins, and half-sleeping in a frightened daze for several days on a nearby beach.

Just to make sure that you are prepared for anything, you might want to know that most of the illustrations depict survivors with all their clothes burned off. Most of the book has nude images, so... know your audience! If you plan to share this with particularly immature boys, for example, you might want to be aware of this little fact in advance. The horror of the whole setting is so powerful that many readers will hardly even notice this, but I thought it bore mentioning.

Young readers today overwhelmingly tend to have little or no sense of the range of nuclear weapons, in terms of destructive power. I would like to encourage librarians, parents, or teachers who purchase this excellent book, to explain to their frightened little audiences that this is an account of a particular, specific, historic atomic blast. The power of such weapons today has an exponential range. For example, a small "dirty bomb" could literally constitute a couple of sticks of regular dynamite, combined with a few grams of radioactive strontium 90. At the other end of the spectrum, today's gigantic multi-megaton weapons, particularly those with multiple warheads, could deliver several thousand times as much destructive force as the Hiroshima bomb, in a single nanosecond. If you would like to prepare yourself to better answer such questions on the part of young readers, I would like to encourage you in the strongest imaginable terms to purchase a copy of "The New Nuclear Danger," by the pediatrician and human rights activist Dr. Helen Caldicott. "The New Nuclear Danger" has a really terrific bibliography at the end, including both websites and books.

The majority of people reading this review are likely to be from the USA, so I'd just like to quickly inject here a couple of relevant comments. World War II is an increasingly distant, misty memory for Americans on the whole. I think that this book makes us see how a horrible war can tend to define us, as little as we like to think that this can happen, in the eyes of ourselves and of others. Vietnam clearly engaged America as a divided "society," as opposed to engaging us as a united "nation." People enjoy the memories of the feeling of rebelling against the authority of our government -- hey, the 60s were an exhilarating time to be alive in the USA. Thinking about World War II, instead of Vietnam, can help us to see that, ultimately, the act of coming to terms with the wars we might wage should not be all about their divisive effect upon our own society, so much as it should be about the absolutely hideous, nightmarish, lethal horrors we can unleash upon the members of the societies we are attacking. "Hiroshima No Pika" makes this point both starkly and accessibly, and for this reason, among many others, it should be included in as many public and private collections as possible.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Book
Review: I do not think this book is meant to be political. It is meant to tell the story of what happened to one little girl and her mother and father on one day. Other reviewers say that this book is faulty because it leaves out information about humanitarian atrocities being commited by the Japanese army. Suggesting that a picture book about one staggering day in the lives of one family is faulty -- because it leaves out the war crimes of the politicians in their country -- is denying the members of this family the right to simply be HUMAN -- to exist as their own people with their own visions and experiances outside of the political mechanics of their country. That is insulting and absolutely ridiculas.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Book
Review: I do not think this book is meant to be political. It is meant to tell the story of what happened to one little girl and her mother and father on one day. Other reviewers say that this book is faulty because it leaves out information about humanitarian atrocities being commited by the Japanese army. Suggesting that a picture book about one staggering day in the lives of one family is faulty -- because it leaves out the war crimes of the politicians in their country -- is denying the members of this family the right to simply be HUMAN -- to exist as their own people with their own visions and experiances outside of the political mechanics of their country. That is insulting and absolutely ridiculas.

Rating:
Summary: A book that should not be at the center of a firestorm
Review: The firestorm of debate over "Hiroshima No Pika" ("The Flash of Hiroshima") is quite interesting. From time to time on the news I have heard stories about the debate in Japan over how World War II is taught in Japanese schools, with regards to the atrocities committed. Certainly, Japan is not alone in having to deal with brutal aspects of its past, but let us just talk about Toshi Maruki's book "Hiroshima No Pika" for a moment, specifically in terms of the other reviews being offered on these pages.

First, this story is not about the victimization of all Japanese because of the bombing of Hiroshima. It is about what happened to the people of Hiroshima. In her "About This Book" comments in the back, Maruki tells us that this fictional story is based on the story of a survivor who tried to escape the Flash carrying her wounded husband upon her back and leading her child by the hand. But that woman also tells of how when she moved to Hokkaido the people there were not sympathetic or kind about her experiences, telling her she was trying to draw upon their pity. It seems to me that this book is clearly intended primarily for a Japanese audience and is in fact provides the sort of confrontation with the past for which other reviewers have called.

Second, with regards to Toshi Maruki in particular, her paintings have included the genocide during the Japanese occupation of Nanking. Obviously she cannot be dismissed as someone who has forgotten the atrocities committed by her nation during the war, whatever general charges you want to make against the Japanese as a people. I am not surprised that the American publishers of this book did not want to do one of Maruki's paintings of Nanking. The debate over Japan coming to terms with its past is worth having, but not over this particular book.

Third, yes this book has an emotional impact. Having your city destroyed in a single flash of light and being thrown into a nightmare of the dead and dying is going to be emotional, especially for an audience that knows all about radiation poisoning. I am part of the generation that had to learn "Duck and Cover" in school, who assumed that one day there would be a World War III and that it was going to be nuclear. Although "The Day After" turned the nuclear nightmare into actual images, the idea of a nuclear holocaust was ingrained in our fiction from "Dr. Strangelove" to "On the Beach" to "Star Trek." The people of Hiroshima are entitled to have their story told and Maruki's paintings do so on their behalf. I do not see anything monumentally wrong with that...

"Hiroshima No Pika" gives young readers a emotional sense of what it was like that day when the Flash came. I think it is inevitable that at some point students would ask why the bomb was dropped. At that point they can be made aware of the reasons. They can learn how Truman decided it would save American lives and end the war, which it certainly did. But it terms of paying back for atrocities committed by the Japanese in China, the Philippines and everywhere during World War II, the line I always heard was that we would not apologize for Hiroshima because the Japanese never apologized for Pearl Harbor. So to suggest the dropping of the atomic bomb was justified by these earlier atrocities seems to me to be obvious revisionist history.

Rating:
Summary: Emotional Journey
Review: This book shows what atrocities of war can do to people, how they can affect innocent lives. Hiroshima No Pika(Hiroshima's Flash) is mostly focused on a child, Mii, and, as we all know, the bombing of Hiroshima in WWII.

The detailed descriptions of people dying all around make this book perhaps not one suited for young audiences. The semi-abstract and disturbing pictures further add to this effect.

Many of the reviews dis this book, claiming that it is "one-sided", and does not tell about some of the horrid things the Japanese did in WWII. Hiroshima No Pika is not about those things---it's purpose is to provide us with a glimpse of what happened that day, the fear, the confusion, and the lingering effects of the radiation. If you want to know about other crimes, I suggest you read another book, there are plenty out there.

Rating:
Summary: A good story
Review: This is a good story that pinpoints the story of one little girl and her family in the confusion and devastation of August 6th, 1945. I wish I had been read this a long time ago (I am now at University). It is good for just the same reason that certain people have faulted it, that it talks about the event by itself. The droppings of the atomic bombs were not retaliation for any other atrocity of World War II, since there were plenty of atrocities for every side to lay claim. To criticize this childrens book for not discussing Japanese atrocities, in my mind, is as silly as faulting "The Diary of Anne Frank" for not discussing the firebombing of Hamburg or the continued lynchings of blacks in the United States.