Hearing Hiroshima (Rebroadcast)

Scene on Radio: Capitalism

Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

Society & Culture, Audiodoc, Radio, Documentary, Stories

4.9 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The word “Hiroshima” may bring to mind a black-and-white image of a mushroom cloud. It’s easy to forget that it’s an actual city with a million people and a popular baseball team. In 1995, John Biewen visited the city to speak with survivors and to ask: What did the world’s first atomic bombing mean in the place where it happened?

Hearing Hiroshima is a production of Minnesota Public Radio, from American Public Media.

Photo: Selections from the 1995 tapes. Photo by John Biewen.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, this is John B.Win, host and producer of Scene on Radio. We're
0:05.3	between seasons and I got to be honest, any season five plans are a long way
0:11.8	off so thank you for your patience. But there is an important anniversary this
0:18.3	week and we have this episode from season one that we know a lot of you have
0:22.3	not heard because you've come to the show more recently. So we decided to
0:26.8	repost it here. When you hear the word Hiroshima what's the first visual image
0:34.0	that comes to mind? A mushroom cloud that event of August 6th 1945 and its
0:41.8	results that we may not want to really face the results on the ground and
0:46.4	most of us have seen those mushroom cloud pictures so many times. I'd guess
0:52.2	most people outside of Japan hearing the word Hiroshima don't think very much
0:57.6	about the actual place. At least of all the modern place a city on Japan's
1:02.9	Kyushu island with a million plus people and houses and markets and office
1:07.7	buildings and a pro baseball team. 75 years after Hiroshima the event most of
1:15.8	the people who lived through that day in the city are gone. But 25 years ago
1:21.1	thousands of atomic bomb survivors still lived in Hiroshima. I went there then
1:26.6	in 1995 and interviewed some of them. I'd lived in Japan for two years in the 80s
1:32.7	and spoke the language kind of. I went back in 95 to make a documentary for the
1:38.9	50th anniversary of the bombing for Minnesota Public Radio and Public Radio
1:42.8	International. This is a rebuilt version of that 1995 piece. We first put out
1:49.1	this version on Sinon Radio in 2016. A lot of books and articles and documentaries
1:55.9	about Hiroshima ask whether the bombing was justified or they explore bigger
2:01.0	kind of meta issues about its meaning in the wider world, how it gave birth to
	...

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