Postwar Shack in Hiroshima

(I wrote this post hastily to take advantage of fleeting Internet availability so I have rewritten it a bit.)

There is a Japanese short story called "Fireflies" about the years following the bombing of Hiroshima, long before the economic miracle of the 50s and 60s. After you have been to the museums in Hiroshima, you can understand the devastation that occurred and what it must have been like to survive the blast and go on. The Peace Museum is designed to let you understand the experience on a very personal level, and many of the stories are about mothers and children. (Almost all the emphasis in Hiroshima is on how terrible war is, rather than ideological argument about one side or the other being right or wrong, a great contrast to museums about the Allies and Axis in the European theater.) In "Fireflies" one woman's only wish is that she will live long enough to live in a house with running water; she lives in a hut where worms crawl in and out of the walls. It's often a difficult story to use in a literature class, because American students have a hard time imagining a Japan where people lived in huts; if they have any impression of a Japanese city at all, they think of it as Tokyo, the city in Lost in Translation, all glitz and Ginza, or a place so modern that, as Parker suggested once in class, that robots walk the streets. The changes in Japan that occurred between 1890 and 1940 were huge in terms of engaging in foreign wars, but the changes in its physical appearance were greater between 1940 and the present. Hiroshima suffered a devastation no other city on earth had experienced, and it was rebuilt as a 20th-century city.