On August 6, 1945, Kazu Sueishi thought she saw an angel flying through the sky. One bright yellow flash later, she had fallen to the floor unconscious, dreaming that she was in heaven. Instead, when the 18-year-old emerged that morning from what she remembers as a five-minute coma, she awoke to an apocalypse. The blue sky was now black. Her back was broken under the weight of her house. Third-degree burns covered her father’s body. Her mother was hidden under the house’s rubble. And in a powerful, violent blast of heat and wind, her cousins, niece and uncle had disappeared–forever. At Palisades Charter High School last week, the 80-year-old Sueishi recalled with pain and humor her life and how it changed the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. In her hour-long speech to more than 100 students, she made a personal plea against warfare and nuclear weapons. ‘It’s my duty as an American citizen to talk about the horrors of nuclear war, so it never happens again,’ said Sueishi in sometimes broken English. ‘I’m not a politician. But I think war is nothing but a stupid game.’ Students on the high school newspaper, The Tideline, invited Sueishi to speak and organized the event, which also featured student poems, a documentary of the bombing and dozens of posters chronicling the history of atomic warfare. Longtime anti-nuclear activists and Palisadians Josh Greenfeld and his wife Foumiko Kometani, who lived in Japan during the war, were inspired to bring Sueishi’s story to a younger generation after meeting her four years ago. And they helped students organize the event. ‘There are a lot of things to work for,’ said Greenfeld, a writer who lives on El Medio Avenue. ‘But at this point in my life, I think the most important is to make the age of nuclear weapons taboo. If just two kids understand its dangers, that’s all. One is an infinitely greater number than none.’ Sueishi was born in 1927 in Pasadena. Her parents’ struggle to learn English made running their grocery store difficult, and they returned to their native Hiroshima one year after their daughter’s birth. When Japan’s war against China began in 1937, Sueishi was a middle-school student. In 1941, a new front in Japan’s war opened when it attacked Pearl Harbor, joining Germany and Italy in World War II. Wartime rations and air raids became a way of life and virtually all young men were drafted to fight, including Sueishi’s middle-school English teacher–a small consequence of Japanese aggression she still resents. But lying on a large island southwest of mainland Japan, Hiroshima was largely spared much of the costs of its nearly decade-long war–until August 6, 1945. ‘Most people would watch the [American] B-29s,’ said Sueishi. ‘It was a beautiful plane. It came by many times but never dropped the bomb.’ When a bomber named Enola Gay released the 9,700-pound uranium bomb–the first ever–on the city, about 70,000 people died instantly. An elementary school class Sueishi visited a day before the bomb had become a graveyard of 25 students’ bodies charred black. Postwar reports by the U.S. government described a blast so powerful that people’s shadows were burned onto walls; birds burst into flames in mid-air; clothes’ patterns were burned onto skin. Those not killed on impact died in a conflagration of smoke and radiation that engulfed the city with immediate and lingering effects. ‘I wasn’t burned, but I became very sick,’ Sueishi said. ‘There was no water for days and I lost my appetite. Every day, really normal looking people would die. And every day after that I thought that today is my turn to die.’ Despite her broken back, the self-described hibakusha–atomic-bomb victim–said that the shock of the bomb kept her from feeling pain. As many as 200,000 people died within five years of the attack because of radiation-induced cancer, according to the Department of Energy, which designed the bomb. And even today, many Japanese trace their tumors to the effects of radiation from the bombing. The devastation of Hiroshima was replicated three days later in Nagasaki, which brought Japan’s unconditional surrender to the United States and the Allied forces. A longtime resident of the United States, Sueishi now lives in Rolling Hills Estates. In 1949, she left Hiroshima for Hawaii and then Los Angeles, where she studied fashion before returning to Hiroshima. In the late 1950s, a Japanese-American proposed to her and she moved back to Los Angeles–this time permanently. ‘Many people ask if I hate America because it dropped the bomb,’ she said. ‘America is a big, beautiful country with very generous people. I love this country. My daughter was born here.’ During her presentation, Sueishi encouraged PaliHi students to pepper her with questions. And although she uses a cane, she was determined to demonstrate her vivacity. ‘I can do the jitterbug,’ said Sueishi, who interspersed humor throughout her lecture. Sueishi’s presentation came at a perfect time for Marcy Winograd, whose U.S. history classes recently finished studying World War II. ‘For kids who couldn’t imagine the reign of destruction, I wanted them to see the effects of atomic weaponry,’ said Winograd, who had three of her classes attend the nuclear war presentation. ‘It was incredible to hear her speak,’ said Elena Loper, a ninth-grader. ‘She has so much love. It was really inspiring. And when she was talking about the bomb dropping, I had tears falling down my face.’ Sueishi ended her speech by asking students to repeat an exhortation. ‘We will not repeat the same mistake again. No more Hiroshima! No more Nagasaki! No more hibakusha!” —————- To contact Staff Writer Max Taves, e-mail reporter@palipost.com or call (310) 454-1321 ext. 28.
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