Help If I May Ask

Masako Hashida was 15-years-old in 1945 when the atomic bomb was dropped on her city. In peacetime she would have gone to school. But like all her friends at that time in history, she was drafted to work at the Mitsubishi weapons factory in Nagasaki. Her job was making torpedoes. The second atomic bomb to be used on a human population was dropped on Nagasaki while Hashida was working at that factory, located less than one mile from the blast. She is an atomic bomb survivor. In her own words Hashida talks about what she witnessed and what she felt that day. Ueda Koji was 3½-years-old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He was sitting on the porch listening to his grandmother read him a story when he was jolted by a sudden flash of light and a tremendous roar. His mother’s accounts are what he remembers most. At times she talked about what she saw. For Koji, the stories were ghostly. He is an atomic bomb survivor. On Aug. 6, 2005, 60 years to the day after the bombing of Hiroshima, the survivors traveled to the birthplace of the atomic bomb, Los Alamos, New Mexico. They visited the sites where the bombs were assembled. They also joined New Mexicans for a disarmament gathering and pleaded for a world without nuclear weapons. Events of the day were tied to similar ones in Japan, California, Nevada, Texas, Tennessee, Colorado and elsewhere around the world.