I love to integrate art into my history curriculum. One of the projects I like to do (I've mentioned this in another post) is have my students do an artistic response to the dropping of the Atomic Bombs on Japan. When I've done this in the past I have used a clip from Barefoot Gen and some accounts from real Hibakusha. This website has a ton of resources and accounts about this group of survivors : Hibakusha
Recently HBO did a documentary called White Light/Black Rain. It's an amazing documentary that will help students realize real people were effected by this event.
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Atomic Bomb Survivors-"Hibakusha"
07/17/2008 01:03 PM
#1
Atomic Bomb Survivors-"Hibakusha"
A few months ago I saw a documentary on the bomb on HBO entitled White Light/Black Rain. The video includes interviews with 14 survivors. The tell what they experienced, there is footage of the medical follow up, and they describe their suffering in the intervening decades. To quote: Sakue Shimohira, ten years old at the time, recalls the moment she considered killing herself after losing the last member of her family, saying, "I realized there are two kinds of courage - the courage to die and the courage to live." The movie was released August 7, I guess, last year. My students have not grown up under the threat of nuclear war as I did. It's hard to tell how much they are concerned. Yet when they see excerpts from this film, they get it. Never again.
I like to do the same thing. I use the picture book Hiroshima No Pika by Toshi Maruki to help with this. She represents the experience from a child's perspective. I tried a few different ways to incorporate this book, including a circle time/story time with my 11th graders. They loved it. I found a DVD version of this book that I have yet to check out, but will soon.
I often teach John Hersey's book Hiroshima and show Barefoot Gen (true account) in short segments in Japanese with English subtitles. Students love it. I would love to one day use the part of the manga Barefoot Gen for study while teaching Hiroshima. I do at times show the anime Grave of the Fireflies to show how nasty the fire bombing was prior to the atomic bombs. In fact, I find it helpful to show a segment of the documentary The Fog of War when Robert McNamara's account of the 70 cities of Japan that were 50 percent or more destroyed, all prior to the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I listened to someone speak about their own individual atomic bomb experience. He talked about how he couldn't find his wife for hours after the bomb hit. She finally came home and was bleeding after the bomb and the first thing she did was walk in the door and start breastfeeding her baby. There was more to the story but when students hear someone's individual, story with a lot of feeling, it is a very memorable experience.
Hi Danny,
You might check out: http://uschinaforum.usc.edu/showpost.aspx?PostID=2390&PageIndex=3 -- the Japan Society event we mentioned there has passed, but other materials are available. This info is in the "teaching about the recent past" thread.