What happened underneath the mushroom cloud....

                                                                                                                                                  
       
 "As knowledge, 'Hiroshima' and 'Nagasaki' come to us inevitably as representation and specifically as a picture" (Chow, 25). After reading A History of Bombing and Chow's "The Age of the World Target", I realized that the depiction of the mushroom cloud and the fact that media coverage of these bombings was forbidden  resulted in a sanitized view of the mushroom cloud picture and what it actually represents.  I think about how a typical North American would look at this picture of mushroom cloud and feel disconnected just in the same way the bombers looked down at their "target" area in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, show an North American a picture of the twin towers and usually that evokes some type of emotional sentiment. A History of Bombing made me realize that I had no idea about how much Japan suffered before and after these bombings.
         For example, John Hersey's piece appeared in the New Yorker that recounted six people's experiences as survivors of Hiroshima. In it, a Dr. Sasaki recalls how in an attempt to reach for a burn victims hand the "Women's skin slips off in huge glove like pieces...he thinks with a shudder of all the burn injuries he has seen in the course of the day" (Lindquist, 118). Many Americans who had seen the mushroom cloud as a new version of the Statue of Liberty has second thoughts when they read Hershey's report (Lindqvist, 118).  The fictional excerpts that Lindqvist shares in his book shed a gruesome description on what the effects of radiation would look like. "The scorched eyelashes had gone into small black lumps...the whole left cheek was a blackish purple color. The side of the left nostril was infected, and the fresh pus seemed to be coming from under the dried-up crust on top. I stripped off all the curled up skin. I took hold of the lump of hardened pus on the side of my nostril with my nails and I pulled...and the liquid yellow pus dropped into my wrist (Lindqvist, 154).
       As difficult as it was to see images of these victims, it is worse to go on looking at the mushroom cloud as I had before. I will never look at it with the same ignorant eyes, I will only imagine the destruction that those poor people ensued at the hands of big bullies...(U.S.).