Surviving the Last Train from Hiroshima

[Charlie P.]

http://japanfocus.org/-Charles-Pellegri ... ticle.html

The above link will bring you to the Japan Focus article about double atomic bomb survivor Kenshi Hirata - one of many survivors who came forth after Associated Press (Sarah Weinman), the New York Times (Motoko Rich), and Holt (Marjorie Braman and Steve Rubin) were hoaxed by people pretending to be everyone from famed Hiroshima artist Keiji Nakazawa and physicist Richard Garwin to former professors of mine - and even people pretending in emails to be me and James Cameron (all, naturally, saying horrible things about me).

Kenshi Hirata (who had been living in seclusion with his family since 1957) was one of the many who came forth to tell of their experiences for the first time. He had survived Hiroshima and then, like many of the key people in my book, traveled by train to Nagasaki (in his case, to deliver a few of his wife's bones to her parents, so she could be properly enshrined). He arrived just in time to survive the atomic bomb a second time. What has emerged, as recorded in the above article, is one of the most poignant love stories in all human history.

The new and expanded edition of the book - "To Hell and back: The Last Train from Hiroshima" - has been successfully published under Mark Selden's imprint (from the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University), with a Forward from Steve Leeper (who served 6 years as Director of the Hiroshima Memorial Museum). Leeper addresses the publishing scandal of our time: The pulling of a NYT best seller from the press, based on a series of hoaxes perpetrated by internet trolls (one of whom turned out to be a neo-Nazi, carrying a grudge from my 2007 book with Simcha Jacobovici about the Jewishness of the original Jesus movement). It ended with the severe demotion of a NY Times political reporter, the banning of a Holt vice president from New York Publishing for life, and the coming forth of many survivors who had intended to take their stories quietly to the grave, until they heard about the American press, in reference specifically to this book, saying, "Hiroshima did not happen that way."

As Steve Leeper noted, the people he calls "nuclear holocaust deniers" (while trying to squelch the truth about what happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) ended up bringing many new truths to light.

Omoiyari and Nyokodo,
- Charlie Pellegrino

[Charlie P.]

From poet Red Slider:

In "The Last Train from Hiroshima," first edition, Pellegrino admitted any errors brought to his attention and made appropriate retractions as required, just as any ethical scientist is expected to do. All the rest of the discussion is over trivial stuff, off the main point of what the other 99% of the text discusses and reveals. To my knowledge no one has even questioned that material -- other than whether a couple of people were at this hospital or that, and exactly how far from ground zero were they?

If that's what sends billows of smoke about "Last Train", then the critical reading skills of those who try to make a case for trashing the book are as polluted as the worst industrial coal-fire smokestack. The irrelevancy of those complaints boggles the mind. Nor is "Last Train" a book about the tired old argument of whether it was necessary to drop the bomb or not. IT'S A BOOK ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE ON THE RECEIVING END OF THESE WEAPONS and, on that score, Dr. Pellegrino did an outstanding job, Certainly a factual and scientifically grounded enough job to begin the conversation on why we no longer should be quibbling over who did what, or why non-proliferation is a very dangerous excuse for not getting rid of your stockpiles if you're already in the club.

The other half of the story is that there is a lot of trivial, non-issue, off-the-point critique that has been maliciously and deliberately fomented by a very few self-appointed censors, some who purported to represent American veterans and who went around planting false reports in newspapers and elsewhere, put up (hijacked) phony Wikipedia pages on the book and its author (with fake Facebook pages linked to them), fabricated slanderous character assassinations of the author and otherwise employed every dirty trick they could think of to quash the book, defame its author and intimidate its publisher (Holt) into pulling the first edition from store shelves and shredding copies rather than defend it and its purposes (correcting minor errors or doing some further fact-checking where/if warranted).

I know this for a fact, as I tangled with this bunch of literary-terrorists over the matter of Pellegino's degree, among other things. After finding his Phd. work was not only completed and cataloged in his university library, along with his thesis which was approved and shelved, I corresponded with the head archivist who managed that collection. He confirmed that Pellegrino's work had been done and his degree conferred. A week after I posted this information in a discussion meant to restore his reputation and expose the false claims of those maliciously censoring his book, guess what? The catalog entry and the thesis mysteriously disappeared from the University shelves. Considering that some of those self-appointed censors were also present in those discussions -- the same ones who hijacked Pellegrino's Wikipedia biography [fabricating a false biography that among other things denied he had ever really been to the Titanic], and had done other dirty tricks to bury the book under their lies -- I'll leave it to you to guess why those materials might have suddenly vanished from the university library.

In any case, that's just a small example of what's been running around in the background of this whole bogus "controversy" masquerading as legitimate criticism. Some of these same types of people forced Smithsonian Director Harwit to resign for insisting on showing some photos of the bombing victims at a National Air & Space Museum exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the bombing, rather than falsify history by leaving them out of the show. In short, the censorship and complaint this edition of "Last Train" suffered is the equivalent to someone trying to shred Newton's Principia asserting there was no apple tree at the location Newton indicated [& no, I am not comparing "Last Train to the "Principia".] Time for readers to move on to the real impact and importance of the work.

The good news is that there is a new edition out, "To Hell and Back - The Last Train From Hiroshima", which appears to have secured a reputable publisher-- one with enough backbone to stand behind its authors and defend its publications when necessary. And, this new edition contains many more stories from reliable and verified witnesses to that horrible day. It was a horrible day, and it will continue to be one as long as we keep trying to shut our eyes and ears to the side of the story about what happens if you are on that side of the event. The story "Last Train" tells (in either edition) is that there is no end to the threat of a likely future catastrophic nuclear war until and unless the conversation begins that will include both narratives -- the narrative of those who used the bomb and the one of those who suffered it. "Last Train" is the best beginning I know to having that conversation. I give each edition 6 stars. Five for content, message and eloquence. The extra one is for courage --- the book for enduring as it must, and the author for putting the message ahead of his own personal and professional comfort and taking a load of malicious crap from a few crazies whose only ambition has been to silence anything they don't like.

Red Slider
August 2015
Charlie P.
Professional Wordsmith

Posts: 218
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:03 pm

[Mr. Titanic]

[Charlie P.]

The truth does not change just because the wolves are howling at it, anymore than the moon stops shining.
- Pellegrino and MacKenzie's First law