Book Discussion: Last Train from Hiroshima {to Nagasaki}

[Mr. Titanic]

Updates!


Here is a Kirkus Starred Review of The Last Train to Hiroshima. I'd like to place emphasis on the part of the review that states: "Enormously painful to read, but absolutely essential to do so." And following is a quote from James Cameron himself, who has film rights to this material.

[quote="Kirkus Starred Review"](STARRED) Pellegrino, Charles
THE LAST TRAIN FROM HIROSHIMA: The Survivors Look Back

Stories of people living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 when the atomic weapons detonated, interwoven with accounts of the U.S. pilots who flew the planes and dropped the bombs.
Pellegrino, who has written before about the connections between cataclysmic events and human beings (Ghosts of Vesuvius: A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall, and Other Strange Connections, 2004, etc.), here chronicles history’s most destructive attack by human beings on others of their species. Although he struggles mightily not to place blame, near the end he skims swiftly through the grim fates and shortened lives of some of the Japanese victims, then notes that pilot Paul Tibbets died “of natural causes in 2007, proud of Enola Gay’s role in history.â€

[Anastasia]

yay! it's finally here!! (well, in a few short weeks!)

I'm back in the U.S.A. permanently now after 9 years, and will hopefully be around more often in the near future.

[Mr. Titanic]

Welcome back Anastasia.

[Charlie P.]

Just one little note, arising from a misprint on the cover: The book is titled, The Last Train from Hiroshima.

Presently, I am in Japan. Mr. Yamaguchi, the only person to have survived the severest exposure to the physical effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs - within the Ground Zero zones each time, is terminally ill with stomach cancer and called me and James Cameron to his bed, to pass the torch and to hold hands in prayer together, committing ourselves to do whatever - what little each of us can - as human beings, to make sure that Nagasaki is the period - that nuclear war ends with Nagasaki. With waning strength he had prepared a painting for me and one for Jim - which I will not yet describe; but he said he could see us (in the exact expression of a line from "Avatar" - which Yamaguchi San has not seen) - each painting, telling us about the difficult path we must embrace, for him, and for tomorrow's children. I have never seen so much life in a man so near to the end of life. I cannot yet speak of (or even quite surround) most of what we were told, but I spent much of today in tears. (Sometimes tears of hope, for our civilization.) One of the friends who came with Jim, normally a loud jokester like Big Lew Abernathy (See "Titanic" and "Ghosts of the Abyss") and my Uncle Dondi (all three must have been separated at birth), happened to be a Buddhist; and he told us that we must understand what he observed in that room - that we had just made a commitment to one of the sainted ones, to "a living Buddha."

See you later,
- - Charlie P.

[Mr. Titanic]

Also posted in the "Avatar" thread.

"Avatar" Director Cameron Meets A-Bomb Survivor, Talks Possible Nuclear Weapons Film

January 2, 2010

From the Mainichi Daily News (Japan's largest paper), Arts and Entertainment, Los Angelas Bureau

NAGASAKI - Filmaker James Cameron visited a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings December 22 to talk over his ideas for a film about nuclear weapons.

The director of "Titanic" and "Avatar" visited 93-year-old Tsutomu Yamaguchi in a hospital in Nagasaki, saying that it may be his only chance to meet the bombing survivor. Cameron was joined by author Charles Pellegrino, whose book, "The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back" will be released January 19.

"I think it's (Cameron's and Pellegrino's) destiny to make a film (about nuclear weapons)," Yamaguchi said after meeting the two men.

According to others who were there, including members of Yamaguchi's family, Cameron told Yamaguchi that he came to visit so he could pass the survivor's rare experience onto all humanity and to future generations, and then gave Yamaguchi a firm handshake. The double survivor (the only person known to have experienced the direct effects within the Ground Zero death zone each time), then gave Cameron and Pellegrino pictures he had painted.

(Each painting carried a specific specific message from Mr. Yamaguchi about what they must conquer and seek, within themselves, along a difficult road ahead. Said Yamaguchi, of the two men, about the experience of painting the messages: "I see you.")

Cameron recalled witnessing the Cuban Missile Crisis when he was eight years old, when the threat of nuclear war was "burned" into his mind. While Cameron's idea for a nuclear weapons-themed film has not yet taken concrete form, the director swore that it would be "uncompromising" if production went forward.

I look forward to seeing Cameron's rendition of something this sentimental and socially, historically and educationally significant. I wonder if Mr. Yamaguchi has a phenomenon similar to that of the Pellegrino effect?

[Charlie P.]

In answer to your question, Cameron was wondering about the Pellegrino effect. He knew that I had been in two deep ocean submersible crashes, and that not very long ago, as a result of a minor gunshot wound, I evidently got infected in a tomb the next day with a previously unidentified variant of penicillin mold that left a rare auto-immune disease whic was, at the time, going lethal and which has since been in so complete a remission that it now appears to be "cured." He knows how a hand grenade landed right next to me and fizzled as a dud, that I've survived a stabbing and two plane crashes, one teriffic cer wreck, and a Texas tornado that broke my nose. He's seen equipment at NASA fail in every direction as soon as I walked into the room (including two Mars probes crashed to pieces in one day). So, he expressed "at least a little" fear about stepping into the same room with me and the only known two-time Ground Zero atomic bomb survivor, but he went in anyway - guessing that even if a small asteroid struck Nagasaki at that moment, as long as he stayed within a small radius of mine and Yamaguchi's so-called "improbability fields," he'd be safe. See you later,
- - Charlie P.

[jccarlton]

Interesting video of Little Boy and Hiroshima:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9lwvImJqT0&NR=1
You literally ride Little Boy to detonation. Very well done.
And something I hope never gets assembled again for any reason:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxD44HO8 ... re=related

[jccarlton]

One of the sickest works of denial I have ever seen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7RQJyt- ... r_embedded

[Mr. Titanic]

Charlie has asked me to share this with everyone:

Subject: "James Cameron's "uncompromising" HIROSHIMA movie"

Please follow this link to some of the questions and debates that I began to answer elsewhere, and that I will certainly continue to answer here, as time permits.

Author: james humberd

Comment:
Charlie P Wrote: The primary point is that the bombs were dropped – simply that – and they turned out to have effects that should be utterly horrifying to any normal human mind.
==============

Yes the power of that Bomb was terrible, perhaps as powerful as the humans who caused the Rape of Nanking. So don't expect me to feel sorry for the death of people who never mentioned that horror was worse than the Bomb.

How about the bombing of Tokyo, more people were killed there, than by the Atom Bombs, but still the Japs would not stop the stupid war they started for no known reason.

And I would say: The primary point is that the bombs were dropped – simply that – and they turned out to have effects that should be utterly WONDERFUL to any normal human mind. The War was ended.

[Charlie P.]

As I ofren say, Education. There is no substiture. The post above actually did leas to an intelligent and educational exchange. It is worth reading the whole thread. - - Charlie P.

[Charlie P.]

As some of you may know from my website, I like to list some of the least boring reviews - the most scathing ones - alongside the glowing, generally more boring reviews. On a site apparently run by Comedy Central, a report sourced from Variety magazine invited "Scathing Reviews from Bitchy People."

Below, the report - followed by some of my favorite scathing reviews yet. (Though it's hard to top the guy from the Chicago Tribune who told the world that my novel "Dust" made him impotent; or the reviewer of "Her name, Titanic" who said he tried to use the book as liner for the bottom of his bird cage but the bird died).



A Sense of Irony, by Steven Lloyd Wilson
James Cameron Options "The Last Train from Hiroshima."
January 11, 2010

On a Monday morning, Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived the first nuclear weapon detonated in war, though the spark of atomic fire burned him and ruptured [an] eardrum. He crawled across a river on a bridge of bodies to reach a train station and escaped the wasteland of Hiroshima to his home town of Nagasaki. On Thursday morning, he reported for work and survived the second nuclear weapon detonated in war. Yamaguchi was the only individual officially recognized by the Japanese government as having survived both nuclear explosions, although there were thirty others who took the last train with him out of Hiroshima. He lived until age 93, dying last week finally of stomach cancer, the latest in a series of radiation-related ailments that emerged in his final years.

It's the sort of story that would be scoffed at if not true, that any editor would kick back in the first draft stage as eye-rollingly implausible. The suspension of disbelief required in fiction can't survive such coincidences.

Charles Pellegrino has written a book interweaving the stories of the survivors of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, peeking into the first-hand experiences of the people on the ground... Pellegrino and Cameron visited Japan last week, met with Mr. Yamaguchi just before his death, and just announced that James Cameron has optioned the film rights for "The Last Train from Hiroshima."


COMMENTS:

Cameron was quoted as saying that he will not film it until technology that re-creates actual atomic blasts in movie theatres is developed and implimented.

Apparently a visit from Pellegrino and Cameron has a more lethal effect on a person than 2 atomic bomb blasts.

From Uncle Bill: They probably bored him to death by droning on endlessly about the Titanic - but that's only an hypothesis, of course.

So, Tsutomu Yamaguchi survives two nuclear weapons blasts and lives to the ripe old age of 93. You realize his kids were probably never allowed to cry... ever. [Bill Cosby's story to his children about having to walk to school through three feet of snow... up hill... both ways - had nothing on Mr. Yamaguchi]. He had the ultimate argument winner:

"Daddy, I fell down and got a boo-boo on my knee and..."
"SO WHAT? I survived not one but TWO atomic bombs - suck it up, buttercup!"
"Dad, some kid at school gave me a bloody nose..."
"TWO ATOMIC BOMBS! You'd have thought the United States was going after me personally!"
"I fell and broke my arm..."
"When I got hit with 500 rads - how is it my whimpy srerms survived?"

Pellegrino comment: Actually, the Tsutomu Yamaguchi I came to know had devoted his life to what in America we call the Pay-it-forward principle. He also had a great sense of humor, so he'd be smiling on the above.

- - Charlie P.

[voralfred]

I have a lot of respect for Mr. Tsutomu Yamaguchi and a lot of pain for his fate.
But if you read this article about what Japanese military propaganda did to their own people, would you not say that, for instance, the last decades of he life of Mr. Nakamura's mother (who lived under her 80's) must have been even worse than that of Mr. Yamaguchi? She killed her own daughter with her own hands, minutes before the first US soldiers who found them handed them candy and cigarettes.
How many Mrs. Nakamura would there have been, all over Japan?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/world ... t-oki.html


In Okinawa only, about 100.000 Japanese civilians were either killed or forced to commit suicide by the Japanese Army, or at least persuaded to commit suicide by Japanese military propaganda. Brought to the scale of all of Japan, one can seriously argue that the two A-bombs saved many millions, if not tens of millions of Japanese civilians. To say nothing of the psychological trauma of survivors who had killed their own children before realizing that the enemy was much less cruel to them than their own troops had been.

Does Mr. Cameron plan to look for survivors like Mr. Nakamura's mother (some must still be alive till today)? The difference is that such people would hide their shame and grief. Being a victim of the enemy is honorable, falling victim to your own government propaganda to the point of committing the unspeakable is ... just unspeakable.

[jccarlton]

Last Train seems to be doing well. The Barnes & Noble that I purchased my copy from had sold all 5 copies they started with this morning, my copy being the last. Of course Borders doesn't seem to have it at all.

[Charlie P.]

I have tried to address all aspects of the story, including the propoganda that encouraged 14 year old boys to crawl into suidide torpedoes, in a chapter titled "The Faithful Elephants." A submarine carrying four such torpedoes is what sank the Indianapolis. One of the people in my book is a 14-year-old boy who happened to be under water near the hypocenter of the Nagasaki bomb, just as the submarine was returning to port to take new Kaiten boys along on the next suicide bombing mission. Along with the Hitler Youth Movement, it was (in a world that seems simply to have descended into madness) the most widespread example of brainwashing and child abuse since the Children's Crusade. In a time-present when women and even children are being "love-bombed" into being suicide killers for religious extremists (I refuse to accept the politically correct term "homicide bombers") the lessons of the past are a glaring signpost for the future. - - Charlie P.

[voralfred]

I am sure that in your book, which is a well documented work by an scrupulously honest academic, all aspects have been covered.

But in the "ordinary people" psyche, the "horrors of the atomic bombs", though they killed less people than the carpet bombings of Tokyo or of German cities, strike a very special chord, which has been harped on over and over by what I call "so-called" pacifists, because they are usually pacifist only when the US, ot the West in general are involved, but curiously silent when others are waging wars (where where they during the Budapest-56, Prag-68 Soviet invasions? Demonstrating against the Suez expedition and the Vietnam war, probably)

Comparatively, there has been much more emotion on the (very emotionel, I'll grant that) fate of a young girl who died of cancer and asked for paper cranes, or for Yamagushi-san, than for the thousands and thousands of people who have been brainwashed by the Japanese military clique to keep fighting (and one can also mention the Hitler Jugend brainwashed by the Nazis), or commiting suicide, when the war was already lost. Their desperate attitude last-ditch attitue was largely responsible, precisely, for the decision of the US to drop the bombs to stop an long and protracted agony that would have brought a much heavier cost, not just the US, but the Japanese civilian population.

If there had been, all these decades, much more emphasis on the monstruous character of this brainwashing, rather than the West self-flagellating about "the Bombs", if the accusations, the shame, the stigma, have been directed in the right direction, then just possibly, the "lessons of the past" might have prevented the "suicide killers", however one calls them, to be an efficient strategic weapon, because the stigma attached to the inspirators of such actions would have been a real deterrent, instead of the present situation, where only yesterday on the French TV, I heard peope seriously defending the "suicide killer" strategy as "the only possible weapon those poor oppressed people have to fight against foreign invaders using drones", as if most of the victims of the "suicide killers" were not their own, innocent bystanders, compatriots.

This is not an accusation against Pr. Pellegrino, but a general statement.
Still, I cannot help to notice that, however complete and honest Pr. Pellegrino book is undoubtedly, what will remain in the general public pscyhe will be much more his (and Mr. Cameron) well publicized visit to Yamagushi-san than the serious and well documented ans argued chapter of his book about brainwashing by Japanese military propaganda.
So, yes, in some sense, I still have a slightly bitter feeling about all this. A book, however serious and honest, will not have the same emotional impact as the visit to a dying man with such a past. And this is all in continuation of the same "self-flagellation" attitude.

The Mrs Nakamuras who killed their own daughters or possibly sent their own sons to crawl into suicide torpedoes, because they were convinced that was the thing to do, one never sees them.

Incidentally, Pr. Pellegrino remarked that there is a "PC" way to call the "suicide bombers", I mean, the present time ones, those who blow themselves up in Shia mosques during prayer to kill as many worshippers as possible, because they themselves are Sunni, and as a way to fight US drones?
Do you know what is the most usual way to call them in France (there are other designations, but this one is the most frequently used)?

Spoiler: show

Kamikaze

as I undestand it, this appelation is never used in the US in that context

[Charlie P.]

Naturally, I was bound to devote a whole chapter to this, and it is a theme that resonated throughout. I have colleagues who explored a German submarine sunk off Long Island New York at the very end of the war (for Germany's side). The average age of the crew turned out to be about 14. Also, my family was directly impacted by the suicide bombers of 9/11. My lungs still carry the scarrs of having worked in the ruins (so, Mr. Atta and the other remarkable pigs got a piece of me).

Mr. Yamaguchi's only message was for the future, that people must not do any of this - any of it - ever again, for any reason whatsoever. There are very few people I have ever known that I would describe as enlightened or even what some might regard "holy." Tsutomu Yamaguchi was one of them.

- - Charlie P.

[Mr. Titanic]

Questions regarding the use of hand drawings over actual photographs and photographs of the event have been posed on the discussion group as well as asked of Charlie frequently. I am posting it as per Charlie's request concerning images available in the book:

Many of the photos available have been published in numerous books and the publisher decided they would be expensive to reproduce. Also, bombing survey photographs are mostly gray and black, and the details are hard to see unless you know exactly what you are looking for. Hence, Patricia Wynne and I highlighted the details in, for example, the before and after sequences. The sequence of Sadako's house in Chapter 10 did not exist at all. My 1945 views were reconstructions made entirely from after the bomb photos, taken by planes flying over the region. I was able to carefully reconstruct what the house looked like from foundations in the photos, from measurements of the area as it exists today (the same rail line and tunnel are still standing) and from her brother's descriptions.

In the end, when the recession hit publishing, more than forty detailed illustrations were removed from the book. We hope to see them restored in foreign editions (as in Japan), and eventually in the paperback edition.

I hope my answer helps.

- - Charlie Pellegrino