Three years ago, I traveled with my then 10-year-old son, Max, to Hiroshima, a city I fell in love with 30 years ago while interviewing survivors of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of that once — and now once again — beautiful city on Japan’s Seto Inland Sea.
Max, as he likes to tell people, is “half-Japanese, half-American” and my wife and I have made a point of teaching him about the great heroism and horrors of World War II. It’s hard to grasp, at any age, but it was a war in which both his great-grandfathers fought and lost so much on opposing sides — one, tragically, losing his wife and two of his three children in the firebombing of Tokyo.
Still, I wasn’t sure how Max would react to the enormity of the human suffering that took place in Hiroshima. It turns out he taught me more than I taught him. The French Poet Charles Baudelaire said, “Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will.” If that is true, there lives a special genius in every child. And mine is no exception.
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