It took Tamiko Shiraishi nearly seven decades before she could come to terms with her experience surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945.
Before she began speaking about her life as a hibakusha in 2013, she’d spent the better part of it despising the country that destroyed her hometown. She had long shunned studying English, seeing it as the enemy’s language, and had cringed at the sight of an airplane, a reminder of her traumatic memory.
But with the passage of time she was slowly able to heal.