Kazuko Blake with Sandra Vega
ALLi Author Member
Location: United States of America
Genres:
Kazuko Blake is a retired professional seamstress and certified master of Ikebana, Japanese flower arranging. She is a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor, now living in O’Fallon, Illinois. She visited Japan in 2019 for the first time since leaving in 1957. While visiting Japan she toured the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Seeing the efforts the people of Hiroshima have made to ensure the past is not forgotten she was convinced to share her story.
Kazuko Blake with Sandra Vega's books
Genres: Autobiography, Biography, Memoir
Age Groups: 12-15, 16-18, 18+
This is the story of a young Japanese girl's experience living through the world's first atomic bomb and its aftermath. Kazuko describes the relatively carefree days before the war, the increased tempo of war through her elementary school days, and August 6, 1945, the day the bomb fell. The chaos and disruption are palpable as she describes the following days of uncertainty and confusion during evacuation, surrender, and occupation of her home country. In time, she met some of those occupiers, and she concludes her story with impressions of them and her eventual move to the country of her former enemy. This is a story of resilience and determination set in a time of historical significance. It was a time of great change, and Kazuko shares her observations of it in this engaging memoir.