My late grandmother, Michiko Kumazawa, was 11-years-old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; she was living in Tokyo at the time. The air raids during the war were so bad that she had to go to Fukushima with her school, almost as an indefinite field trip, in order to stay safe while her parents still worked in Tokyo. She and her mother were peace activists; her mother participated in a protest against nuclear weapons in New York City among a crowd of more than a million people in 1982 (which my father happened to be at, way before he met my mother). Michiko made sure to educate my mother on what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, but never had hostile feelings towards America. She knew that my mother always wanted to go to America, but unfortunately passed away before my mother could. However, my mother is confident when she says that Michiko would have been happy to hear that my mother got married and had a child with an American, and she got her grandmother's, Michiko's mother's, blessing when she got married. So, many Japanese people who witnessed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not hate America, but rather hated America's actions and just wanted peace for the future, just like my grandmother always did.
-Toscana Finke
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