Junko Morimoto

A different perspective on a very tragic moment in history. This book is an autobiography and an account of the loss suffered by the author. The book offers a first hand perspective of what it is like to lose everything you once held dear. The author humanizes the people of Hiroshima through this book, and offers a rendering of a county that is beautiful, and where the author grew up has fond memories. As Americans, we tend to hear stories, and accounts of what happened from a self serving perspective, as if to admit the tragedy, but painting it as a necessary evil to prevent something worse that what would have happened. America has historically demonized asians, and basically anyone else that we go to war with... a means to justify the actions. However, we forget or disregard that people, real innocent people just like us, suffer. Many tend to suffer for the few.

I want to use this book to point out that demonizing a whole culture or country is not very prudent. There are many individuals that suffer because of war, and it is not just the bad guys, on the contrary, the lives of the innocent are almost always caught in the cross fire.
This is a good book for offering another voice, and for preventing, or at least derailing the single story. This book inspires compassion, and real insights into the tragedy and loss that results from war.… (mere)

"My Hiroshima" is an honest and heart-breaking book, as we follow young Junk Morimoto as she grows up in Hiroshima during World War II. The reader is able to experience what Hiroshima was like before the war and the atomic bomb- a beautiful town that "is surrounded by green mountains and looks towards the sea. Through it flow seven beautiful rivers."

I love Morimoto's first person narrative, as though she is directly telling me the story and relating all her joys and fears from that time. The illustrations do well to convey the emotion and setting of the story, from a peaceful and playful childhood to the unsettling changes that came as she grew older and the war influenced the the city. After the bomb hits, we see just how terrifying and bleak her city and world becomes. The full spread illustration of the bomb going of off and the hands reaching out in dark tones is particularly impacting, as it signals the drastic and devastating change in Hiroshima on that fateful day.

The last sentence of the story are haunting as well, and telling of the change time has brought once again to the city and the change that has taken in place in Morimoto all these years later: "All I see now is clean white ground and peaceful images of young students, who are just like I was so long ago."… (mere)