The man from Malaga and the atomic bomb, by Juan Soto Ivars

Everyone knows what happened in August 1945 in the Japanese cities of hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everybody knows what happens to people after an explosion. nuclear device. Everyone has heard of the cancer, burns that do not heal, congenital diseases. People are familiar with it, and the mushroom cloud is part of pop culture. Some may have even read ‘Black Rain’, Masuji Ibuse’s searing account of the immediate consequences of the bomb and the taboo that surrounded the survivors like a cloud of radiation. And we know who Godzilla is. And the expectation is great around Christophe Nolan’s film about Oppenheimerthe father of the atomic bomb, who lived out his days after the summer of ’45 dealing with the guilty feeling. But with journalism often leaving disaster sites quickly, few will know the intricate human ins and outs, the long-running stories that swirled up like ash swirl from explosion craters. Few journalists have taken the trouble to speak in depth with the survivors, with their children and grandchildren, many years later. And that is precisely what a Spanish journalist, from Malaga, has done agustin rivera. He was a correspondent in Japan, but he is more than that in love with the country. His book ‘Hiroshima: testimony of the last survivors’ has just been published in Kailas.

Recognition between different

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On the pages appear the other consequences of the US attack on the two cities: the human ones, the familiar ones, the civilizing ones. Isn’t it curious that the only country that has received a nuclear attack ended up being not only an ally of the only country that has used these weapons against humans, but also one of the most prosperous and thriving nations on the planet? Isn’t it curious, especially seen from the perspective of a country that seems incapable of forgiving itself for a civil war of almost a hundred years ago, that in Japan the grudge of the survivors almost conspicuous by its absence?

Rivera asks, listens and transcribes in this work full of affection, curiosity and respect. In closed, withdrawn, identity and tribalist times, his book not only moves and informs, but also reminds us of something essential: empathy and recognition between different people is possible. And a person from Malaga is just as entitled to write about Japan as a Japanese person.

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