I offer an absolute “Amen” to this post. Mr. President, I would have never known my Dad had it not been for the two bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Your apology is not for me either, and I will not recognize it as such. I told the same thing to my Japanese friend from Tokiyo, who is about my own age, and he smiled and understood. The majority of the Japanese people do understand in spite of your so called “apologies”.

Dad was in southern Japan around Osaka. In his WWII letters, he writes a lot about his post-war experiences in and around Osaka. Mostly he just played baseball and counts the days, hours, and minutes when he would receive his orders to get on a boat and return to the states. He was lucky, but that luck had “Little Boy” and “Slim Man” written all over it. These were the names of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. I believe “Little Boy” was the one built from the U-235 that was purified and refined into fissionable form in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and “Slim Man” was the one made from the Plutonium that was made at the Hanford, Washington facility. I suppose that it was a good thing that the Japanese did not know that these two bombs were the only two of their kind in the world at the time and that it would have taken several years to make enough fissionable material to make another. It is in the letters that he wrote just after going ashore in Osaka where he writes about the young Japanese kids running up to the GI’s as they came ashore yelling “B29, B29.” I suppose that this was the only English that they knew. When I told this story to my friend, Naohito Ikeda, who was raised in Tokyo and who is about my age, he smiled and said that he may have been one of those kids. Naohito would have been four or five years old at the time that the bombs were dropped. His few months in the Army of Occupation must have been really an experience in itself. In his letters, he writes about traveling in areas in and around Osaka and surveying the bomb damage prior to the end of the war. He never went to either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I don’t suppose he was allowed to go to either of those two places, I suppose, because of the residual radiation and massive destruction that was still present. I know that he was glad when he finally got on that boat and headed back to the States. I suppose his main joy in the entire experience was playing baseball. I understand that his unit had a fairly good team.

He went ashore in southern Japan (I believe Osaka) after the Peace Treaty was signed in Tokyo Harbor. He talked about sitting on the landing craft waiting orders to hit the beach if the Japanese had not signed the Treaty.