Looking at Hiroshima: tough, touching Junko Kayashige is a
friendly former teacher who wears sensible clothes and has a
ready smile. We were standing last month by a broad model of the
busy industrial city where she spent her early years.Skip to
next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor "There! That's
where my uncle lived," she says. "By that river, there!" The
house was only a mile from the point where, on the morning of
Aug. 6, 1945, the world's first atomic bomb exploded. Mrs.
Kayashige was 6. That morning, she and her sister Fumie were
visiting their uncle. There was an air-raid siren, then shortly
afterward the "all clear" sounded. Kayashige and a cousin
climbed up to a window to watch one last American plane fly home
across the clear summer sky. That was when the bomb went off.
Hiroshima was - and has again become - a thriving, modern city.
Its geography is eerily similar to that of Pearl Harbor, cupped
between a towering half-ring of mountains and the sea. In Pearl
Harbor, in 1941, the Japanese spa