Metal Slides and Omoiyari in Hiroshima

The world is lousy with politicians and pundits telling us why we must build walls to keep others out and fight to take what is “ours.” Children suffer because of them.

My 10-year-old son, Max, with a photo of 10-year-old Yukiko Fujii taken on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the day another was dropped on Nagasaki, at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

By Michael Judge

In my last post, “Hiroshima’s Message,” I wrote about my 10-year-old son, Max, and our long-awaited trip to a city I fell in love with three decades ago while interviewing survivors of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of that once—and now once again—beautiful city on Japan’s Seto Inland Sea.

My son, as he likes to tell people, is “half-Japanese, half-American,” and my wife and I have made a point of teaching him about the great heroism and horrors of World War II—a war in which both his great-grandfathers fought, and lost so much, on opposite sides; one losing his wife and two of his three children in the firebombing of Tokyo.

Still, as I wrote before returning to Hiroshima on Aug. 6, I wasn’t sure how he’d react to the enormity of the human trag…