In this episode of Shed Life we talk to Hiroshi Yoshikawa, founder of American Dream Education in Hiroshima, Japan, and the son of an atomic bomb survivor. It is our first international episode, recorded in a capsule hotel in Hiroshima during the Hodaki Plains College trip. Hiroshi took us through the Peace Memorial Park and then sat down to share his mother's story, the history of the city, and the two messages that Hiroshima carries to the world.

Hiroshi was born in Hiroshima in 1961, sixteen years after the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945. He told us that even at that distance from the event, the radiation left its mark on him. He carries effects in his eyes and has very high blood pressure. His mother was 17 at the time of the bombing, working as a researcher at Hiroshima University about three to four kilometres from the hypocentre. She was in the act of putting on her white lab coat when the bomb dropped. The white fabric reflected enough radiation to protect the right side of her body. Her left side was burned and embedded with thousands of pieces of glass. She was unconscious for about a week and woke not knowing what had happened. The pain was severe enough that she asked the doctors to end her life. She told Hiroshi she survived because one day she coughed up what she believed was the poison leaving her body, and from that point she began to recover. She lived to the age of 95 and passed away peacefully three years ago.

Hiroshi told us his mother never hated America. She ran a restaurant she named America. She was the one who agreed to send Hiroshi to study at UCLA and who funded his college tuition herself by running that business after his father went bankrupt. When Hiroshi asked her directly how she felt no hatred after losing her father and nearly dying herself, she told him that what she had been told to fear before the war ended, that American soldiers would kill everyone and worse, turned out not to be true. What she saw after the surrender were people trying to help.

The episode covers a lot of ground from there. Hiroshi explained how Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki was born from women rebuilding the city after the bombing, cooking on steel plates over brick fires using flour donated by US forces, feeding their children and earning small amounts of money after losing their husbands to the war. He told the story of Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old when the bomb fell and developed leukaemia at twelve, and whose classmates' guilt over not visiting her in hospital led eventually to the fundraising that built the Children's Peace Monument in the Peace Memorial Park.

He also talked about what it was like growing up in Hiroshima with peace education, how survivors largely could not speak about their experiences for decades because the memories were too painful and because there was real social prejudice against them in other parts of Japan. And he told us about the president of the Japan Football Association, a survivor himself and originally from Hiroshima, who could not bring himself to walk through the Peace Memorial Museum.

Hiroshi's message to every young person he brings through the Peace Memorial Park is the same one he left us with. When you grow up and you have the right to vote, do not vote for any politician whose policy is to drop a bomb on somebody's head.

Listen to the full episode on all major platforms

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[VIDEO_ID]

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72KnBcFkM1r3xm2YyVujJR

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shedlifenz-podcast/id1857464528

iHeart Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-shedlife-nz-308999038/