Hiroshima

THIS YEAR the anniversaries passed without notice. Hiroshima, missing somewhere off the edge of our consciousness. Nagasaki, beyond much American recollection. In her home in northwest Baltimore County, Sylvia Beser, widow of Jacob Beser, the only man who flew both atomic bomb missions over Japan, leafs through old photo albums and wonders about the national memory."The kids don't understand," she says softly. "Even V-J Day this year, there was nothing."In October, surviving members of her husband's old unit, the 509th Composite Group of the 20th Air Force, who gathered anxiously on the island of Tinian in the South Pacific 54 years ago, who ushered in the atomic age with the devastation of two Japanese cities and ended World War II, will reunite in Washington.

STEVENSVILLE -- The Maryland Port Administration plans to begin digging 18 million cubic yards of silt and mud from the state's shipping channels next year, depositing the muck over a 4-mile stretch of open water near the Bay Bridge, about a mile off the northern tip of Kent Island.While state officials await completion of an Army Corps of Engineers environmental study, the project, part of a 20-year overall plan, has drawn furious opposition from the bayside community this summer.Residents, environmentalists and political candidates have been taking aim at the proposal, which port officials say is a vital part of a long-term plan to keep the port of Baltimore competitive.

Four Japanese peace ambassadors from the World Friendship Center in Hiroshima are visiting the Brethren Service fTC Center in New Windsor this week.Every two years, the center sends its ambassadors to several cities in the United States, where they meet with church and community organizations to promote peace. The members of the World Friendship Center, founded in 1965, believe that peace is built one person at a time.The ambassadors will be the guests of Carl and Carrie Beckwith, resident volunteers at the Brethren center.

PEOPLE ARE surprised when they hear that everyone in the world could stand inside the beltway that encircles Washington, D.C. -- 5 billion people in some 7 billion square feet. Standing room only, for sure, but there it is.On a standard 10-inch world globe, the area inside the Washington beltway is barely a dot, which gives a perspective on the size of our species in relation to the earth and its surface.Another perspective is that the chemistries of the earth's 1 billion cubic miles of air and 400 million cubic miles of water are being affected by 1/15th of one cubic mile of living human tissue.

Residents of Hiroshima, the Japanese city that suffered the worst nuclear disaster of the century, are delivering messages of peace across the United States.The Japanese Peace Ambassadors Exchange (PAX) team made New Windsor its first stop on a three-week U.S. tour. The team -- a Hibakusha (blast survivor), a historian, a photojournalist and a teacher -- came as peace ambassadors from the World Friendship Center in Hiroshima."We have to tell the true history," said Fumiko Sora, 67, a Hibakusha who has been active with peace activities her whole life.

On Memorial Day 50 years ago, the nation was in the midst of a poignant period, never to be repeated, of celebrating fresh victory in Europe without knowing that triumph over Japan was but ten weeks away. Scores of young Americans were dying daily in the fierce battles for Okinawa and other Pacific strongpoints.The Evening Sun, in an editorial, captured the mixture of relief in Hitler's overthrow and the dread of what lay ahead in the Pacific. "This year we know half the task is done," the paper declared, but then added: "We cannot dare tell ourselves that by the time another Memorial Day comes the war in the East too will have ended in final victory, but it is the deepest hope of all Americans that it will be."

The Hiroshima bomb claimed another victim when the director of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum got shot down.If more Americans had private armies and fought private wars, the National Rifle Association's manufacturer and dealer members would make more profits and pay more dues.Dr. Foster could fail to get confirmed and still get Bill re-elected.

FIFTY YEARS have passed since the end of World War II, and many people still talk as though Japan is still the worst enemy.Growing up in Japan, the history of World War II hurt me deeply. I felt sad for my countrymen knowing many were killed and the nation was destroyed. At the same time, I felt guilty about the way the Japanese treated others. Even though Japanese textbooks didn't cover these issues, I learned early what really happened during those years.Coming to the United States in 1987 at age 23 and meeting the non-Japanese people who were also victims was an affirmation of the tragedy of the war. And it was real.

DRESDEN, Germany -- On the apocalyptic night when the British bombers came by the hundreds, Ingeborg Hommelsheim crawled from the cellar of her family's burning home to find the Dresden sky a red dome of fire.It sucked the air from her lungs, burned her hair and tore her suitcase from its handle. Friends who had been caught outdoors earlier were blackened like logs. Those who had sheltered in water tanks were boiled alive.Across the city, American soldier Kurt Vonnegut listened to the attack from deep in a meat locker near a barracks for prisoners of war. Decades later in his novel "Slaughterhouse Five," he would unabashedly call the attack a "massacre" comparable to Hiroshima.

Atom bomb was needed and long agoObviously the Hiroshima incident has split the American public into two camps, those who possibly owe their lives to the guts of Harry S Truman, whose duty was to protect and save American lives, and the apologists of the Smithsonian and of Peter Jennings ilk.Those arguing only 14,000 Americans would have died in an invasion of Japan do not take into account the tens of thousands of American POWs who, the Japanese warned, would...

It took a while for the Order Sons of Italy in America to weigh in on the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wrong - er, uh, excuse me, I mean Jeremiah Wright - but I figured we'd be hearing from them. Wright is the "spiritual adviser" to presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. Wright, before he retired, was also the pastor of the Chicago church Obama has attended for 20 years. The clergyman emeritus is not exactly the bashful type. Excerpts from some of Wright's more - well, how should I put this?

Beer Appreciation 101 For three hours, we drank beer, looked at beer, sniffed beer, talked about beer, studied beer labels to discover their ingredients and drank more beer. Today baltimoresun.com/cowherd Where's the fun in the game? The Ravens won at San Francisco yesterday, but it wasn't a particularly entertaining brand of football being displayed. Sports baltimoresun.com/preston OTHER VOICES Tim Smith on Baltimore Opera Company -- Today David Steele on Ravens' teamwork -- Sports Edward Gunts on Architecture Week -- Today 5 THINGS TO DO TODAY Hiroshima -- The band will bring its unique sound to Rams Head Tavern, 33 West St., at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. $35. 410-268-4545 or ramsheadtavern.

ATOMIC BOMB Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima By Stephen Walker. HarperCollins. 352 pages. It's easy to forget that, as cities go, Hiroshima was ordinary. People there lived without any special foreboding and experienced everything in normal, rich colors, not the grainy black-and-white of World War II newsreels. Unless you believe that long chains of circumstances are actually part of some higher power's detailed master plan, there was nothing inevitable about Hiroshima's becoming the first city to be destroyed by an atomic bomb.

WASHINGTON - Sixty years after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, a film documenting the aftermath is reminding Americans about the horrors of nuclear war. Footage from a U.S. government-produced film, labeled top secret and kept out of public view for decades, is included in Original Child Bomb, a documentary that will air on the Sundance Channel at 8 p.m. today, the 60th anniversary of the day that Hiroshima became the first city...

SIX DECADES after a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there is a question that remains unanswered and perhaps unanswerable: Should those of us who were not under that mushroom cloud thank these weapons for bringing us an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity? The bomb has been widely disparaged as the most destructive device ever invented, one that brought not only devastation to Japan, but also fear and uncertainty to generations that lived under its shadow of doom. Look at Europe.

Editor's note: Sun photojournalist Chiaki Kawajiri recently visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, Japan, dedicated to the memory of the dropping of an atomic bomb there 60 years ago this week. There, she heard the story told by Setsuko Iwamoto, 75, who was a teenager when the bomb made her hometown synonymous with the horrors of war. SETSUKO IWAMOTO saw a light and another blue light. Then she lost consciousness. At 8:15 a.m., Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was used as a weapon for the first time in history.

HIROSHIMA, Japan - The Hiroshima High Court overturned a lower court decision yesterday and ordered the Japanese government to pay 40 plaintiffs, comprising former Korean forced laborers who survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and their bereaved families, 1.2 million yen - about $11,665 - each. The court cited the illegality of excluding atomic bomb survivors from compensation on the basis that they live abroad. The plaintiffs live in South Korea. Although the court ordered the government to pay a total of 48 million yen - about $466,737 - it rejected the plaintiffs' demands for compensation from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and Ryoju, a firm set up after the dissolution of the Mitsubishi conglomerate, on the ground that the statute of limitations had expired.

A Memorable Place In Hiroshima, a place of contemplation By Tom Potts SPECIAL TO THE SUN During a visit to Japan, my wife and I realized we could take the train to Hiroshima rather than spend a second day touring the shrines and temples of Kyoto. We boarded the Nozomi bullet train and traveled at speeds up to 180 mph to reach Hiroshima. Because the taxi driver at the station -- dressed in suit, tie and white gloves -- understood no English, I pointed to a picture of Hiroshima's Peace Park in a brochure, and we headed there.

Shigeo Sasaki, 87, whose daughter was an atomic bomb victim who became famous for the paper cranes she folded, died Tuesday in Tokyo of a brain tumor. Mr. Sasaki devoted his life to campaigning for peace after his 12-year-old daughter Sadako died in 1955 of radiation-related leukemia that she developed after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 10 years earlier. Mr. Sasaki, a barber from Hiroshima, retold her story to school children around the nation. Sadako made cranes on her hospital bed, inspired by a Japanese legend that says anyone who makes 1,000 paper cranes would be granted a wish.

HIROSHIMA -- Sometimes, in the swirl of unpacking and re-packing and schlepping and waiting and more schlepping, all the while still trying to shake off the enervating after-effects of jet lag, it's hard to remember why touring is such a good thing for an orchestra. And then comes a night like the one the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra had on Saturday before a sizable, enthusiastic crowd in Tokyo's premier performance venue, Suntory Hall. It's worth putting up with just about any aggravation to hear this ensemble make that kind of pour-your-heart-out music-making.