Scene on Radio · Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

Voices of Hiroshima

August 6, 2025·34 min·2 clips

Michiko Yamaoka describes the beautiful blue and yellow flash that burned her face, leading to 27 surgeries.

Hiroshima first appears as an image. The host starts with the mushroom cloud most listeners already know, then turns toward the city, the survivors, and the postwar lives tucked behind that symbol. This is anniversary radio with a ledger open. The archive comes from a 1995 trip, when many thousands of A-bomb survivors were still alive and could describe what August 6, 1945 had done to them. The memory does not stay tidy. The episode places the survivors' demand against nuclear weapons beside the harder fact that Japan's wartime victims often heard Hiroshima in another register. Some heard liberation. Some heard survival. The reporting names Pearl Harbor, Nanjin, Manila, Korean forced sexual slavery, and the long argument over whether Japan has fully faced its wartime aggression. The comparison is uncomfortable because it has to be. A poem by Sadako Kurihara becomes the hinge, pressing the point that Hiroshima cannot be spoken about cleanly while other violence sits outside the frame. Then the harbor opens the story further. Hiroshima Harbor, once tied to shipbuilding and the Japanese navy, becomes a place where postwar commerce and unresolved history sit side by side. A Korean restaurant near the harbor makes that tension sharper. Moon Shi Kang, described as a leader in the Korean Residence Union in Japan, argues that Japanese people can be victims and still carry responsibility for a war their country began. The episode does not smooth that over. It listens for grief, evasion, conviction, and the pain of people holding more than one truth at once. Survivors come through as witnesses, not symbols. The credits return to names, voices, and deaths, including Michiko Yamaoka, whose burned face became one life inside Hiroshima's public memory. The episode is grave, but close to the skin. Hiroshima becomes neither a single atrocity story nor a national innocence story. It becomes a place where suffering and accountability share the same ground.

As heard by us

A survivor-led Hiroshima documentary that holds memory and responsibility in the same uneasy frame.

Voices of Hiroshima moves the city out from under the mushroom cloud and into postwar life: office buildings, markets, a pro baseball team, and a million residents carrying history in ordinary streets.

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Why you'd press play

Want the mushroom cloud to stop doing all the talking? Press play.

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