Eighty years ago, Aug. 6, 1945, we sliced the chrysanthemum off its stalk and left it burning in the sun. Our victory was hailed, yet over the ashes of Hiroshima, my ancestors lay buried.

Forty-four years later, that mushroom cloud traveled across the Pacific into my classroom. Noriyo and family moved to Hawaii from Hiroshima. Her grandmother, exposed to the radiation as a child, was now ridden with cancer throughout her body. Her physician recommended the mild climate of Hawaii for the last years of her life. Noriyo, not knowing a word of English, entered my third-grade class. Oh Noriyo, forgive us for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The atomic bomb, we were promised, was the start of peace, a world free of mushroom clouds, battlefields, soldiers, motherless children abandoned in hunger and fea

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