This manga begins with a little about Hiroshima's history and then the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. Each chapter covers one aspect of Hiroshima's post-bombing reconstruction and revival.

The first few chapters were dedicated to more immediate reconstruction efforts: restoring electricity, water, and gas (Chapter 1), restarting a streetcar service (Chapter 2), and reopening banks (Chapter 3). The next few chapters dealt with activities that began soon after the bombing and covered more of their history up to the present: getting legal commerce going again in the midst of a thriving black market (Chapter 4), the history of the company now known as Mazda and its three-wheeled truck (Chapter 5), reopening schools (Chapter 6), and getting the municipal government up and running again and acquiring funding for Hiroshima's reconstruction (Chapter 7). The last few chapters felt a bit more removed from the bombing than the rest, but still tied into Hiroshima's overall revival: providing cinema, music, and books to citizens again (Chapter 8), evolving a new local food culture (Chapter 9), and the history of the Hiroshima Carp baseball team (Chapter 10).

I found this volume at a used bookstore and realized, as I was googling it, that it's apparently impossible to buy online - no listings at all for it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and AbeBooks, and the book itself didn't include an ISBN or any sort of English-language publisher I recognized. Although the translation generally seemed good, the font choices and text arrangement didn't look very professional, which added to my suspicion that I'd somehow bought a bootleg book. However, I think I've solved the mystery! This review mentions that the English language edition of this work can be purchased in the Hiroshima Peace Museum's shop. Which explains how a few libraries have managed to add it to their collections and makes me feel better about donating it to my own library.

Okay, now on to the content. For the most part, I thought this was a good overview of the Hiroshima reconstruction efforts. I didn't know much about the work that went into it, and the most interesting chapters, for me, were the first three. It amazed me how much folks were able to accomplish only a couple days after the bomb dropped (and I couldn't help but worry about the effect the post-bombing radiation had on those people). I wish I could have learned more about Haruno Horimoto, the girl who volunteered to run the one functional streetcar. The streetcar chapter ended with the closing of the school that was perhaps the only home those girls still had.

The commerce chapter was the weakest and most confusing one in the volume, and seemed less focused on the people involved than the much more effective chapter on reopening the banks that came before it. The second weakest chapter was probably the baseball one, which felt out of place. More than in any other chapter, I could also feel the undercurrents of drama that the author was trying to simplify and smooth over (team management changing repeatedly, the incident with Joe Lutz and the umpire). And I don't know if the bit with the kid donating his allowance to the team actually happened, but it seemed like a particularly in-your-face bit of schmaltz in a volume that was already somewhat prone to playing up sentimental moments and details.

This isn't really something you can go into with the same expectations you'd have for fiction. The dialogue is a bit stilted, for example, and there were times I struggled to tell some of the people apart ("was that one guy with glasses the same guy who spoke up just a few pages ago? oh, yes he was!"). And I wish a bit more care had been put into its lettering - it looked like it was done by someone who hadn't had much experience with it. Dialogue was usually in a Times New Roman-like serif font, while narration was usually in an Arial-like sans-serif font, although occasionally narration used the serif font. And I came to really appreciate the tricks professional letterers use to indicate that text in one panel would be continuing in another, because they were absent in this volume, and it was occasionally jarring to discover that a sentence I had thought might be finished wasn't actually done yet.

Overall, though, I felt this was a really worthwhile and informative read, despite its issues.

Extras:

A postscript with details on some of the overseas efforts to aid Hiroshima's recovery and reconstruction. There's also what appears to be a fairly lengthy bibliography, but all the entries are in Japanese.

 

Rating Note:

 

I debated between 3.5 stars and 4. It probably wouldn't have been as much of a debate if I hadn't known, from reading Ichi-F, that this really could have been done better. However, 3.5 stars felt a bit like kicking a puppy - this is such an earnest and heartfelt volume, and I did learn quite a bit from it. And who knew that reopened banks could make me cry? So, 4 stars it is.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

It took me almost 2 years to read this, but that was by design. I would read about 10 pages a week and just study and try to absorb all I could from it. What a fantastic book....this major work of history takes the reader from the very beginnings of the journey of the theoretical insight of the people who first conceived of splitting the atom all the way through design, experiments, more design, tests, fabrication, more tests, Trinity (which is by far the most readable and intense part of the book), and ultimately the decision and action of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It even covers the political fall out and lead in to the Cold War with Russia through the ultimate path to the hydrogen bomb as well. This book leaves out nothing....it covers the horror that the Japanese experienced on August 6th and 9th, 1945....it delves into the feelings these brilliant men and women experienced before, during, and after those fateful events....it explains where the brainchildren of this concept came from and the political troubles they faced in Europe on their way to Los Alamos, Washington (state), and Oak Ridge. The most hair-raising part, as I mentioned, was Trinity, the first atomic explosion test in New Mexico. Rhodes brilliantly portrays the people and events as it led up to that test and his descriptions of that test are just mind blowing. History buffs....if you also like long books, this is a must read.

This is an intriguing fictional account of a young mother who befriends Ethel Rosenberg. I felt it to be quite an original way of portraying Ethel as a loving wife and mother and gave a new insight into the lives of both Ethel and her husband, Julius.  The neighbor, Millie, and her family are completely fictitious but the author does weave the story around true facts.

 

I recently read and reviewed "A Place We Knew Well" and like that book, "The Hours Count" brought me back to that time in history when Americans lived with the fear of being bombed by Russia on a daily basis, this time focusing on the threat to Manhattan. A reader of my blog - Troy's Blog - commented on my review of "A Place We Knew Well" that it was beyond him how anyone could keep a level head under that threat.  I think that "The Hours Count" proves that we always didn't.

 

The neighbor Millie is often naive about the world around her. She's a very likable character and my heart ached for her as she struggled with her love for her mute child and her life with an unaffectionate husband.  The one downside I found in the book was the love angle with Jake.  I found him to be a very confusing character, one who kept deviating from what I expected of him. 

 

Please do know that this is a very fictionalized and slanted portrayal of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. What this novel does do is give you an intimate look at the lives and fears of those living during that time period and it will make you want to read more about these people and the true facts surrounding their execution.  It's a suspenseful book, even knowing the ending, due to the fictionalized story revolving around Millie.  I recommend it to those interested in that time period as it will give you a good insight into the tense atmosphere Americans lived with.  But I would recommend reading a factual based book if you're specifically interested in the Rosenbergs.

 

This book was given to me by the publisher through First to Read in return for an honest review.

"Told through letters, reports, documents, and oral histories, this book takes us from the first sustained nuclear reaction under a squash court in Chicago all the way to the destruction of two cities and thousands of human beings. The story of the Manhattan Project is simultaneously exciting, riveting and heart wrenching. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only victims of the bomb; thousands of lives were consumed by this project, many were shattered, including perhaps the biggest hero of the story, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Whatever your feelings about the bomb or nuclear energy The Manhattan Project is a fascinating read.

Recommended.
"

 

Thundery black clouds had borne down on us from the direction of the city,

and the rain from them had fallen in streaks the thickness of a fountain pen.

 

  

Ibuse's documentary novel Black Rain is his widely acclaimed masterpiece about the aftermath of Hiroshima, expressed through the diaries of two survivors, Shigematsu and his niece, Yasuko. Shigematsu uses the diaries to try to prove that Yasuko is marriage-worthy, untainted by any poisonous fallout. Ibuse's tale recounts the lives of innocent, ordinary people irreparably altered by the dropping of the bomb; the immediate death of many; the chronic illness and subsequent discrimination that the survivors endured within the Japanese community. Shigematsu's journal makes up a large portion of the novel and is a record of an actual person; Yasuko's memoir is the author's invention.

I washed my hands at the ornamental spring, but even rubbing at the marks with soap couldn't get them off. They were stuck fast on the skin. It was most odd. I showed them to Uncle Shigematsu, who said, " It could be the oil from an oil bomb, after all. I wonder if it wasn't an oil bomb they dropped, then?"

Ibuse uses a matrix of themes that include violent natural and historical forces, estrangement and ambivalence, the sufferings of war, the strengths of victims cast aside, the traditional spirituality in commemoration of the dead. His novelistic values are rooted in Japanese tradition, depicting village lives with their unpretentious mix of customs, prejudices, and peculiarities; he smoothly contrasts humor with horror, dystopia with hope. 

Reading Black Rain had the surrealistic effect of an apocalyptic science fiction - the construction of a natural world annihilated by a cataclysmic event that, had the reader been 'born yesterday', and therefore not privy to this world's history, would have suspended all ideas of reality and the belief in humanity. 

...the correct name for the thing that had caused the monstrous flash-and-bang over the city.. An 'atomic bomb'... It gives off a terrific radiation...They say nothing'll grow in Hiroshima or Nagasaki for another seventy-five years.

Ibuse measures his storytelling with understatement and elusiveness, but despite this deceptive muteness and almost emotionally leveled prose, the depiction of the effects of the aftermath on the survivors is acidic. It is precisely from this unsettling degree of 'soft-spokeness' that the power of Black Rain, to evoke the horror of a nuclear event, is drawn. Noticeably, too, is the absence of the author's own point of view of the bombing, making the scope of the tragedy even greater when left to the reader's personal interpretation.

Wouldn't it have been possible to surrender before the bomb had been dropped?
I hated war. Who cared , after all, which side won? The only important thing was to end it all soon as possible: rather an unjust peace, than a 'just' war.

Even after realizing the inevitable cycle of death around him, Shigematsu whispers words tainted with a small spark of hope:"If a rainbow appears over those hills now, a miracle will happen," he prophesied to himself. "Let a rainbow appear- not a white one - but one of many hues- and Yasuko can be cured."

That is the spirit of the survivor!

I highly recommend this subtle, evocative novel. Also see its film adaptation Kuroi Ame (1989)http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XWzbTQTkVnc

*********

From Pools of Water Pillars of Fire The Literature of Ibuse Masuji by John Whittier Treat, p.208:

Ibuse wanted to make sense out of Hiroshima, to find a way to make it fit into some greater truth, but : "I asked myself: Why did this happen? Everything seemed senseless... There was no justice, no humanity, no anything in what happened. Everyone died... it was too terrible."