The nuclear family: Facing both sides of the atomic bombs | Ari Beser | TEDxKyoto

Ari Beser, recipient of the Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship, gathers stories from both sides of the World War II conflict to strengthen the path of peace and reconciliation between the United States and Japan.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

When I was 8 years old,
my mom took me to a party.

My grandfather's friend was visiting
from Japan and she wanted me to meet her.

But before I went inside,
my mom warned me:

'Ari, Grandpa's friend is burned.

Please don't mention her scars'.

I was only 8, so I asked my mom
what happened to her.

She told me she was burned
by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

I said, 'Mom don't you think
that's strange?

Grandpa's friend survived Hiroshima,
and Pop-pop dropped the bomb on her'.

Pop-pop was what we called
my other grandfather, Jacob Beser.

He was the only men in the world
to fly on both planes

that dropped the atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In America we were taught
that the bombs were good thing:

That they saved lives
and ended the war quickly,

and that the crewmen were heroes.

They made a movie about it in the '80s,
and Billy Crystal played my grandfather.

Wasn't I supposed to be proud?

Well, March 10th, 2011,

I actually won a grant that morning

to go to Japan and write a book
about Jacob Beser, the Japanese lady,

and this strange family coincidence.

And I was on my way home from celebrating,

and it was already March 11th in Japan.

The Great East Japan Earthquake struck,

and caused a tsunami
that washed up the Tohoku coast,

and inundated some towns
with up to 30 meters of water.

And the news kept unfolding
and we found out

that there was a nuclear
melt down at Fukushima.

And day after day as the news unfolded,
and it kept getting worse,

I never cancelled my plans to come.

And by that summer, I was in Japan,
ready for the atomic bomb anniversaries.

And I met the Japanese lady's family,

and I asked them if they would work
with me, and help me write this book.

And they said, 'No.

If you want to write a book about
the atomic bomb of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

and you want to understand,
you have to meet survivors.

We'll be your friends privately,
but we can't work with you publicly.

You have to meet as many survivors
as you can, if you want to understand.'

So ever since then,

I've been on the journey to meet
these survivors of the atomic bombs,

or 'Hibakusha',
as they're called in Japanese,

and trying to meet as many as I can since.

That same summer I was introduced
to the artist, Shinpei Takeda.

He said he knew the perfect
people for me to meet.

One of them was Yuji Sasaki,
Sadako Sasaki's nephew.

Sadako was the girl
who folded a thousand paper cranes,

to fulfill the Japanese legend
that says doing so gets you a wish.

Her wish was to cure her leukemia
that she got from the bomb's radiation.

But she passed away.

Her message of hope lives,
and children all over the world today

are folding paper cranes
for peace because of her.

And when I told Yuji what I was doing
and what I wanted to understand,

he caught this idea
and ran into a back room,

and he came out a few seconds later
with a little plastic box.

He opened the box,

and inside was this tiny little
paper crane and a tiny paper triangle.

And he told me that was the last
paper crane his aunt ever folded,

and the triangle was the crane
that she didn't finish.

And he told me to open my hand
and he took out the crane,

and he put it in the center of my palm.

He said, 'Tiny, isn't it?'

In 2010, I met the grandson
of president Truman,

the grandson of the president
who dropped the atomic bomb.

And I did the same thing for him
that I'm doing for you,

and I asked him the same question
I'm about to ask you.

Will you work with us
to send a message of peace?

And I was only 23 at that time,

I didn't know what I could do to help,

but I knew why I needed to try.

If we could come together as Japanese
and Americans as former enemies,

and descendants of these
involved people with the history,

then it would be an example to the world
of the positive changes that are possible.

I was told that there are two types
of peace activities:

There's negative peace and positive peace.

Negative peace isn't a bad thing.

It just means that we will achieve peace
through the absence of something,

like if we get rid of land mines
or nuclear weapons or guns,

then we'll achieve peace.

Positive peace is a little different.

It just means that people
can come together,

and build better relationships.

We can do that.

Sure, we can demand that our governments
have high-level discussions

to eliminate the weapons of war,

but we can come together as ordinary
people from opposite ends of a conflict,

and build better relationships ourselves.

That night that I met Yuji, Shinpei
introduced me to a few more people.

They were volunteers,

working in the Tohoku cities
of Ofunato and Rikuzentakada,

with a group called All Hands Volunteers.

Shinpei thought
that after spending some time

trying to understand
the atomic bombs, the disaster,

it would be good for me
to go up to an ongoing disaster

and help them in their recovery efforts.

Eighty percent of Rikuzentakada
was washed away.

And on the coastline
where there used be 70,000 trees,

there was only one left standing.

All Hands was doing
a lot of different work.

They were doing so many kinds
of projects: Mudding houses,

cleaning up fish factories,

and cleaning photographs.

I was helping with the
photo cleaning project.

It was like people were... we found
a lot of photographs in the debris

and people were bringing in
photographs for us to clean.

But it was something
I became very passionate about.

It wasn't the most popular project

of all the different kinds
of the work you could do.

It wasn't the most popular one,
but it was like giving back

a piece of memory of people's
lives before everything was washed away.

And I'm a photographer,
so I understood the value of pictures.

But I never told any of the local people
what I was actually doing in Japan.

I didn't want my family's story
to interfere with their recovery.

But I told some of the volunteers,
and to my surprise,

I wasn't the only one there
with a connection to the atomic bombs.

One girl told me that she didn't
know exactly what he did,

but her grandfather was involved
in the Nagasaki mission too.

Her family has all these photographs that
he took and no one had ever seen before:

Of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki.

He must have been
on one of the survey planes.

Another girl told me that my grandfather
saved her grandfather's life.

Her grandfather
wasn't on his way to Japan.

He was already on Japan, mainland,

and he was scheduled to go
on to battle on August 7.

The bomb was dropped on August 6,
the battle was cancelled, and he lived.

And she knew that she
lived too because of it.

I don't know how many lives were saved
because of the dropping of atomic bomb,

or if there were any at all,

but she knows that her life was spared;
that was what she said.

And so she feels conflicted.

The next year, Sadako's nephew, Yuji,

brought me and the grandson of President
Truman, Clifton Daniel, to Japan.

Clifton was the first Truman
Family member to come to Japan,

and it was a huge deal for him to be here.

I got to be in the background
of this historic visit,

I got to witness and see all the meetings,

and be in the press conferences,
but it wasn't about me.

I kind of felt like Forrest Gump.

You know, just in the background.

But we met a total of 15, I think,
survivors, maybe he met more.

And they told us their stories,
and they asked us

to remember their stories,
and to tell them to the world.

I'm not coming here today
to argue the decision of the atomic bomb

or defend what happened.

I just don't want you
to forget what happened.

The day that we forget what happened
in Hiroshima, Nagasaki,

is the day we risk it happening again.

Survivors told us
what it was like for them.

On August 6,

it was a clear blue sky
in a hot sunny day.

They knew something was coming.

Hiroshima hadn't been bombed
like the other Japanese cities.

And they had narrow streets;

they were tearing down the houses
to make them wider to be escape routes.

They were using
13-year-olds, up to adults;

everybody was working
to make these routes wider.

But nobody could imagine what was coming.

At 8:15 am, people were setting up
for their day, just getting to work,

getting onto the street car,
getting off of the street car,

sitting in the class,
looking out the window.

And they saw a silver plane, a B29 bomber,
and they said it looked beautiful.

And they pointed up at it,

and then some people said
it flew in another direction.

And some people said they swear
they saw a black dot fall through the sky,

parachutes dropping what turned out
to be measuring equipment.

Some people didn't see anything.

They just saw a flash.

And when they woke up, no one remembered
how long they were knocked out for,

but Hiroshima was gone.

It was a sea of fire, death, destruction.

The roads were full of dead bodies and
dying people with their skin hanging off.

They were holding their arms
like this to avoid the pain.

The river... the rivers...
Hiroshima has a lot of rivers,

and they were all full of dead bodies.

You couldn't even see the water, but
people were drinking from them anyway,

because they needed the relief.

An 8-year-girl, she was 8 at that time...

Someone came up to her begging
for water, and she gave it to them.

He was blooded,
he died right in front of her.

The father told her that night,
'Don't give water to the burn victims',

and so she lied, and said she didn't.

So, for thirty years,
she said she kept it secret.

She wasn't burned by the atomic bombs,

but she carries
what she calls invisible scars.

A year later, I got to meet the family
of Tsutomu Yamaguchi.

He's the double survivor, they call him.

He was working in Hiroshima.

He was a ship designer.

He was scheduled to go home on August 7,
but the bomb dropped on August 6.

He barely escaped with his life.
He was severely burnt.

He made it home to Nagasaki.

Bandaged and injured,
he went to work on August 9.

He told his co-workers what happened.
Nobody believed him.

'How could one bomb
destroy an entire city?'

He was technician.
He should know better, they said.

And that's when the second bomb went off,

and he thought the mushroom clouds
were following him.

His family could have had a million
different responses to meeting me.

His daughter actually told me that,
when my grandfather came to Japan in 1985,

he angered a lot of the Hibakusha,

he didn't apologize for what he helped do,

he didn't feel any regret.

But he came to meet survivors,

and he came to plea to the world
that we learn how to get along

because we knew
that we could destroy everything.

However, his daughter said,
'We didn't bring you here to yell at you.

We don't want an apology anymore.
My father taught me how to be above that.

We have to come together.

We have to work together for peace.

It's our duty'.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi used to say:
'We are living in a world,

where we are listening to the loudest
and the most radical people'.

And we think that they are right.

World War II was the same way.

We have to listen to our hearts.

We know what's right.

Even if it doesn't sound
like anyone else agrees,

you know what is right.

And the truth can start out as a whisper,

but we must keep telling it.

The truth can transcend borders.

If we can imagine a world without war,

and a world without nuclear weapons,

then we can work together and achieve it.

Thank you.

(Applause)