Praise for...A Dimly Burning Wick—Memoir from the Ruins of Hiroshima

Praise for

A Dimly Burning Wick: Memoir from the Ruins of Hiroshima

“This memoir is a moving and powerful reminder that there are innocent people—not numbers or kill ratios—on the receiving end of nuclear weapons. Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, A Dimly Burning Wick is a vivid reminder that the abolition of nuclear weapons is the most effective step toward human security.”

Martin J. Sherwin, Pulitzer Prize winning biographer and Professor of English and American History at Tufts University, author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies

“What a powerful scholarly and moral statement! Here is a grim reminder that the U.S. was the first nation to deploy the atomic bomb as a weapon of mass destruction. The ghastly atomic attacks on Japan did not have to happen. In fact, General Douglas MacArthur stated that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was not a military necessity. Why, then, was this terrible new weapon used? Vergun's study offers answers, but also lets the victims of the atomic bombings speak for themselves. Told from the bottom-up and in their own words, their accounts of their "lived" experiences are vivid, detailed, and searing. Their memories can guide us in today's fearful world, bristling with nuclear weapons.”

Ronald Takaki, Historian and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Author of Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb and Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II

“For many people, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima brings to mind a towering mushroom cloud and Colonel Tibbets waving from the cockpit of the Enola Gay. Better that those images be replaced by some of the heart-wrenching scenes of human suffering readers will encounter in Sadako Okuda's memoir. One of the most valuable parts of the book is the supporting chapter by Dr. Pamela Vergun that asks us to consider how decisions like the one to obliterate Hiroshima are made--and why so many of us feel compelled to defend those decisions on moral grounds.

A very impressive book.”

Leonard S. Newman, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology and Area Director, Social Psychology Program, Syracuse University, Author of Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“The story of the children of Hiroshima in A Dimly Burning Wick is strikingly parallel to the story of the Bikini islanders who left their homeland sixty two years ago to allow the US to conduct its nuclear weapon tests. The nuclear tests devastated the islands and contaminated the islands with high level radioactive materials. The entire population has been severely affected by radiation-induced illnesses and many have since died. The US promised to clear their homeland but have not done so. In fact, the US has miserably failed to provide aide and support for years. The Bikini islanders are asking the US to provide fair compensation and justice to these nuclear victims. The story of the children of Hiroshima is indeed quite compelling and sad, very similar to the Bikini islanders.”

Senator Kessai Note, President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, 2000 to 2008

“Her voice of hope and expectation in the midst of despair helps us see the possibility of using Hiroshima as a more universal symbol, as an icon whose memory inspires an ambitious arms control agenda with the ultimate goal of abolishing nuclear weapons…. Hiroshima could become a symbol of globalization that would be at least as powerful as the Nike swoosh mark or the Golden Arches of McDonalds…. As she wanders through the terror of Hiroshima, Sadako Okuda asked why she should live. As we read her powerful account of what happened, we should all be grateful that she did.”

Paul Joseph, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program Tufts University, Author of Are Americans Becoming More Peaceful? and Peace Politics: The United States Between the Old and New World Orders, from “Remembering Hiroshima,” in A Dimly Burning Wick

“I have been to Hiroshima and have visited the horrible remains and relics in the museum. The feelings I experienced at that time, however, were no match for the moving emotions I experienced as I read this book. The true essence of what took place when the bomb was dropped is not adequately revealed by the relics and remains one finds in a museum. It is exposed through the eyes of the author that can capture its spirit, the heart that embraces it, and the gentle, soul-filled breath that cries or shares brief moments of happiness with those who were there. Through the eyes of Sadako Okuda, one can capture its spirit.”

Sok-Hon Ham, Nonviolence and Human Rights Advocate, Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, from the Foreword to the first Korean Edition of A Dimly Burning Wick

“[T]here is, flowing at the very bottom of the hell described in this book, a powerful wellspring of life… If all the peoples of the Earth… are made in God’s image, then what person would not cry when reading this book? Indeed, who would still see different races, countries, or religions after reading this?... The historic drama of Hiroshima shows how God lifts up the weak and shames the powerful.”

Hyung Kyoon Cho, Translator of the First Korean Edition, from his Afterword

“One of the most important moments of history was when Japan was bombed and World War II was ended. Never before have I read a book of what it was like to be a survivor in search of family members that hopefully had survived. What a story! Thank you, Mrs. Okuda, for sharing your experience with the world today. God loves you and so do I!”

Dr. Robert H. Schuller, Founding Pastor, Crystal Cathedral

“This book has brought back to me in vivid truth what August 6 meant to me as a child. On that day in 1946, the first anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I was not quite 13 years old and was preparing to become a Bar Mitzvah — one commanded by God to act as a mature and decent human being. I was a camper at a Jewish day camp in Baltimore, and editor of its mimeographed weekly newspaper. I wrote my first serious article for that mimeo paper, saying that obviously Hiroshima taught us that we must end war. All these years and failures later, I hope that A Dimly Burning Wick will help us bring that memory and that covenant to the foreground of our lives.

On the first and on the fiftieth anniversaries of the bomb, August 6 fell on the fast day in the Jewish calendar that commemorates the ancient destructions of the Temples in Jerusalem by the Babylonian and Roman empires. These days, like August 6, remind us that just as the sacred microcosm of the world, the Temple, was destroyed by arrogant military might of an arrogant empire, so too might the earth as a whole — our sacred macrocosm — be destroyed unless we learn to control our arrogant urges to domination and violence.”

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Director, The Shalom Center (www.shalomctr.org); Co-author, The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, and Muslims

“Historical accounts of war often strive to give a sense that destruction was necessary. In the case of World War II, the death tolls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the millions of other lives lost, are explained as unfortunate but necessary. A Dimly Burning Wick leads us to question that perspective, suggesting that the loss of life was not only tragic but unnecessary. As scholars such as Paul Joseph, Ronald Takaki, and Pam and Rob Vergun argue at the end of the book, the decision to bomb Hiroshima did not contribute to the war's end. As such, the catastrophic loss of life intimately outlined in A Dimly Burning Wick becomes all the more tragic.

Ann Hironaka, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, Author of Neverending Wars: The International Community, Weak States, and the Perpetuation of Civil War

“In reflecting on the damage humanity has done in the twentieth century, there are two higher purposes: to remind ourselves of the damage we are capable of inflicting and to celebrate the resilience of the survivor. Hiroshima will remain one of the darkest and most painful days in human history. A Dimly Burning Wick makes it possible to tell the story of this day to our children, without turning away from it. The book’s drawings are a powerful record of the pain. Inherently, A Dimly Burning Wick celebrates the resilience of our rising to a renewed understanding of our own accountability.”

Rabbi Gary Schoenberg, Gesher

“The illustrations by Mia Nolting are elegant and poignant — drawing the reader even further into the horror and beauty of the narrative.”

Martin French, Assistant Professor in Illustration and Chair of the Illustration Program, Pacific Northwest College of Art

“The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 resulted in the unspeakable loss of 210,000 lives; thousands more succumbed to radiation poisoning in the years that followed, and others were maimed for life. Just as heinous as the decision to cause such unfathomable pain and death was the sentiment in other countries that these actions were justifiable. Sadako Teiko Okuda lived right outside of Hiroshima when the bombs were deployed. She traveled for eight days in the ruins of Hiroshima in search of missing family members. A Dimly Burning Wick is Okuda’s haunting depiction of this journey and the suffering she encountered along the way. It aptly removes any arms-length historical justification of these events and brings the reader face-to-face with the physical and emotional anguish of war.

Okuda’s tale was published in Japanese in 1979, and was introduced to Korea in 1983. We owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Pamela B. Vergun for bringing Okuda’s words to us in English in 2008. Her skillful accounting of this story allows us to better understand the consequences of nuclear warfare. The author writes, “…I witnessed firsthand the cruelty and ugliness of war, as families were torn apart, children were orphaned, and human beings were reduced to shells of their former selves. In the wake of the bomb, human dignity had been shredded and I was just a helpless bystander.” The atrocities inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have retreated to the safety net of our blurred collective memory, neatly categorized as an event that happened long ago in a distant place. Yet it hasn’t been that long, and this wartime tool could be employed again.

A Dimly Burning Wick should be required reading in every school. It begs the audience to consider the innocents caught in the trajectory of war … it cries out for the elimination of barbaric methods to solve global differences … and in its noble prose, devoid of hatred yet brimming with sadness, it crystallizes the importance of peace.”

Jo-Ann Moss, Editor, Raving Dove Literary Journal

“For decades, Americans have been told that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a military necessity to reduce our casualties at the end of World War II. As Americans come to terms with the fact that the bombing was unnecessary, we must also confront the painful realization that the suffering of children like those encountered by Okuda was avoidable. Vergun’s translation of Okuda’s account of the experiences of defenseless children serves as a powerful reminder of the human misery imposed by a government intent on developing a weapon of annihilation. The horrors inflicted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki continued to play-out in the Marshall Islands, in communities downwind from testing sites in the United States, and in indigenous communities considered expendable by the U.S. Government. Okuda’s voice increases the volume of the growing chorus of protest against the continued presence of nuclear weapons.”

Holly M. Barker, M.A., Ph.D., Former Advisor to the Government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Guest Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Washington, Author of Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World

“A Critical Perspective on Nuclear Weapons.

Like many of the 20th Century's saddest and most violent legacies, the bombing of Hiroshima stands as a pivotal moment in time. For those of us too young to have been there, it can seem like a distant history, relegated to the pages of a textbook as the event that ended WWII in the Pacific.

But, like those other legacies of violence and inhumanity, it is something that we can not, we dare not, forget. The easiest way for these events to be remembered is through the stories of their effect on children. That is why A Dimly Burning Wick serves as a critical perspective on Hiroshima and the effects of nuclear weapons.

Pamela Vergun has created a sensitive and extraordinarily powerful translation of these absolutely critical stories. She has done this over time, with subtlety and grace. Were it not for the horrors described here, the text itself could be described as “beautiful.”

This is a remarkable book. It was difficult to read, but more difficult to put aside. It should be required reading in every course on the war in the Pacific. These stories sit alongside the children’s stories from the Holocaust; the stories of Nanking, Cambodia, and China’s cultural revolution; and all the other stories of the 20th century’s violence — as a profound reminder of what we have done to our world and what effect it has had on our children.

Ms. Vergun should be given our deep thanks for making these stories available to those of us without the benefit of Japanese language skills. Bravo!”

Steven Bilow, Board Member, American Jewish Committee – Oregon, Immediate Past President, Beit Haverim

“As the hibakusha generation begins to disappear, Sadako Okuda's memoir of Hiroshima at Ground Zero in the wake of the atomic bomb is a clarion call to remember the human cost of the final acts of the Pacific War. And the threat to humanity that resides both in the continued atomic arms race and the unbridled use of air power against civilian populations that has been a continuing legacy of that war.”

Mark Selden, Ph.D., Historian, Cornell University. Coordinator of Japan Focus, Coauthor of The Atomic Bomb: Voices From Hiroshima and Nagasaki

“To understand the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima, few things are more powerful than first-hand accounts. In the case of A Dimly Burning Wick, the overwhelming horror accompanies uplifting moments of hope, generosity, and caring that have the power to lead us further from nuclear weapons and war. All of us, I believe, have the opportunity and duty to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons [and I ask you to join] former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz [in calling] for a bold new vision: a world free of nuclear weapons.

As we move farther away in history from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is human nature to want to forget the horrific effects of the nuclear bombs dropped on those cities. This book brings the past directly back in view and puts human faces on the appalling deaths.

In this global age, we must recognize our interdependence if we are to survive. Young and old, we all hold the responsibility to bear witness to the voices of the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just as the children sought to keep the vulnerable flickering flames of the people they loved alight, so can we follow their example in protecting others and in doing so protect our earth and its invaluable resources. I am honored to write a foreword for this remarkable book. My hope for you is that reading this book will move you to help achieve one of the greatest civil rights goals imaginable, the abolition of nuclear weapons.”

Catherine Thomasson, MD, Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility, from her Foreword to A Dimly Burning Wick

Unauthorized distribution and copying strictly prohibited without the express written permission of Pam Vergun.

Website Creator: Pam Vergun

Illustrations by Mia Nolting; Web Contributor: Jim Wilson