How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
The bombing almost seemed a natural disaster—one that it had simply been her bad luck, her fate (which must be accepted) to suffer. (5.6)
According to Hersey's account, Mrs. Nakamura did not like to spend a lot of time dwelling on the larger meaning of the bomb or her status as a victim; in her view, it just was what it was, and she had to accept it. She was disinclined to think about the politics/global issues associated with the bomb drop.
Quote #8
About a year after Nakamura-san retired, she was invited by an organization called the Bereaved Families' Association to take a train trip with about a hundred other war widows to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, in Tokyo. […] The shrine was considered by many Japanese to be a focus of a still smoldering Japanese militarism, but Nakamura-san, who had never seen her husband's ashes and had held on to a belief that he would return to her someday, was oblivious to all that. She found the visit baffling. […] It was impossible for her to summon up a sense of her dead husband's presence, and she returned home in an uneasy state of mind. (5.25)
Just as she couldn't really get worked up about the politics surrounding atomic warfare, so Mrs. Nakamura didn't really seem able to rustle up the "Japanese militarism" that others who visited the shrine seemed to indulge in. She just ended up perplexed by the exercise of going there.
Quote #9
These thoughts led her to an opinion that was unconventional for a hibakusha: that too much attention was paid to the power of the A-bomb, and not enough to the evil of war. Her rather bitter opinion was that it was the more lightly affected hibakusha and power-hungry politicians who focused on the A-bomb, and that not enough thought was given to the fact that warfare had indiscriminately made victims of Japanese who had suffered atomic and incendiary bombings, Chinese civilians who had been attacked by the Japanese, reluctant young Japanese and American soldiers who were drafted to be killed or maimed, and, yes, Japanese prostitutes and their mixed-blood babies. (5.89)
Like Mrs. Nakamura, Miss Sasaki ultimately wasn't super interested in dwelling on her status as a victim of the bombing/war, but her experiences did seem to prompt her to think about war in general and its meaning/impact.