75 years after the Hiroshima bomb, a couple’s art still devastates
Pika. It means glitter or flash in Japanese. It’s what survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima remember from exactly 75 years ago. The flash that popped in a blue cloudless morning sky. Followed immediately by a brilliant blue-white light that was far stronger and erased all shadows.
Survivors say they heard no sound.
Then the city of Hiroshima — homes, barracks, hospitals, factories, government offices, rice paddies, schools, street cars — simply vanished, along with Japanese soldiers, American prisoners of war, farmers, grandparents, schoolchildren.
An estimated 140,000 died. The shockwave leveled a two-mile radius and threw people into the air, bodies raining down in trees and bamboo thickets. Survivors in the rubble found themselves naked, their clothes blown away
