{"id":37926,"date":"2025-07-31T22:47:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T22:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/37926\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T22:47:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T22:47:09","slug":"ghosts-of-hiroshima-book-excerpt-ahead-of-james-cameron-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/37926\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Ghosts Of Hiroshima’ Book Excerpt Ahead Of James Cameron Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEditor\u2019s note: While up to his eyeballs in Avatar sequels, James Cameron<\/a> made a deathbed promise to Tsutomu Yamaguchi (one of the survivors of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb blast) that he will tell the story onscreen<\/a> of those history-changing moments in Japan from the vantage point of the Japanese ravaged by the blasts that ended World War II.<\/p>\n

\n\tCameron and author Charles Pellegrino<\/a> gave Deadline permission for a glimpse at a nightmare, before the book hits stores August 5.<\/p>\n

\n\tCameron found a way to weave in a love story that turned Titanic into at one time the biggest-grossing film of all time. There are earnest and touching characters aplenty in Pellegrino\u2019s book, but this one plays out more like Schindler\u2019s List than anything else. \u201cNot since Titanic have I found a powerful, heartbreaking and inspiring real life story as found in Ghosts of Hiroshima<\/a> by Charles Pellegrino. This is an amazing book and a film I am excited to direct,\u201d Cameron says.<\/p>\n

\n\tRead the excerpt below.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u2014 Mike Fleming Jr.<\/p>\n

At Moment Zero, the most important thing in the world for eight-year-old Takashi Tanemori was a game of hide-and-seek that brought him indoors while his friends scurried after hiding places among the bushes and trees outside.
\u00a0
In an instant, Tanemori\u2019s classroom vanished in the purest white he had ever seen. Even with both hands closing reflexively over his eyes, he saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, like an X-ray photograph. And in that same moment, he was cocooned and saved from harm in a tiny\u00a0cave of wood and stone that formed around him near the outermost wall when the three-story schoolhouse compressed down like a big cardboard box to barely one story tall. Outside, beneath the blinding light, his friends appeared\u00a0to have been spirited away.\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Inside the school, history would record only one other child who lived, Mizuha Takama Kikuzaki. She was almost twelve years old on the day of the bomb.
\u00a0
Mizuha began to wonder how she came to be in this strange manifestation of hell.
\u00a0
The answer was all so painfully simple.
\u00a0
Defiance got me here.\u00a0
\u00a0
She and a great many other eighth grade girls had been evacuated to a \u201csummer camp.\u201d
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
In a forested compound beyond Hiroshima, most of Mizuha\u2019s fellow campers no longer had fathers, because the men were taken away to the Pacific War. Many of those fathers had ceased\u00a0sending letters home and were listed as \u201cmissing.\u201d\u00a0
\u00a0
The children hated being taken away from their mothers, and they\u2019d been more than merely turning cruel; they were being groomed specifically for savagery. Girls as young as nine and ten practiced with sharpened bamboo spears\u2014practiced at blocking and stabbing maneuvers until those actions became muscle memory. Soldiers told the children that they must prepare for a fight to the death because if the American\u2019s captured them, they would dissect the girls like animals, rape them, and eat them, in almost that order. (Almost.)
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
At night, the children were instructed to write letters home to their mothers in Hiroshima. Mizuha understood without being told that their letters would be read and \u201cfact-checked\u201d by the new \u201cteachers.\u201d Punishment would be swift and brutal if a soldier read anything indicating \u201cbad thinking.\u201d\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
\u201cDear Mother, I am enjoying life with my new friends and teachers,\u201d she lied. \u201cIt\u2019s a nice place. Please don\u2019t worry, because I\u2019ll study hard.\u201d She and her friend Yasuko would write the truth later: \u201cWar plays unfair tricks with fate; it cheapens human life to the level of a worm.\u201d
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Infested with the camp\u2019s fleas and lice, hungry and surrounded by lies, Mizuha made a prison break. If anyone thought to recapture her, there must have been too few people to spare for the chase. And so, with her mother\u2019s blessed Lady of Mercy in mind, Mizuha reached home in two days, bowed, and prayed her thanks: \u201cThank you, Mary, that I\u2019m in Hiroshima.\u201d
\u00a0
###
\u00a0
At Mining Camp 25, where British prisoners were being worked\u00a0and starved to the edge of death, it had become more widely spoken even\u00a0than rumors of Hitler\u2019s death that an airfield nearby was dedicated to the final\u00a0preparation of kamikaze planes. From a hilltop\u00a0at the mine, it was possible to observe the horror. The war really was devolving into the eastern Children\u2019s Crusade.
\u00a0
\u201cSuch was the shortage of trained airmen,\u201d 23 year-old POW John Baxter recorded, \u201cthat area schools were being scoured for new recruits\u2014schoolboys were being pressed into service as suicide pilots. And we became used to the daily procession of solemn-faced youths [in] black kimonos and with sweatbands on their foreheads, preceded by a Shinto priest and an air force officer on their final journey to the waiting aircraft.\u201d Baxter estimated the boys to be about age sixteen, but some were, in fact, as young as fourteen.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Some forty miles from the camp, beneath the target of the second atomic bomb,\u00a0a conscript named Yoshitomi Yasami was already assigned to die. The sixteen-year-old had been\u00a0working for weeks,\u00a0deep within a huge labyrinth of interconnected factory caverns and launch tunnels, well\u00a0hidden from Allied aerial reconnaissance. Yasumi handled tools and dies and lathes, producing precisely measured parts for one-way-mission aircraft. And most\u00a0chilling of all were the newly arrived aerial torpedoes called Ohka, a word meaning \u201ccherry blossom.\u201d
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Yasumi had been conscripted from the Imani Commercial School \u201cto work in great honor for the emperor.\u201d The latest generation of \u201ccherry blossom planes\u201d was advertised to the kids as fantastic rocket ships. The newer models would be catapult-launched from their hiding places, and they would be given extended range, to \u201cgreet\u201d the American ships before the enemy could come ashore.\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Those boys selected for training to fly the new Ohka designs were praised\u00a0as \u201cthunder gods.\u201d But being revered and granted access to great food in a time of shortages did not quench their apprehension. Certain bits of information had leaked out to the cavern kids. Yasumi learned that an Ohka pilot had to be of small stature, with a shoulder width of only fourteen inches so he could fit inside the rocket torpedo. Men had measured every new kid\u2019s shoulder width before he was conscripted and driven far from home to the tunnels. Yasumi missed his mother.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
On the day of the second atomic flash, confusing radio chatter about air raid planes would precede, only by a matter of minutes, the sudden loss of power within the maze. After the whole mountain danced and swayed, after people near a tunnel entrance were seared and mauled beyond hope of survival, even before Yasumi crawled outside, the boy would realize\u00a0This means I\u00a0get to live.\u00a0
\u00a0
###
\u00a0
More than twenty miles from Hiroshima\u2019s Ground Zero, defiant Mizuha\u2019s fellow inductees saw\u00a0the detonation that flattened everything around her. At Moment Zero: a stupendous lightning flash in the distant blue sky, and then \u201cfar between the mountains, what appeared to be a small round cloud.\u201d The spear-trained child Yasuko Kimura would write, \u201cThe little round cloud rose bigger and bigger, finally taking the shape of a mushroom. The mushroom\u2014very strange\u2014grew just like a slow-motion movie.\u201d
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Mizuha had returned to her old school and was permitted to rejoin her class. She was deep within the building when it compressed. Huge wooden beams crisscrossed and interlocked overhead and formed a protective tent around her.\u00a0The wood and rubble shielded Mizuha during the critical first thirty seconds of quantum machine-gun fire\u2014shielded her from gamma rays and volleys of neutron spray and even DNA-scrambling nuclei of iron and tungsten and fractured pieces of uranium from the bomb itself.\u00a0
\u00a0
More than ten miles away,\u00a0in the atomic strike plane, bits of strange new matter stopped and radiated inside the fillings of the\u00a0captain\u2019s teeth. He would recall that it tasted like lead melting in his mouth.\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
The water droplets condensing\u00a0in and around the rising cloud were swirling with newly created particles that would have terrified even the bomb\u2019s creators. And the radiating droplets returned to the streets as black rain, falling as horizontal gusts across Mizuha\u2019s neighborhood and inflicting upward of one-third the amount of secondary radiation exposure able to kill.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Mizuha burrowed and squeezed her way to the surface about the same time as the Tanemori boy, who discovered that\u00a0a few of his friends appeared still to be engaged in their game of hide-and-seek, ashed and frozen in place.
\u00a0
###
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
North, near the Misasa Bridge,\u00a0two-year-old Sadako Sasaki came to be sitting in a half-sunk fishing boat while her mother and the other adults tried to bail water out. Sadako\u2019s brother Masahiro, only four years old, tried to help. More than a dozen people, most of them showing signs of flash burns, were trying to climb into the boat. Masahiro reached out and pulled as hard as he could at a man\u2019s hand; but a commanding voice at the tiller ordered him to stop. \u201cYou\u2019ll swamp us if you bring any more people aboard. This is not a time for compassion. It will only get us all killed.\u201d The boy retreated from the gunwale and sat down hard against pieces of blast-damaged wood.\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
From the fishing boat-turned-lifeboat, barely visible through gusts of black rain, a whirlwind of fire rose higher than the city\u2019s tallest department store\u2014twenty, maybe thirty stories. Another of the fiery serpents was struggling to be born along the near shore. And another appeared alongside it. And another. And another. From both sides of the river, Masahiro\u2019s world was a gallery of impossible images. A two-story house with one side torn away had all its furnishings on display. Table settings were perfectly in place despite being completely aflame, and everything stayed intact until the entire structure leaned forward and tumbled into the water. Even when sheets of dark rain provided occasional shielding from the glare of the fires, the air remained astonishingly hot. Driven by thirst, Masahiro and his sister licked the filthy black rainwater from their lips. Its taste and smell were metallic. Yet the rain was soothingly fresh and cold\u00a0and no one aboard could\u00a0have imagined that it was dangerous. It seemed a wonder enough that they had survived the past few minutes at all.
\u00a0
###
\u00a0
In waste fields strung with cobwebs of downed electrical and phone lines, Mizuha recognized her father, searching through ruins near the school.\u00a0She ran toward\u00a0him with such joy that her campmate, Yasuko,\u00a0would one day include the event in a novel-turned-film\u2014White City Hiroshima\u2014in which Mizuha\u2019s own daughter (still many years from being born) would reenact\u00a0this\u00a0rare and fleeting moment of light in all the darkness.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Father, who had survived in a factory beyond the fires and the fallout, would have received no radiation injury at all had he not come into the zone of the black rains in search of his family and anyone else who might still be alive\u2014no injury at all had he not joined the machinists at a trolley garage and disembarked as a wandering rescuer into the regions of deepest and still lethally young radioactive debris\u2014again, again, again.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
There could never be a proper assessment of how many different species of chromosome-shredding isotopes he inhaled, ingested, or absorbed. With each trip into the hot\u00a0zone, radiation poisoning was targeting Mizuha\u2019s father, slaying him for his kindness, for his humanity.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Mizuha would tell future generations how the Atomic Bombing Survey physicians were always seeking her out for blood samples\u2014\u201cbut never offering medical care. Just candies.\u201d\u00a0In 1950, Mizuha knew only that her white blood cell counts continued to roller-coaster, mostly plunging down and staying down for long periods,\u00a0until finally a family doctor told Mizuha that she was terminal and\u00a0that medicine could do nothing to save her.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Defiance again.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
By then, Mizuha had enough knowledge to\u00a0navigate medical libraries with ease. She was resolved to face death along her own path, shifting toward what future generations would recognize as a vegetables-and-nuts-and-fruits-centered \u201cMediterranean diet,\u201d backed up with everything she could learn about Chinese herbal and root-extract medicines, buttressed with an indomitable will.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
In defiance of medical prophesy, Mizuha lived.\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
The doctor who prophesied her death\u2014well, he died.\u00a0 \u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
And still, the bomb\u2019s power to harm a family had been but fractionally wielded. Mizuha found love, married, then suffered four miscarriages and a stillbirth. Each time, she survived a crippling anemia \u201cby too frighteningly thin a margin.\u201d
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
And then, while monsoons and isotope decay returned Hiroshima gradually toward normal background radiation levels, while rockets shot to the moon and\u00a0Mizuha built a business that prospered,\u00a0she knew, finally, the hope and joy of a pregnancy that took root\u2014and which had progressed successfully through the first three months without degrading her blood. She assured her friends and family,\u00a0\u201cEverything will be all right.\u201d
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
The doctors were not so sure. Though the space age had arrived, in 1973 there were no such tools as high-resolution sonograms and genetic testing. According to prevailing opinion,\u00a0given her Hiroshima exposure, she had a 90 percent probability of delivering a significantly handicapped child. \u201cIf it survives,\u201d authorities said.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
This mathematical judgment was based almost entirely on what happened to first-trimester fetuses exposed directly to the bombs of August 1945. By 1973, the \u201c90 percent\u201d figure had become a self-perpetuating textbook dogma, based on supposition and fear rather than actual data.
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
No one in authority quite understood yet that almost all the alien-appearing fetuses in the Atomic Bombing Survey\u2019s embalming jars had been exposed during nature\u2019s crucial first trimester, when the genetic software that sequenced tissue layers into human beings happened to be most easily shaken up and shoved off course, to produce stillborn \u201cmonsters.\u201d\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Knowledge had been so slow to come (and acceptance of that knowledge generally slower) that among the exposed, who now called themselves\u00a0hibakusha, nature\u2019s self-correcting nucleic acid monitors were so vigilant that postwar second and third-generation children were proving the expected \u201cmonsters\u201d was just another bit of dogma.\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
\u201cOnly one dissenting doctor,\u201d said Shiho, the daughter fated to become the twelve-year-old\u00a0who would portray Mizuha in\u00a0White City Hiroshima, \u201conly this one dissenting doctor\u2014though no one knew what the outcome would be for me, and though everyone except my mother was very afraid of her refusal to abort\u2014this one doctor said to her, \u2018I know you. I see your kind soul, and if you\u2019re going to have a child with a disability, you will take care of and you will raise that kid.\u2019
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
Most of Mizuha\u2019s family had died from the black rain, and from the loss of peace and\u00a0sanity that\u00a0always came with wars. \u201cWars take everything,\u201d Shiho had said.\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
###
\u00a0
The history of civilization is written in humanity\u2019s perversion of nature. In 1945, Uranium-235 was the still-active remnant of supernovae and their colliding neutron-star corpses\u2014which gave our solar system life. Thinking creatures sought out the uranium, coaxed it to beget plutonium, and taught a dead star how to scream out against humanity\u2014twice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s note: While up to his eyeballs in Avatar sequels, James Cameron made a deathbed promise to Tsutomu…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37927,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,27687,75,27688,5961],"class_list":{"0":"post-37926","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-charles-pellegrino","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-ghosts-of-hiroshima","14":"tag-james-cameron"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}