On the bright, clear morning of August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, immediately killing 70,000 people, and injuring another 50,000 who soon died from their wounds. Hideko Tamura Snider was ten years old when the bomb destroyed her home in Hiroshima. Snider is the author of the new edition of One Sunny Day, an unflinching look at the horror and disillusionment in the aftermath of WWII.
Hideko Tamura Snider has been sharing her story and advocating for peace since 1979. She has spoken before university classes and community organizations across the United States and in Japan. While there are many accounts of the devastation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, One Sunny Day, charts a more personal pathway towards survival amidst the unending nature of grief:
“Every year when the days begin to stretch and the penetrating heat of summer rises to a scorching point, I am brought back to one sunny day in a faraway land. I was a young child waiting for my mother to come home. On that day, however, the sun and the earth melted together. My mother would not come home…”
What gives One Sunny Day its power is the book’s exploration of the loss of Hideko Tamura Snider’s mother. During a time period where little was known about the psychological wounds of the atomic bomb, Snider continued to fight for her life with an unmet desire to fix her panic attacks, nightmares, and the unbearable loneliness of surviving. Through academia she studied social work, moved across the ocean to the United States, prayed to a foreign God, sought refuge in relationships with men, but her grief followed. This book is perhaps Snider’s greatest testament to healing as she aims her pen toward her own suffering and writes with acute precision.
“It took nearly a lifetime before I could begin to share my story. It began as a chronicle for my children who never knew their grandparents or the home I once came from. It grew into an article published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and from that into a book.”
Today, Hideko Tamura Snider’s narrative exists as an artifact that continues to educate readers on the personal impact of nuclear warfare. This new edition includes an epilogue that covers Snider’s final act working as an anti-nuclear activist. In these last pages, Hideko Tamura Snider visits the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It is in the end, Snider’s deliberate meeting of her mother’s death again and again that transforms her grief like a well worn path into something familiar.
Even when the last victim of the atomic bomb has passed away, as long as we continue to tell the story, its memory will survive. In this way, we can keep the voices of our dead with us and carry them forward.
