Bombings Japan

Kaz Suyeishi will never forget the quiet peace of that cloudless August morning in 1945. The 18-year-old was in the front garden of her Hiroshima home, chatting with a friend, when a gleam of silver in the sky caught her attention. "It looked like an angel," she said. "It was the most beautiful airplane. It looked like heaven and peace." The plane was the Enola Gay, dropping the world's first atomic bomb over the Japanese city. That morning, the B-29 released the weapon known as "Little Boy."

Air Force Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, 96, who as a combat photographer filmed the aftermath of the atomic bomb detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, died Wednesday of cancer at his home in Laguna Woods, his family said. Within weeks after the bombs were dropped in early August 1945, McGovern was assigned to take photographs. His still pictures and color film taken over nine months have been used in history books, newspaper articles, television and movies.

Fifty years ago today, the first of two atomic bombs was dropped on Japan. The Hiroshima bombing and the second, three days later at Nagasaki, brought World War II to an end. Atomic weapons--like the long bow, machine gun and submarine before them--forever changed the complexion of warfare. Half a century later, those bombs and their progeny continue to cast a shadow over our world--as the ultimate threat and the ultimate deterrent.

An explosion went off near the office of scholars who wrote a textbook that was approved for public schools earlier Tuesday despite criticism of its treatment of Japanese wartime atrocities. The blast occurred shortly before midnight in a parking lot next to the central Tokyo building where the nationalist scholars who wrote the "New History Textbook" work. It scorched a first-floor window frame, but nobody was injured, a police official said.

The Postal Service indicated Wednesday that it will bow to White House pressure and redesign a proposed "mushroom cloud" stamp that it had planned to issue next year to commemorate the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In a statement issued late Wednesday, the service said it is "mindful of the sensitivities on this issue" and is "taking into consideration the views of the Department of State and the White House, as well as other groups and individuals."

The National Atomic Museum at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., has decided not to sell souvenir earrings with tiny silver replicas of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan amid protest on the 54th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. "It just wasn't worth the bad feelings," museum director Jim Walther said. The earrings are shaped like "Little Boy," which was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and "Fat Man," which was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

Against a backdrop of violent protest by clandestine radicals opposing Japan's imperial system, Emperor Akihito declared to the world today his accession to the ancient Chrysanthemum Throne. Royalty, heads of state and special envoys from 158 nations assembled under strict rules of protocol at the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo to attend the stiff, 30-minute enthronement rite--the first such ceremony in 62 years.

Actor Martin Sheen was among 400 anti-nuclear protesters who rallied at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Monday, the 54th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. Sheen and 75 others were briefly detained. The group protested the lab's production of new plutonium pits, which is the core of a nuclear bomb. "We are the generation that brought the bomb in. We have got to be the generation that should take it out," Sheen said.

Next Sunday evening, exactly 50 years after an American plane dropped an atomic bomb over Japan, Showtime will premiere a three-hour movie called "Hiroshima." This is the third original movie about Hiroshima to appear on television in the past six years, an extraordinary number considering the grimness of the subject. What we call the "Hiroshima raw nerve" remains as sensitive as ever, and filmmakers--as well as television executives--are increasingly willing to address it.

The Japanese Parliament unanimously enacted a resolution Friday condemning China's nuclear testing and demanding that France retract its plans to conduct nuclear tests in the South Pacific. The action came two days before the 50th anniversary of America's dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World War II. It was part of an extraordinary five-day session of Parliament convened to elect officers for the upper house after an election of half its members.

Police in Tokyo blamed leftist guerrillas after a bomb exploded under the car of a mid-level Transportation Ministry official. The blast damaged the car and broke windows in the home of the Japanese official, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, 41, but no one was injured. Police say fragments of a detonator and wires found at the scene match those found in eight other guerrilla attacks against Transportation Ministry officials since 1997.

It has been an extraordinarily busy few days for Japanese police, who are investigating a series of unusual crimes that have further chipped away at this nation's image as a relative sanctuary from violence. A bomb filled with nails exploded Saturday in a park in Sapporo on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido. The blast injured 10 people at a festival, including a teenager who was critically wounded by a nail that pierced his chest.

At first, she thought it was a bad case of jet lag. Then her vision began to blur, and she got lost on the walk to the nearby post office. Her handwriting became childlike, and she was tormented by hallucinogenic nightmares. Within four months of her first headache, Takako Tani quite literally lost her mind to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, the human form of the fatal brain-wasting malady known as "mad cow" disease. It was 1996. She was 41.

Actor Martin Sheen was among 400 anti-nuclear protesters who rallied at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Monday, the 54th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. Sheen and 75 others were briefly detained. The group protested the lab's production of new plutonium pits, which is the core of a nuclear bomb. "We are the generation that brought the bomb in. We have got to be the generation that should take it out," Sheen said.

The National Atomic Museum at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., has decided not to sell souvenir earrings with tiny silver replicas of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan amid protest on the 54th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. "It just wasn't worth the bad feelings," museum director Jim Walther said. The earrings are shaped like "Little Boy," which was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and "Fat Man," which was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

Kaz Suyeishi will never forget the quiet peace of that cloudless August morning in 1945. The 18-year-old was in the front garden of her Hiroshima home, chatting with a friend, when a gleam of silver in the sky caught her attention. "It looked like an angel," she said. "It was the most beautiful airplane. It looked like heaven and peace." The plane was the Enola Gay, dropping the world's first atomic bomb over the Japanese city. That morning, the B-29 released the weapon known as "Little Boy."

Activists will create origami cranes Saturday to honor those hurt or killed when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The event, sponsored by the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the United Nations Assn. of the United States of America, will pay special tribute to Sadako Sasaki, who believed that if she created 1,000 cranes through origami, the ancient art of folding paper, she would recover from the bomb blasts.

Alarmed by a rocket attack on the New Tokyo International Airport at Narita days before the start of the Olympics, police sharply heightened surveillance at the airport and stepped up security at the Winter Games in Nagano. The attack Monday came as foreign athletes, officials and spectators were streaming through the airport on their way to the Games, which start Saturday. Police have no evidence so far that the rockets, which injured a worker, were linked to the Olympics.

It was 3:40 p.m. on Aug. 9, 1945, and POW Manuel Eneriz was being marched back to his camp 30 miles outside Nagasaki, Japan. Then he heard a noise like nothing he had ever heard before. "It was actually two explosions," Eneriz recalled this week. "Maybe one was an echo. We looked up and saw that huge mushroom shape." In the telling of it half a century later, he still cries. Today, on the 52nd anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, Eneriz will go about life as usual in his Camarillo home.