Nagasaki Japan

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.

FOR all the trouble he'd caused, Nagasaki gangster Tetsuya Shiroo had atoned by cutting off half a little finger and the tips of two others. And things were not looking up. The yakuza code calls for troublesome members to perform the joint-by-joint amputations when they upset the bosses. Shiroo was an old-style gangster. A man who believed in the rituals. But yakuza life was hard and getting harder for Shiroo. Everyone knew he had money troubles.

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.

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.

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."

FOR all the trouble he'd caused, Nagasaki gangster Tetsuya Shiroo had atoned by cutting off half a little finger and the tips of two others. And things were not looking up. The yakuza code calls for troublesome members to perform the joint-by-joint amputations when they upset the bosses. Shiroo was an old-style gangster. A man who believed in the rituals. But yakuza life was hard and getting harder for Shiroo. Everyone knew he had money troubles.

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.

South Korea is seeking $2.3 billion from Japan in reparations for Korean victims of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo reported in Seoul. The newspaper said that diplomatic talks are under way and that Tokyo is said to be ready to accommodate part of Seoul's request.

Television loves to lob talking heads at anniversaries. Well, not just any anniversaries, only those for events judged to be epic. And not just any of those anniversaries, either. Never three-year anniversaries, seven-year anniversaries or 11-year anniversaries, but always one-year anniversaries, multiples of 10-year anniversaries and also 25-year anniversaries. Why 25? A quarter of a century somehow seems more significant than, say, 26 years.

Cicadas hum furiously from the branches of a grove of cherry trees in a small, simple park that marks The Spot. About 1,800 feet overhead, on a hot morning like this one 44 summers ago, history visited Nagasaki with a horrific flash and a boom. The decades have passed, but Nagasaki still struggles to remember, to forget and to get on with life. Hypocenter Park is characteristic of the city's ambivalence about its past.

There was no shortage of inspiration Thursday when Susan Masuoka took an audience on the East Coast back in time to the dawn of the Nuclear Age. There was no shortage of help, either. Masuoka is a Los Angeles native who runs the main exhibit center at Tufts University near Boston. That's where her latest exhibition Thursday night began taking an unusual look at the lingering effects of the atomic bomb.

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."

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.

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.

Television loves to lob talking heads at anniversaries. Well, not just any anniversaries, only those for events judged to be epic. And not just any of those anniversaries, either. Never three-year anniversaries, seven-year anniversaries or 11-year anniversaries, but always one-year anniversaries, multiples of 10-year anniversaries and also 25-year anniversaries. Why 25? A quarter of a century somehow seems more significant than, say, 26 years.

Christine Dzida dedicated part of her summer vacation to the memory of youngsters her age who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 50 years ago. In summer Bible school classes at Huntington Beach's Saints Simon & Jude Catholic Church, the 12-year-old Costa Mesa youngster and 150 classmates practiced the Japanese art of origami, folding hundreds of pieces of paper into likenesses of the crane, a bird regarded in Japan as a symbol of health and prosperity.

Christine Dzida dedicated part of her summer vacation to the memory of youngsters her age who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 50 years ago. In summer Bible school classes at Huntington Beach's Saints Simon & Jude Catholic Church, the 12-year-old Costa Mesa youngster and 150 classmates practiced the Japanese art of origami, folding hundreds of pieces of paper into likenesses of the crane, a bird regarded in Japan as a symbol of health and prosperity.

There was no shortage of inspiration Thursday when Susan Masuoka took an audience on the East Coast back in time to the dawn of the Nuclear Age. There was no shortage of help, either. Masuoka is a Los Angeles native who runs the main exhibit center at Tufts University near Boston. That's where her latest exhibition Thursday night began taking an unusual look at the lingering effects of the atomic bomb.

News of the "tremendous, large bomb" that destroyed Hiroshima first reached her hometown in Japan over the radio. "We didn't know anything about atomic bombs at that time," recalls Tsuyuko (Dewie) Janzen of Mission Viejo. "They just said it was something they had never seen before." Janzen, then 17-year-old Tsuyuko Tarumoto, was home from college in Tokyo for the summer that August.

Underscoring a wide "perception gap" between Japan and the United States, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Wednesday sharply challenged the prevailing U.S. view that the nuclear attacks on their cities were necessary to end World War II. Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima called the attacks "one of two great crimes against humanity in the 20th Century, along with the Holocaust."