Month: December 2020

Podcast – WW2 and Hiroshima

megumib

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today we will be talking about WW2 and the Hiroshima bombing. Or at least what I learned about them. In order to share my learning I made my next podcast episode about WW2 all in order to answer the driving question:

How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WW2?

This project was a series of ups and downs mainly because of how large scale the event was, and the delicacy needed in order to talk about WW2 as a subject. The first thing i needed was information. Ignorance may be bliss but knowledge is power. I decided to learn more about the Hiroshima bombing for 2 reasons. The first is that I am Japanese and I thought that I might be able to provide some insight into how it has a lasting effect until today. The second reason is that I have been to the Hiroshima bombing museum as well as the Gen Baku Dome pictured below.

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/775/

Source: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/775/

I think that I used this competency in the first milestone where we were researching what nationalism is and how to use in text citations. If I took anything away from this project it was how to use in text citations and how useful they are. I felt that I was able to show evidence that backed my claims because of the variety of sources I looked into. One thing I struggled with, with this milestone was putting my ideas together so that it didn’t sound like it was jumping from topic to topic and the reader wasn’t confused.

 

The second thing I needed was an interview, or a story. I did contact a couple of people but to no avail, and needed up using an oral story from the national museum of the Pacific war. Here I learned about a man named Kenneth Evans who served in the war. I also got a interview with Japanese teacher, who grew up in Hiroshima. This interview was really insightful into learning how the bombing effects people who live in the area and what people think about the effects.

I showed the use of this competency not as well as I could have in this project. I did manage to contact a teacher of mine who lived in Hiroshima which I thought was very cool. Adding the personal experiences from someone who lived the consequences and having them be a different nationality helped to elevate my podcast. I was disappointed that I couldn’t get a response and I failed to show my attempts by not cc or showing that evidence. Instead I used a clip from the memory project which helped to show veterans options on the tragedy.

 

I showed this competency when we were doing the literary discussions. I felt that I contributed to the conversation and brought a new perspective that was needed in the discussion. It was also a nice chance to see whether or not I took away the same things as the other students.

One thing that I really enjoyed about this project was learning about stories people wrote about war. One in particular called the “War Prayer” by Mark Twain. This short story was about the 2 sides of war. The honour that it can bring to your country and the devastation the fighting can bring.

In my podcast episode I focused a lot on the consequences of the Hiroshima bombing. I felt that focussing more on the after effects helps to bring to light how serious the situation was, especially since Hiroshima usually becomes an after thought when talking about the war because it was at the end. In that sense I felt that I was able to appropriately talk about the events leading up to the incident and both the direct and lasting consequences shown through the 2 interviews. My Japanese teacher talked about the lasting consequences to people today and why the incident is still relevant, and the immediate consequences through the audio from Kenneth Evans who talked about what he saw at Hiroshima.

Finally I recorded my podcast and published it. I published it to a site called anchor which automatically sends it to other platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. You can check out my podcast here.

Conclusion
This project was really an eye opener and helped me understand how tragic the war was. It also puts into perspective the fact that, even though there were so many deaths in the Hiroshima bombing it was still only one incident in the larger scale of the war. Hearing the bombing from different perspectives allows me to understand the diverse opinions and consensus on the topic. In conclusion my answer to the driving question would be; that there are emotional consequences that last within the Japanese people until today. Being able to remember these tragedies and learn from them so they are not repeated.