Hiroshima Bomb Money is a work of fiction but rooted in the reality of family stories. My wife’s family live in Hawaii but came to the US from Japan in the 19th Century. They did experience the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her father, who lived in Waikiki at the time, was woken by the bombing. He complained angrily, “Who’s making all that racket on a Sunday morning?”
At the end of the war, the family heard about the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—of great significant since the extended family lived in Hiroshima. Many were lost including Chiemi Tanigawa, maiden name of my wife’s Great Aunt. She did survive for a few weeks as she made her way back to the Akamatsu Compound just outside the city limits to make sure her two babies were alive. When she finally made it home and found her babies, she died. In the aftermath, her husband, Ito-san, dug up a bag of money buried in the garden before he left for China in the early days of the Fifteen Year War (the Japanese term for the war period from 1930 to 1945).
He found a grey mass of coins melted together because of the intense heat. The paper money and the bag itself were burned. That was surprising since the cache had been buried at least two feet underground.
The family decided to break the mass of melted coins into five pieces and give a share to family members—to three sisters and both of Chiemi’s sons. One of the sisters was my wife’s grandmother.
Years later, during a visit home from her job in Rochester, New York, my wife announced she was going to participate in an anti-war rally in New York City. Her grandmother gave her granddaughter her “bomb money”. She simply said, “Show them what they did to us.”
The bomb money became a family heirloom when we married.