As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide.
I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.
I did not want to be labelled 'the designer who survived the atomic bomb,' and therefore I have always avoided questions about Hiroshima.
I think the way to think about the impact of Hiroshima is to think about it as a sudden shift in the balance of power.
At first, Uniqlo was a casual chain on the back streets of Hiroshima. Then... we became a national brand in Japan. So, the next step is to become a global brand.
Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.
It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.
Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.
The 'will to peace' is the best answer that we can imagine to the 'will to war', which unfortunately seems as strong in this century as it was in the middle of the last.
'Hibakusha' is an animated docu-drama that Choz Belen and I are directing, and it will take you through the earliest memories of a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor named Kaz Suyeishi.
But when I went to Hiroshima and began to study or just listen to people's descriptions of their work, it was quite clear they were talking about death all the time, about people dying all around them, about their own fear of death.
I have two lovely sons and some good memories, but I've had a rather tumultuous personal life. It hasn't been dull; I've been the Hiroshima of love.
Really interesting genre films, especially monster movies, evoke the fears of the times intentionally. Our starting point was 'Godzilla' - the original movie was released less than 10 years after Hiroshima, and it's a classic in Japan.
My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.
Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It's not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it's madness.
It seemed like my professional life would take a more scientific route. I guess that plan started to become undone when, at the age of 17, I happened upon a screening of Alain Resnais' 'Hiroshima Mon Amour,' and it took my breath away.
Check your environment and be sure that it is supportive. Some environments do not support progress. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not fertile lands for a farmer’s dream seeds. Change location.
After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.
Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.
What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.
Japan learned from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the tragedy wrought by nuclear weapons must never be repeated and that humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.