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Friday, August 6, 2010 – Daily News – 3B HONOLULU, Hawaii (MCT) — Izumi Hirano was 16 when the atomic bomb exploded a little more than a mile from his school in Hiroshima 65 years ago today. Hirano, who was born on the Big Island but moved to Japan at age 4 with his family, knew it was a sunny day. "I heard big rains coming down," he recalled. "I thought, 'Clear sky, how could the rain come down?'" When he looked out the win- dow, he saw a curtain of fire. "I stand up, next thing I noticed, I was flat on the teacher's desk in front," he said. The right side of Hirano's face was full of glass and blood. His story of survival on Aug. 6, 1945, only grew darker, but in retelling it Monday to college teachers from nine nations, the hope was that it would bring light to a World War II history the region shares but still views in disparate ways. About 40 college teachers from the U.S. and overseas are meeting in Hawaii for a workshop titled "History and Commemora- tion: Legacies of the Pacific War." The National Endowment for the Humanities, National Park Service, East-West Center and Pacific Historic Parks (which sup- ports the USS Arizona Memorial, among other sites) are holding two of the weeklong teachers conferences. One was held July 25-30, and the second runs through today. The international flavor of the conference represents an evolu- tion from workshops that began in 2004 for high school teachers, grew to include Japanese teachers and has a focus this year on not just the Pearl Harbor attack, but the wider war in the Pacific. The college teacher mix this week includes 25 Americans and 15 educators from Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Australia, China, Japan and South Korea. On Monday afternoon the group listened to the experiences of Hirano; Lily Takakura Hatana- ka, who was incarcerated at Japanese internment camps in Arizona and California during Pacific war seen from many sides in workshop 'Father of A-Bomb' warned against it World War II; and Miram Antibas and Ataji Balos, two Marshall Islanders who experienced the war in the Pacific. "We want to have a more com- plex international dialogue involving people from a variety of countries where the (war) experi- ence is often quite different," said Geoffrey White, an organizer of the workshops and chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawaii. For other countries around the Pacific, the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was simply one point in a longer series of con- flicts. "We have Chinese in this pro- gram who will remind us that for them the war began in 1937," White said. Indonesia had been a Dutch colony, and when the Dutch returned after the war, Indone- sians continued their fight for independence, so they did not see the war ending in 1945, White said. Hungdah Su, who teaches international history at National Taiwan University, said because of lingering World War II ani- mosities in Asia, "such a work- shop could not be held in any other Asian country--only Ameri- ca." The workshop is a step toward reconciling histories, Su said. "For me it's very healthful for Asian countries and people," he said. The group heard from Pearl Harbor survivors Sterling Cale and Everett Hyland, was sched- uled to visit military sites in Hawaii, and met to discuss ways to share information. Despite being incarcerated at Santa Anita racetrack in Califor- nia and then Poston Relocation Center in the Arizona desert because she was Japanese Ameri- can, Hatanaka said she had "a wonderful time." "For me it was just so excit- ing," she said. The then 16-year-old Hatana- ka, who was born on Maui, was living in San Diego when she was taken to the camps in 1942 with her aunt, uncle and grandfa- ther. She remembered camp gar- dens, the determination of the older generations to survive and a man who meticulously built a raft and tried to float down a river to freedom, only to be caught by the FBI. "The idea is to bring these multiple perspectives together so that we can understand how other countries are interpreting the Pacific war," said Daniel Mar- tinez, chief historian at the USS Arizona Memorial, and an orga- nizer of the workshops. home-delivered subscription to Convert your Daily News FAIRFAX, Va. (MCT) — During his 63 years (1904–67), J. Robert Oppenheimer engaged all the great transformative forces that roiled the 20th century: quantum physics, with its new understanding of the uni- verse; the communist movement, with its alternative vision of capital and labor; and the Manhattan Project, with its atomic weapon that immediately threatened the world's security, sanctity and sanity. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer sought to exorcise the demon he had strived so mightily to conceive. In this effort to prevent a nuclear arms race, he failed. The continued proliferation of nuclear weapons today links his nuclear world to ours, and Oppenheimer, "Father of the Atomic Bomb," to the president of the United States. On April 5, 2009, President Obama took up Oppenheimer's cause. Speaking in Prague, he noted, "The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War." Nuclear proliferation has escalated, nuclear testing has continued, terrorists are trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and the technology nec- essary to produce them is more widespread, he reported. "So today, I state clearly and with conviction, America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence." With that historic speech President Obama brought the central goal of Oppenheimer's postwar life full circle. In October 1945 he had told President Truman how dangerous nuclear weapons would be to human survival, but Truman countered with the advantages of our atomic monopoly. Oppenheimer's warnings that advantages would be short- lived while the threat would grow and last forever went unheeded. In 1949, in response to the first Soviet atomic test, nuclear weapons enthusiasts proposed a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb, a weapon thousands of times more powerful than atomic bombs. Oppen- heimer and his fellow scientists on the advisory committee to the Atom- ic Energy Commission unanimously opposed it as provocative, unnec- essary and genocidal. This was the great turning point in Oppenheimer's public career. The powerful men who had embraced nuclear weapons _ the Air Force and its supporters in Congress and elsewhere _ vowed to destroy him. The election of President Eisenhower and the witch-hunt environment known as McCarthyism put them in a position to do it. In truth, Oppenheimer was guilty of insufficient enthusiasm for nuclear weapons, which he viewed — in President Ronald Reagan's words — as "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on Earth and civilization." Three years before President Obama's Prague speech, a variant of this view was promoted by a most surprising quartet: former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Sen. Sam Nunn. On Jan. 4, 2007, these longtime supporters of the U.S. nuclear arsenal wrote in The Wall Street Journal arguing for "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons." "Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also a his- toric opportunity," they stated. "U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage — to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world." Oppenheimer would have gladly endorsed that letter for it says what he tried to tell President Truman, Congress and the military. But he did- n't need to — President Obama did it for him. Martin Sherwin is co-author of "American Prometheus:The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer." Private Party Classifieds August FREE ADS! No more checks to write, stamps to buy, trips to the Daily News office to pay your paper bill, or big payments in advance to get a lower rate Now you can …. SAVE over 17% compared to the regular subscription price! with a painless charge every 13 weeks to your Visa or Mastercard. 13 weeks Home Delivery – only $ Other time increments available also at discounted rates. 530 527-2151 Or use our new online Subscription Concierge service: www.redbluffdailynews.com Click on Subscription Services, upper right on the home page. 24! For more information or to convert or extend your subscription, call PAY … At no cost to you! Has the heat gotten to us? Maybe! 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