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Girls in Summer Dresses
NHK planned and produced a wide
range of programs to transmit A-bomb related experiences to future
generations, including animations.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, 220
students in the first year of the Dai-ichi Hiroshima Prefectural
Girls High School had been mobilized to help with the demolition
of buildings in the city. The A-bomb killed them all.
NHK Special, Girls
in Summer Dresses, is an adaptation by Makiko Uchidate
based on Mitsuko Ohno's idea and experience. Ms. Ohno was a second-year
student of the same school when she was exposed to the radiation.
This was a time of extreme shortages, and the girls had to unpick
their mother's old kimonos to remake them into summer uniforms.
This is the story of the summer dresses. The program combined
animation, documentary footage and diaries to portray their too
brief youth.
One summer
day just before the A-bomb anniversary of August 6, an old couple
visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum with a parcel, wrapped
up in cloth. They presented the parcel to an official there and
said: "We have treasured this for years as a keepsake of
our lost daughter. Now, we don't have many years to live. We would
like to place this in the care of the museum." Inside the
parcel was a badly burned but carefully folded summer dress.
The program about those high school
girls who had died in the A-bombing and the sorrow of their mothers
touched the hearts of young people of the same age across Japan.
* NHK Special
Girls in Summer Dresses: Hiroshima on August
6, 1945 (1988)
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Survey of 1968 (From the compilation, A-Bomb Victims of
Hiroshima)
Of 25,134 students mobilized to work in military factories
or demolish buildings in the city on August 6, 1945, 6,833
were killed.
- 16,947 university and upper
grade junior high school students had been mobilized to
work in 49 factories, including war plants.
- 8,187 first and second
year junior high school students (aged between 10 and
13) in six districts were mobilized to demolish buildings.
6,295 perished.
- The number of victims
in war plants was low because of their location in the
outskirts of the city.
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NHK Special Girls
in Summer Dresses: Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 (1988)
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End of the Cold-War: But the
Nuclear Powers Keep their Nuclear Weapons
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and East
and West Germany were reunified in 1990. The Soviet Union crumbled
in 1991. The end of the East-West conflict held out the possibility
of rapid progress in nuclear disarmament. The Doomsday Clock was
put back sharply to 17 minutes to nuclear war. But the nuclear
powers held on to their weapons. The United States conducted sub-critical
nuclear tests and pushed forward with nuclear development by computer
modeling.
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