Do students know about the American internment of Japanese and Japanese American citizens after the bombing of Pearl Harbor? This excerpt is an occasion to discuss these events in the histor

Most students will not have learned much about America’s bombing of Hiroshima; this reading may inspire considerable emotion. Do students know about the American internment of Japanese and Japanese American citizens after the bombing of Pearl Harbor? This excerpt is an occasion to discuss these events in the history of World War II. How does Hachiya’s highly personal account help a reader for further education about the war? Hachiya’s account also reminds the reader of the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, 2001. Comparing the rawness and immediacy of Hachiya’s account to Don DeLillo’s composite essay on the collapse of the World Trade Center towers (“In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror, Loss, and Time in the Shadow of September,” p. 355) may make vivid to students how the framing of a detail shapes a reader’s sense of the event under description. It might be useful to focus on tone. Hachiya’s matter-of-fact prose style is not the simple answer to the question, “What is Hachiya’s tone?”; this is a piece of complex evidence that shows how the fractured nature of experience gets sorted out through the process of writing. If some of your students have lived through a disaster (an event whose size and duration were temporarily unknowable), please respond here about your immediate thoughts.