Fallout (7’)

Program Notes:

Both of my grandfathers fought for the US in World War II, and one was even at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed, so the 80th anniversaries of the war have been on my mind for the last several years. In 2024, when I was thinking about the coming anniversary of the end of the war, I thought about a story I read in elementary school. It was about a Japanese girl who was dying of leukemia, because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The story is heartrending because although she tries to make 1000 paper cranes so that her wish to live can come true, she dies. This story has stuck with me for the last 30 years and has been a reminder not only of the tragedies of those bombings but of the social, political, and emotional fallout that accompanied the nuclear fallout.