War’s Enduring Echoes: A Note from Robert Rand

It’s hard not to think about war these days, with Ukraine and the Middle East. It’s been said that only the dead can stop thinking about it; only the dead have seen the end of war. But for survivors of military conflicts, war can be everlasting: a body scarred for life; a mind filled with memories that can shape a postwar existence.

Tattered Kimonos in Japan examines the impact of one of history’s most consequential conflicts —World War II — on Japan’s war generation: the men and women who survived that struggle; who remembered what it was like and grappled with the consequences of those recollections; and who managed to carry those memories into the twenty-first century, where they crafted lives out of long-ago misfortune.

Figure 1. Hiroshima A-bomb survivor with kimono pattern burned into her skin by force of blast, at the Ujina Branch of the Hiroshima First Army Hospital. Photographed by Gonichi Kimura following the August 6, 1945, bombing. Courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Tattered Kimonos in Japan tells their stories, and in so doing presents what one reviewer called “a singular and vital anti-war statement that more than requires publication, it demands it.” Tattered Kimonos in Japan considers the character traits that enabled wartime survivors to thrive, and explains how Japan, a defeated empire, atoned for its wartime aggression.

Robert Rand has worked in journalism for more than three decades. He was senior editor of the weekend edition of NPR’s All Things Considered and has produced and reported stories and documentaries that have aired on NPR’s newsmagazines as well as other public radio platforms. Rand is also author of four other books, among them Tamerlane’s Children: Dispatches from Contemporary Uzbekistan; Comrade Lawyer: Inside Soviet Justice in an Era of Reform; and My Suburban Shtetl: A Novel About Life in a 20th Century Jewish-American Village.

“Robert Rand has woven a poignant story introducing unsung victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and managed to leave the politics and judgmentalism out. . .We are now 78 years past the end of that war, and it’s a good time to change the focus. Rand’s beautifully written new book provides that opportunity, reminding us that before and after, so many victims were ordinary people living normal lives.”

—Yoshihisa Komori is a veteran Japanese journalist and Washington correspondent. As a journalist, he also covered wars, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, and Afghanistan.