Wakeful, during my second night in Hiroshima, I recall more poignant details I learned in the last couple of days from Toshiko Tanaka, atomic-bomb survivor.  When she gave birth to her first daughter, Reiko, Toshiko’s husband arrived at the hospital looking pale and worried.  He counted Reiko’s fingers and toes and when he found that she was born without physical defects he said, ‘Thank you!’  Toshiko realised that, out of love, her husband had never said anything, but had always been secretly concerned about the possible after-effects of the atomic bombing.  In my play, Shigeko, suffering from radiation sickness, seriously contemplates whether she should have children, in case they too, like her, will have been ‘contaminated’ by the bomb.  The atomic bomb not only wreaked havoc on this two fateful days, August 6th and 9th, but spread its sinister tentacles down the generations. 

Eventually, day breaks and I realise it’s October 1st – a new month.  We now have only three more days in Japan.