Theme of Japan with very long titles

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From My Grandmother's Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo. Norma Field.

Dr. Field is the daughter of an American soldier and a Japanese woman who were married for several years after WWII. This book is a series of thoughts, memories, and vignettes that range from stories told about her grandmother's childhood, to musings about art criticism and what it says about the Japanese nationalistic culture. She was raised in Japan but now lives in America, and teaches at the University of Chicago. The main narrative story (as much as there is one) is the story of the three women in her family, Field who only can visit in the summer, her mother who cares for the titular grandmother, and the grandmother herself, who has suffered from her second stroke and spends much of her time absorbed in her private self. "My grandmother is my mother's jewel" is a line that is repeated throughout.

There were times that I wished I was better versed in Japanese history and culture, but for the most part it was clear to someone who has mostly been exposed through anime and manga. It contains many interesting thoughts about Japan, but mostly it was one person thinking about her family. I very much enjoyed it, and would recommend it to anyone interested.

The Legacy of Hiroshima: its past, our future. Naomi Shohno. Translated by Tomoko Nakamura and adapted by Jeffrey Hunter. 

Naomi Shohno was away at college when her hometown, Hiroshima, was destroyed. Fortunately, her parents survived. Not all of her family did. She became a researcher in nuclear physics after graduation, and was involved in the research on the damage and aftereffects of the two atomic bombs dropped in Japan. This is not a fun book. It is, however, concise, well-written and translated, and informative. She does not shy from technical details, but skips over the ones that she knows will be inaccessible to laymen, and explains all concepts so that I, a liberal arts major, could understand them. She balances the facts of the bombs with the human stories very well. The consequences of those two bombs on humans lives are horrific. The weakest two chapters were the final two, in which she covers all of the testing done from 1945-1986 (which was when the book was published) and makes her appeal to get rid of all nuclear weapons. I highly suggest reading this book.