Japan: Tale of Two Cities

Among all the landmarks of history, from Wittenberg or Waterloo to Lexington or West Berlin, none have burned more deeply into 20th century consciences than Hiroshima. With every U.S. or Soviet nuclear explosion, ban-the-Bomb demonstrators the world over chant the name of the first city to be hit by an atomic bomb. Hiroshima is visited by 2,000,000 tourists a year; its chilling museum of atomic horrors has been massively and masochistically documented in endless magazine and newspaper articles, TV features and movies. Seventeen years after the first atomic blast, the world has...

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