Greta Jennison

13 October 2025

2 Comments:

• On page 170, the panel in the bottom left corner shows the tragic death of George’s aunt and cousin who did not survive the bombing of Hiroshima. In this part of the book, the Takei family received a letter from relatives in Japan signifying that George’s Grandmother and Grandfather were still alive, but weeks later they received another letter explaining that their aunt and cousin sadly were not. The panel shows a vague outline of bodies resting at the bottom of an empty canal, and the text explains that their bodies caught on fire and they jumped into the canal to extinguish the fire, but tragically perished anyways. This panel is extremely powerful and exposes the sad truth about the amount of Japanese civilians who were killed in the bombing of Hiroshima.
• On page 177, George is now all grown up and working as an actor in the musical “Fly Blackbird!” that ran for over a year and was hired to perform songs before civil rights rallies, most notably they performed before the speaker Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. George was extremely moved by his speech and had the opportunity to meet him afterwards. The art in the panel that shows George meeting MLK Jr stood out to me because of the way the artist highlighted them shaking hands. Most of the panel is pretty darkly shaded, but there is a circle of highlighted light around the touching hands of the two men, signifying how much this meant to George and how magical it was.

1 Extension:

The Japanese city of Hiroshima was bombed on August 6th, 1945 at approximately 8:15am. The atomic bomb nicknamed “little boy” was dropped by a b-29 bomber by the name of Enola Gay. Over 70,000 people were killed instantly and thousands more lives were claimed by the shock wave and firestorm that engulfed the city after the initial explosion. This was the first use of atomic weapons in wartime and it created great fear and devastation, but was invented as a threat to end all wars. I read a very interesting letter from a pilot of the B-29 bomber to his son, explaining the extreme significance of his mission. In the letter he explains the reasons for the attack, and that the end goal of the bombing is to end all war. One sentence in particular that stood out to me was when he talks about how we no longer need to use a bunch of planes in a bombing, for “A single plane…can wipe out a city”/ 

1 Question:

How quickly did the news spread to Japanese Americans about the bombing? Were Japanese Americans still treated as “the enemy” even after America attacked Japan?

https://visit.archives.gov/whats-on/explore-exhibits/atomic-bombing-hiroshima-and-nagasaki