This assignment is an opportunity for you to investigate an historical event from two different cultural perspectives. Everyone will research American and Japanese newspaper articles, videos, books, magazine articles, etc. on the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan (August 6th. & 9th., 1945) at the end of World War II. It will be fairly easy to research this event from an American point of view there is a lot of material on the event. However, material from the Japanese perspective may be more difficult to locate much of the good information may be written in Japanese. You are not required to interview anyone for this assignment, but if you have an opportunity to interview someone from Japan (preferably older than 50) you will probably gather some very rich information for your paper. Events occur in history, and cultures do not respond the samefor obvious reasons. But, if we never read about an event from another cultural perspective, we cannot truly understand how people experience and perceive an event. Understanding history from as many cultural perspectives as possible helps us to appreciate how many different cultural ways the same event is perceived- this may illuminate any ethnocentric ideas we are harboring about how/ why something happened. Your paper should include a historical perspective on the atomic bombing of these two cities, and then, according to your research, analyze and discuss how Japan and America viewed the event. Your paper should focus on how culture may or may not have influenced the way each country viewed the bombing.
