Development
According to Fumiyo Kōno's afterword, she was prompted to write Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms when her editor asked her for a Hiroshima story. She was initially reluctant because, while she was born in Hiroshima neither she nor anyone in her family was a survivor of the atomic bomb, and growing up she found the subject upsetting and had tried to avoid it ever since. She decided to tackle the subject because she felt it was "unnatural and irresponsible for me to consciously try to avoid the issue." Living in Tokyo, she had come to realize that people outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't know about the effects of the bomb, not because they were avoiding the subject but because it is never talked about, and so she attempted the story because "drawing something is better than drawing nothing at all."
Kōno described "Country of Cherry Blossoms" as "what I most needed to hear two years ago, when I still avoided anything to do with the atomic bomb."
Read more about this topic: Town Of Evening Calm, Country Of Cherry Blossoms
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
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