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:
“On fields all drenched with blood he made his record in war, abstained from lawless violence when left on the plantation, and received his freedom in peace with moderation. But he holds in this Republic the position of an alien race among a people impatient of a rival. And in the eyes of some it seems that no valor redeems him, no social advancement nor individual development wipes off the ban which clings to him.”
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