Growing up in California during the 1970s, in a Japanese household a generation after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima , it was often hard to work out how I felt about the event that ended the second world war. Aside from my brother I was the only Japanese kid at my school, and fitting in was kind of important. At home my mother would sometimes talk about her grandmother who was killed in Hiroshima; she suffered in the summer heat for a month before expiring.

Even when I was aged nine or 10, Hiroshima was taught at school and debated both in the classroom and on the playground. Never once was I subject to ill feeling — as my parents were when they moved to the US as students in the war’s aftermath — but a question always floated in the air: what do you think America should have done? And more deeply, a question only once put to me out loud, by the father of my best friend when I was seven: are you American or are you Japanese?

At school I learnt that the atomic bombings probably shortened the war and prevented greater suffering on both sides. At home I learnt that my family had been touched intimately by one of history’s worst calamities. The way I have reached not an answer but a resolution to these contradictions is by listening to the actions of my forebears more than to their words.