"Lance or spear practice was a regular women's exercise to practice for the anticipated U.S. landing": A Japanese American on Hiroshima

If it were not for the Hiroshima and, yes, the Nagasaki bombing, my Japanese grandmother would have had to fight the American forces, an event for which she and the other women in her neighborhood were preparing

writes a Morehead City (North Carolina) reader to the Federalist Patriot.

Lance or spear practice was a regular women's exercise to practice for the anticipated U.S. landing. My uncle, who was disabled, had been sent to a mandatory training camp to practice with wooden bullets and makeshift weapons to do his civilian share in greeting American forces. Then the bomb was dropped and it was over. Those who recently protested the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings don't have a grip on the grim reality of invasion that both Americans AND Japanese were facing. When I first visited the Hiroshima museum, I, too, had been overwhelmed with pity, sorrow, and anger. This was before my family explained to me what the consequences would have been if those bombs had not been dropped.