NAGASAKI ¨C Shohei Tsuiki, who survived the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945 at the age of 18, still remembers brief but unforgettable exchanges he had during World War II with a Dutch national detained by the former Japanese military.
In the summer of 1944, Tsuiki was a first-year student at a teacher training school in Nagasaki, and had been mobilized to work at a shipyard in the village of Koyagi, now part of the city of Nagasaki. One day, during a break, he came across a group of foreign men working at the same shipyard.
Contact with foreign nationals?was prohibited at the time. Even so, Tsuiki wanted to try out the English he had started learning. He asked one of the men whether he had a wife. The man, looking pleased, showed him a photograph of her.
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