Actor Haruka Ayase will appear on the 80th anniversary of the end of the war special program "Why did you go to war? Haruka Ayase x news23" (TBS), which will be broadcast from 10 pm on August 14th. Ayase, who has been covering the war for the past 20 years on the program, will talk with the grandson of a doctor who visited the United States and was involved in the atomic bomb development project.
Ayase visited Los Alamos in New Mexico, the base of the Manhattan Project, a project to develop an atomic bomb. One doctor involved in the project sounded the alarm about the plan.
Despite this, why were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What did the doctor think when he visited Japan after the bombings and witnessed the horrific scenes of the victims suffering from radiation damage? Ayase talks with his grandson to get to the bottom of his thoughts. In addition, a gift that the doctor's grandson made to the Nagasaki association 80 years later is revealed.
Ayase, who also visited Los Angeles, explores why the myth of the atomic bomb that exists in the United States, that "the atomic bomb was necessary to end the war," was born. Ayase met a 98-year-old woman who lived in a town where many Japanese people lived at the time, and she talked about the atmosphere that Americans were surrounded by and how the clever manipulation of information at the time changed their minds.
The program also discovered a mysterious plane 70 meters below sea level in Kagoshima Bay and succeeded in taking a video of it. Using the latest technology, the plane was made into a 3D image, and as the investigation progressed, it became clear that the plane was a "tragic kamikaze plane."
Why did the "last kamikaze unit" take off after the Emperor's radio broadcast announcing the end of the war go on a kamikaze mission after the announcement? This dramatic story follows a young man who was one of the unit members and his girlfriend.
◇Comment from Haruka Ayase
I've been covering war-related topics for almost 20 years, but I haven't had many opportunities to hear from the American side until now. I realized once again that it's important to hear both sides' stories, rather than just one.
As I listen to the stories of those who experienced the war, the words that remain with me are "imagine" and "think." It may be a small thing, but I feel that such things are important every day. I am grateful once again to those who have shared their valuable testimonies with our generation, who have no experience of war.
