Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…We fast forward to August 15th, 1945, the US, in the week prior, has just dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The reaction that Morita has, he writes this. This is literally the opening paragraph to the book, Made in Japan, "I was having lunch with my Navy colleagues when the incredible news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima arrived. The information was sketchy—we were not even told what kind of bomb had been dropped—but as a technical officer just out of college with a degree in physics, I understood what the bomb was and what it meant to Japan, and to me. The future had never been more uncertain—Japan had never lost a war—and only a young man could be optimistic. Yet I had confidence in myself and my future even then." Wow. There's also this fascinating thing where he sort of knows a secret. The next day after the bomb has been dropped when he hears about it and hears first-party accounts of it, he knows exactly what it is. I think, if I'm remembering right, he thought the US was working on an atomic bomb but was sort of like years behind where they were. Once he hears this report, he sort of knows a thing that the rest of the Japanese public doesn't, and so he sort of gets to decide, okay, how am I going to spend my next few days knowing what I know even though the government isn't sharing it widely yet? Yeah, there's a whole story that I didn't put in the notes here, but it's in the book. Everybody should go read the book. It's really, really great.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.