Isamu Shin was born in Fukuoka in 1936. He and his family went into Nagasaki to check on relatives about a week after the bombing, making them nyūshi hibakusha, or people who were exposed to radiation by entering Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the bombs had dropped. He describes the destruction in Nagasaki and the injuries his relatives suffered. He talks about his experiences after the war as a child in Nagasaki, where his family stayed, including how school life differed in the post-war era. He talks about how movies and songs helped to pique his interest in going to Hawaii. He moved to Yokohama to work as a cook in 1953 and then opened a restaurant there with his wife, whom he married in 1961. He moved to Hawaii in 1971 at the urging of his wife; a local restaurant sponsored his visa. He describes life in Hawaii, including his experiences working at a restaurant and his sense of the relative lack of discrimination he felt. He discusses how people rarely talked about being a hibakusha in the past and describes how he got his genbaku techō in 2005. He gives his opinion that it was better that the U.S. alone occupied Japan instead of splitting the country with the U.S.S.R. like Germany.
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