Sumiko Yoshida was born in Hiroshima in 1936. Her family ran a grocery store there. She talks about her aunt who went to the U.S. before the war and was put into an internment camp, and she mentions that her aunt's family lost everything they had when they were sent to the camp and had to start over again from scratch; they ended up owning a nursery in California after the war. She was at school, about 1.5 kilometers from ground zero, when the bomb was dropped; she says that she was inside of a school building, so she was unharmed, but when she got home she found that her mother was badly burned, and her baby brother, grandmother, and aunt died shortly afterward. She talks about going to school after the bombing and receiving packages of food and other items from her aunt in the U.S. She later went to a mission school where she studied English with an American teacher, and she was able to meet her cousins from the U.S. when they came over to Japan during the Korean War, sparking her interest in coming to the U.S. She came to the U.S. in 1956 to study at the age of 20 with her uncle as the sponsor. She talks about meeting her husband during a visit to Disneyland. She mentions how she still has bad reactions to things that remind her of the bomb, such as the haunted house at Disneyland and war movies. She talks about returning to Japan in 1961 with her husband and daughter and getting her genbaku techō. She also speaks about her daughters and their educational and professional achievements as well as their marriages and children.
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