Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of genocide, anti-Aboriginal racism, and war crimes.

Author Richard Flanagan writes in first person about his visit in 2012 to the former site of the Ohama [Prisoner of War] Camp in Japan where his father was held as a prisoner during World War II and forced to serve as a “slave labourer” in an Ohama coal mine. Flanagan visits a local museum to find out more, but the woman who works there knows nothing about the use of enslaved peoples in the mines. Flanagan reflects that “it was as if it had never happened” (3).

Flanagan reflects on why people search for their beginnings. He thinks people are looking for “the truth of the why,” but there is no such thing, only the “why” itself (4).

Flanagan describes the moment on August 6, 1945 when US Major Thomas Ferebee dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. At that moment, Flanagan’s father was working in the coal mine, fearing death.