Name: I Went to Hiroshima in Japan and I Was Shocked
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T04:40:26.000Z
Duration: 6 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Present continuous

Because of a Hollywood movie, everyone is talking about nuclear weapons.

To-infinitive

So today, I'm going to take you to the only two places in the world where nuclear weapons were used.

Future simple

I am going to take you to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I landed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I immediately started crying.

On the 6th of August, 1945, at 8.16am, exactly when people were going to work, exactly on this spot, 500 meters up, here, a nuclear bomb dropped by the United States exploded in the air.

In less than one minute, the city was wiped out.

Nothing was left standing except for this building.

And the bomb did not discriminate. 70,000 people died, innocent people.

The same thing happened here in Nagasaki.

Three days later, another nuclear bomb was dropped, wiped out another 70,000 people and melted the whole city.

This is so gruesome that we don't even know how many people died.

An American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.

If I was Japanese today, and I'll be honest with you, I would hate America.

I would hate anything to do with Americans dropping a nuclear bomb twice is a little bit too much.

Even Oppenheimer himself, the guy who invented it, thinks the same.

Hiroshima was far more costly in life and suffering and inhumane than it needed to have been.

I went around Hiroshima and Nagasaki looking for people who hate America and I couldn't find any.

Do you hate America?  It's very difficult.

I hate the leaders at the time who decided to drop atomic bombs.

They don't hate because, according to them, and this is important, peace does not flow from hate.

That's why 77 years later, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fully rebuilt.

They have skyscrapers, public transportation, world-class infrastructure.

Japan became the third largest economy in the world.

In both cities, I saw so many American businesses, Starbucks and McDonald's opening stores.

I saw young kids learning English at school.

Without any hate for America or the past.

And in those two cities, the government built a museum to remember the past because it's important.

You would expect the museum to be called the War Museum, the Tragedy Museum, the Anger Museum.

We can't forget our past, but we should not continue the tragedy and the hate and the anger.

Inside this museum, I could not stop tearing up.

Joy at how far we have come in just one generation.

Today, the U.S. and Japan have the best relations ever.

President Obama came to Hiroshima to call for peace.

The United States and Japan forged not only an alliance, but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war.

Between Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, it feels like these conflicts will never end.

They lasted for decades and will go on for decades more.

But if there is one thing we can learn from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Japan, and the U.S., is that time heals.

Countries that used nuclear weapons no longer see a point in fighting each other.

As I ate in a McDonald's, talking to little Japanese kids and nuclear attack survivors in English, I was convinced.

But most importantly, we can build a world without any nuclear weapons.