'A Dimly Burning Wick' ignites anti-war passions

A Beaverton researcher brings a Hiroshima bomb survivor’s memoir to English readers

By Shasta Kearns Moore

The Beaverton Valley Times, Oct 16, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Jaime Valdez / The Beaverton Valley Times

Pam Vergun translated a memoir of a Japanese woman who survived the Hiroshima bombing.

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Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Pamela Bea Wilson Vergun was sitting with a co-worker at a school in Japan’s Yamagata prefecture. The sun was shining and the two were remarking to each other on what a beautiful day it was in that rural part of the country.

“But you know,” Vergun remembers her friend, Sadako Okuda, saying somberly, “in other parts of the world, it’s not. There’s war and it’s terrible.”

Okuda was 30 years old when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, 37 miles from her home island of Osaki-shimo. Worried for her niece and nephew who were somewhere in the city, she took the ferry over and spent the next eight days wandering the streets to the point of exhaustion, shouting herself hoarse and encountering many people — maimed and on the brink of death — who terrified her.

What stood out to her most, though, was the many children she encountered and the extraordinary generosity, kindness and innocence they showed despite their painful, and often fatal, injuries.

Okuda, who is now 94, kept a diary of her experiences, which she later made into a book that was modestly distributed throughout Japan in 1978. But mostly, her experiences and her anti-war message were limited to those living in her mountain-top village where she taught home economics.

At least until now.

After years of work, Vergun — who now lives in the Bethany area — recently released the English translation of “A Dimly Burning Wick” to wide critical acclaim.

“This is an unusually valuable book because it depicts both the suffering and the resilience of people in Hiroshima,” said Dr. Robert Jay Lifton of Harvard Medical School, winner of the National Book Award in Psychiatry. “We learn that survivors bring special wisdom to the overall human struggle to confront nuclear weapons.”

“Like John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima,’ ‘A Dimly Burning Wick’ is a vivid reminder that the abolition of nuclear weapons is the most effective step toward human security,” said Martin J. Sherwin, professor at Tufts University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer.

The 189-page volume was illustrated with line drawings from Mia Nolting and includes an essay from Nobel Peace Prize nominee Sok-Hon Ham, as well as several pieces from Vergun, her husband, Robert, and others. The complimentary pieces add historical and medical facts to Okuda’s first-hand account, but also argues for the abolition of nuclear weapons.