Joan Darling

“You have to think about whether they’re really your friends,” Johnny’s dad says when Johnny talks to him about the grief his pals have been giving him lately. The other boys haven’t exactly tried to understand why Dad opened up his family’s home to Miyeko, a survivor of the Hiroshima Atomic bomb. Although she is only in America a short time to have surgery on her badly scarred face and arm, her visit reveals just how many ignorant and intolerant attitudes still exist 10 years after the war’s end. But Johnny, who also resents Miyeko at first, becomes one of her fiercest defenders after he makes the effort to look past her outward appearance. Only then can the scars begin to heal.