Helen Keller Visits Japan

After World War II, Helen Keller and her companion Polly Thomson went to Europe and Asia to show support for war veterans abroad. This film footage is from their 1948 trip to Japan. They visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki to experience firsthand the aftermath of the only atomic bombs ever dropped. For more, visit www.afb.org/helenkeller.

[@pearatheodore3471]

This is amazing. Love you Helen Keller may your legacies go on and on eons to come

[@GustavoDB]

Beautiful. I wanted to see something with her and Takashi Nagai. He was very glad to meet her at that time

[@karinkopitskie6005]

Beautiful but incredibly ironic in light of the fact that Japan, with its post-World War II national Eugenics Law (which was in place for 48 years) force-sterilized approx. 25,000 people (mostly disabled people), to prevent them having children deemed "inferior". Children as young as 9 years old were forcibly sterilized under the deceptive guise of surgeries such as appendix surgery. And the government had the power to abstractly assign the surgeries.
It's very ironic, then, that the great Helen Keller was simultaneously so revered. Such a dichotomy!