Stories from other parts of the diary also greatly affected me emotionally. An account that Dr. Hachiya recorded from a colleague related the story of four middle school students who huddled together in the street, and were so badly burned from the blast that they themselves knew that they would soon die. Later the colleague returned and found them in the same street, still huddled together, dead. Stories like this one made this diary the most informative and culturally eye-opening account of Hiroshima that I have ever read, and honestly, I was ashamed that I had never recognized the magnitude of this atrocity. Another assumption of mine that was dismissed upon this reading was the idea of a certain level of something like unconsciousness of pain on behalf of the victims. When Dr. Hachiya "matter-of-factly dislodged [the glass fragment from his neck] and studied it" (Atwan/McQuade 33) immediately after the pika, for some reason, my perception of the event changed drastically. What I had believed before was that, like mentioned above, people too close to the hypocenter immediately died, and all others suffered prolonged internal effects later in life, years after the bomb, like tumors or terminal diseases. Lacerations, people burned beyond recognition, and an entirely destroyed city didn't match my idea of the relatively calmer chaos where live people didn't generally suffer immediate pain and injury. Finally, the last forsaken misconception, and the most damaging to my idea of the American identity, was that I had been raised to believe that Japan as a whole had been warned of an attack, that civilians had been given a warning, possibly even one to evacuate. Reading the conservations and speculations that were recorded made me realize that this was blatantly untrue. No one knew what was coming. Though the aftermath shocked me, this simple misrepresentation made me question the supposed "objectivity" of the Western study of history.