E.R. Murrow Award Excellence in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion - Disrupted (2026)

Disrupted

Excerpted from: 80 years ago, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan. Connecticut’s Shizuko Tomoda still feels the impact

Broadcast Date: 08/08/2025
Excellence in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

As a show about change and changemakers, spotlighting the ways that inequities shape our world is central to what we do on Disrupted. A lot of the inequities we discuss fit neatly into certain boxes, like race or gender. In the past year alone, we’ve covered topics like Black History Month and the ways COVID has impacted disability. But when the Disrupted team interviewed Dr. Shizuko Tomoda, we found ourselves in a conversation that was a bit more difficult to categorize.

Dr. Tomoda is the daughter of a survivor of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima. To hear her tell her mother’s story is painful, but it becomes even more painful when it’s paired with Dr. Tomoda’s own story, a story involving health challenges and a lifelong journey to try to understand her mother’s emotions and experiences.

Our hope, with this episode, was that it would help to diversify the perspectives in the media on the atomic bomb. So much of the media focus is on the power of the bomb, but it is too rare for us to hear the voices of the people who were actually directly impacted by it, let alone to hear about the multigenerational impact of the bomb.

Our team spent a lot of time looking for ways to spotlight the voices of Japanese people impacted by the bomb, so when one of our producers found, through her personal network, the daughter of a survivor who lived in Connecticut and was using her voice to spread awareness, we knew we had found the perfect guest. Inequity feels like too small a word to describe Dr. Tomoda’s experience, but I believe this episode offers a sense of how drastically survivors’ lives were changed, simply because of where they lived.

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