In Blood, Flowers Bloom: A World War II Story of Valor and Forgiveness Across Generations

An intergenerational story of war, forgiveness, and memory told through stolen and returned battlefield souvenirs.

How do we remember war? How do we forgive? In Blood, Flowers Bloom illuminates one of the last untold stories of World War II, the common act of soldiers, sailors and Marines taking their enemy’s possessions after victory. This is the story of a single Japanese battle flag found among the belongings of a long-passed American WWII veteran, originally belonging to a Japanese soldier. In telling the story of this flag, and its journey from battle in the Philippines to a shed in upstate New York, award-winning writer, Samantha Bresnahan reveals the way in which objects represent generations of trauma, imperialism, and memory.

Weaving through time, In Blood, Flowers Bloom tells the overlapping stories of two families, that flag, and a decades-long quest: here we meet American Iwo Jima veteran Marty Connor, Japanese imperial Naval captain turned Buddhist monk Tsunezo Wachi, and Masataka Shiokawa, the resilient son of a Japanese soldier killed in battle at Okinawa. These three men could have lived and died as enemies--that was their historical prerogative. Instead, they banded together as uneasy allies, and then eventual friends, in their shared mission to return artifacts taken by American GIs to their rightful owners, giving Japanese families a new opportunity for closure and healing the wounds inflicted by loss of loved ones--both physically and spiritually.

Samantha Bresnahan is an Atlanta-based senior writer and copy editor for CNN International. She’s reported across the US and around the world producing global features from India, Brazil, Japan, Kuwait, Thailand, South Korea, Jamaica, Norway, England, Hong Kong, France, and the UAE. She is a 3-time News & Documentary Emmy award nominee, a Livingston Award finalist, and National Headliner Award-winner. In addition to her more than ten years of experience as a journalist, Bresnahan holds an MFA in Narrative Nonfiction from the University of Georgia.