Izumi Hirano was 16 when the atomic bomb exploded a little more than a mile from his school in Hiroshima 65 years ago Friday.

Hirano, who was born on the Big Island but moved to Japan at age 4 with his family, knew it was a sunny day. "I heard big rains coming down," he recalled. "I thought, ‘Clear sky, how could the rain come down?’"

When he looked out the window, he saw a curtain of fire.

"I stand up, next thing I noticed, I was flat on the teacher’s desk in front," he said. The right side of Hirano’s face was full of glass and blood.

His story of survival on Aug. 6, 1945, only grew darker, but in retelling it Monday to college teachers from nine nations, the hope was that it would bring light to a World War II history the region shares but still views in disparate ways.

About 40 college teachers from the U.S. and overseas are meeting in Hawaii for a workshop titled "History and Commemoration: Legacies of the Pacific War."

The National Endowment for the Humanities, National Park Service, East-West Center and Pacific Historic Parks (which supports the USS Arizona Memorial, among other sites) are holding two of the weeklong teachers conferences.

One was held July 25-30, and the second runs through Friday.

The international flavor of the conference represents an evolution from workshops that began in 2004 for high school teachers, grew to include Japanese teachers and has a focus this year on not just the Pearl Harbor attack, but the wider war in the Pacific.

The college teacher mix this week includes 25 Americans and 15 educators from Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Australia, China, Japan and South Korea.

On Monday afternoon the group listened to the experiences of Hirano; Lily Takakura Hatanaka, who was incarcerated at Japanese internment camps in Arizona and California during World War II; and Miram Antibas and Ataji Balos, two Marshall Islanders who experienced the war in the Pacific.

"We want to have a more complex international dialogue involving people from a variety of countries where the (war) experience is often quite different," said Geoffrey White, an organizer of the workshops and chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawaii.

For other countries around the Pacific, the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was simply one point in a longer series of conflicts.

"We have Chinese in this program who will remind us that for them the war began in 1937," White said.

Indonesia had been a Dutch colony, and when the Dutch returned after the war, Indonesians continued their fight for independence, so they did not see the war ending in 1945, White said.

Hungdah Su, who teaches international history at National Taiwan University, said because of lingering World War II animosities in Asia, "such a workshop could not be held in any other Asian country—only America."

The workshop is a step toward reconciling histories, Su said.

"For me it’s very healthful for Asian countries and people," he said.

The group heard from Pearl Harbor survivors Sterling Cale and Everett Hyland, was scheduled to visit military sites in Hawaii, and met to discuss ways to share information.

Despite being incarcerated at Santa Anita racetrack in California and then Poston Relocation Center in the Arizona desert because she was Japanese American, Hatanaka said she had "a wonderful time."

"For me it was just so exciting," she said.

The then 16-year-old Hatanaka, who was born on Maui, was living in San Diego when she was taken to the camps in 1942 with her aunt, uncle and grandfather.

She remembered camp gardens, the determination of the older generations to survive and a man who meticulously built a raft and tried to float down a river to freedom, only to be caught by the FBI.

"The idea is to bring these multiple perspectives together so that we can understand how other countries are interpreting the Pacific war," said Daniel Martinez, chief historian at the USS Arizona Memorial, and an organizer of the workshops.