Hiroshima (Hersey)

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Hiroshima (ISBN 0-679-72103-7) is the title of a magazine article written by Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey that appeared in The New Yorker in August 1946, exactly one year after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, at 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945. The article was soon made into a book. It described how the bombing affected the lives of six individuals:

Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto: a Methodist minister educated in the United States at Emory University;
Hatsuyo Nakamura: a war widow and seamstress, the mother of three young children;
Dr. Masakazu Fujii: a prosperous doctor and owner of a private hospital;
Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge (Makoto Takakura): a Jesuit priest stationed in the city;
Dr. Terufumi Sasaki: a young doctor at the Red Cross hospital; and
Toshiko Sasaki: A clerk at the East Asia Tin Works (no relation to Terufumi Sasaki).

Each account is followed by a brief statement describing how close each person was to the epicenter of the blast. The article consisted of four parts:

A Noiseless Flash: describing the moment of the blast;
The Fire: describing the devastation that the city experienced immediately after the blast, and the efforts of the hibakusha (survivors of the bombing) to reach safety in Asano Park;
Details Are Being Investigated: describing the rumors about what happened that were rampant throughout the city, while the hibakusha provide help and comfort to one another;
Panic Grass and Feverfew: describing the weeks after the attack, as the hibakusha attempt to rebuild their lives, while facing a slew of ailments and medical conditions that hamper their readjustment to a normal life.

Though Collier's Weekly had previously published an account of the bombing, the editors of the New Yorker recognized the impact that the article would have by providing a human face to the victims, and devoted the entire August edition to it. Although the four chapters were intended for serialization in four consecutive issues of the magazine, the editors decide to devote one entire issue only to it. There were no other articles and none of the magazine's signature cartoons. Readers, who had never before been exposed to the horrors of nuclear war from the perspective of the actual people who lived through it, were quick to pick up copies, and the edition sold out within just a few hours. The article was read in its entirety over the radio and discussed by newspapers. Shortly after it appeared, the Book-of-the-Month Club printed it as a book and distributed it free of charge to all of its members. Only in Japan was the distribution of the book discouraged by the American Occupation Government.

Modern editions of the book contain a final, fifth chapter, written forty years after the original article. In it, Hersey returned to Japan to discover what happened to the six people he originally interviewed in the ensuing years. Two of them, Masakazu Fujii and Wilhelm Kleinsorge, had already died, but he described how they lived in the shadow of the bombing, with the former trying to erase any memory of what had happened, and the latter suffering a series of ailments stemming from his exposure to radiation. Influenced by Father Kleinsorge, Toshiko Sasaki had become a nun, after caring for her three younger siblings. Kiyoshi Tanimoto had become the "celebrity" of the group, touring the United States to raise money to rebuild his church, help young girls injured in the blast with things such as plastic surgery, and establish the Hiroshima Peace Center. On one such visit, described in detail, he appeared on the popular television program This Is Your Life where he was placed in the uncomfortable position of meeting with Captain Robert Lewis, copilot of the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on the city.

Despite its popularity, the book, which appeared as the Cold War was gaining momentum, faced some criticism by people who either felt it was too sympathetic to the victims, thereby challenging the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, and by others who felt that Hersey's tone was too dry and journalistic. Nevertheless, the book is still popular today, and often cited by anti-nuclear weapons activists.