Hiroshima is a 1946 book by American author John Hersey. It tells the stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is regarded as one of the earliest examples of New Journalism, in which the story-telling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reporting. "Its story became a part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust," New Yorker essayist Roger Angell wrote in 1995. One of the first Western journalists to view the ruins of Hiroshima after the bombing, Hersey was commissioned by William Shawn of The New Yorker to write articles about the impact of a nuclear explosion by using witness accounts, a subject virtually untouched by journalists. The New Yorker article Hiroshima was an immediate best seller and was sold out at newsstands within hours. Many radio stations abroad did likewise, including the BBC in Britain, where newsprint rationing that continued after the war's end prevented its publication; Hersey would not permit editing of the piece to cut its length. The Book of the Month Club rushed a copy of the article into book format, which it sent to members as a free selection, saying "We find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be of more important at this moment to the human race."

Published a little more than a year after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it showed the American public a different interpretation of the Japanese from what had been previously described in the media. Hersey's work is often cited as one of the earliest examples of New Journalism in its melding of elements of non-fiction reportage with the pace and devices of the novel. Hersey's plain prose was praised by critics as a model of understated narrative. Hersey rarely gave interviews and abhorred going on anything resembling book tours, as his longtime editor Judith Jones recalled. "If ever there was a subject calculated to make a writer overwrought and a piece overwritten, it was the bombing of Hiroshima", wrote Hendrik Hertzberg; "yet Hersey's reporting was so meticulous, his sentences and paragraphs were so clear, calm and restrained, that the horror of the story he had to tell came through all the more chillingly."

The author said he adopted the plain style to suit the story he strove to tell. "The flat style was deliberate", Hersey said 40 years later, "and I still think I was right to adopt it. A high literary manner, or a show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator. I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader's experience would be as direct as possible."

The magazine later termed Hersey's account of the bombing "the most celebrated piece of journalism to come out of World War II."

It was also met with approval by The New Republic which said "Hersey's piece is certainly one of the great classics of the war". While the majority of the excerpts praised the article, Mary McCarthy said that "to have done the atomic bomb justice, Mr. Hersey would have had to interview the dead". It was quickly a book in the Book-of-the-Month Club; it was distributed for free because of the questions it raised about the humanity of the human race. Hiroshima was also read word for word on the radio by the American Broadcasting Company, amplifying its effects.

Publication in Japan

Although the US military government (headed by Douglas MacArthur) dissuaded publishers from bringing out the book in Japan, small numbers of copies were distributed; in January 1947 Hersey gave a reading in English in Tokyo. A Japanese translation of Hiroshima was first published in 1949 in Japan; it has not been out of print since. According to Gar Alperovitz in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, "Occupation authorities suppressed various accounts of the atomic bombings. A noteworthy instance involved the denial in later 1946 of a request by the Nippon Times to publish John Hersey's Hiroshima (in English)." MacArthur said in 1948 that despite numerous charges of censorship made against the censor's office by the US news media, Hiroshima was not banned in Japan.

Outline

The article begins on the morning of August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped, killing an estimated 135,000 people. The book begins with the following sentence:

Hersey introduces the six characters: two doctors, a Protestant minister, a widowed seamstress, a young female factory worker and a German Catholic priest. It describes their mornings before the bomb was dropped. Through the book, the lives of these six people overlap as they share similar experiences. Each chapter covers a time period from the morning of the bombing to one year later for each witness. An additional chapter covering the aftermath 40 years after the bombing was added in later editions.

The six characters are:

; Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto

Tanimoto is from the explosion. A pastor at Hiroshima Methodist Church, a small man in stature, "quick to talk, laugh and cry", weak yet fiery, cautious and thoughtful, he was educated in theology in the U.S. at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, speaks excellent English, obsessed with being spied on, Chairman of Neighborhood Association.

; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki is from the center of the explosion. He works as a 25-year-old surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital. He lives with his mother in Mukaihara, an idealist. Upset with poor health services, he practices medicine without a permit in communities lacking in quality health care. He is not related to Miss Toshiko Sasaki.

; Miss Toshiko Sasaki (Sister Dominique Sasaki)

Sasaki is from the center of the explosion. She is 20 years old and engaged to a soldier, as well as working as a "clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works" It put forward three issues that before had not been faced: the force of modern science, the bomb and the future of nuclear weapons. The effects of the radiation sickness have continued to be a concern for the world and the safety of nuclear power. These concerns have resurfaced since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor incident.

In his essay From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland: John Hersey's "Hiroshima", Patrick B. Sharp also saw Hiroshima as a counterpoint to "Yellow Peril" fiction like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, which were "narrated from the point of view of an 'everyman' who witnesses the invasion of his country first hand. As the narrators struggle to survive, we get to witness the horror of the attack through their eyes, and come to loathe the enemy aliens that have so cruelly and unjustly invaded their country." While in Yellow Peril fiction scientists and soldiers who defeat the invaders are portrayed as heroes, Hersey portrays Japanese and German clergymen, doctors, and other ordinary citizens as heroes. Still, relevant anthologies like Nihon no Genbaku Bungaku or The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath are confined solely to Japanese writers. In her 1953 short story Fireflies, writer Yōko Ōta, a representative of the Atomic Bomb Literature, repeatedly refers to Hersey's report and Dr. Sasaki, whom she calls Dr. X in her story, "the young doctor that John Hersey had written about in Hiroshima".

In 1999, the original article was ranked as the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century by a panel of experts assembled by New York University's journalism department.

The book was featured on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read in November 2020.

See also

  • Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb
  • List of books about nuclear issues

References

Further reading

  • Patrick B. Sharp, Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture discusses the profound influence of Hersey's story on how nuclear apocalypse was represented throughout the early Cold War.
  • Hiroshima, 1946, at the Internet Archive
  • Hiroshima first edition dust jacket at Opal Rare Books (Archived)
  • Hiroshima, the August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker
  • Hiroshima, repeat of the BBC Light Programme broadcast from August 6, 1948