THE PEOPLE WHO SURVIVED HIROSHIMA
The world was stunned 70 years ago by the human stories behind the dropping of the first atomic bomb
NEXT Wednesday marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of a piece of journalism that has gone down in history as one of the most influential articles ever written.
The New Yorker magazine considered it such an important piece of work that it took the unprecedented step of devoting an entire issue to its 30,000 words. British newspapers were keen to run it too but at a time when newsprint was still rationed it was too long to be published and so the BBC stepped in.
It had the piece read out in four parts on four consecutive nights on the Third Programme and then by popular demand in one extended version on the Light Programme. Daily Express critic Nicholas Hallam described it as the most terrifying thing he had ever heard.
Called simply Hiroshima, the article reverberated around the world because, while it appeared in 1946 – a full year after the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan’s military capital – it told the story of what it felt to be under nuclear attack from the point of view of ordinary people for the first time.
The journalist who wrote the piece, John Hersey, concentrated not on the city’s shattered buildings but the human story behind the destruction through the experience of six survivors: a 20-yearold female clerk, a widowed mother, two clergymen – one of them a Westerner – and two doctors.
The opening paragraph gives a flavour of Hersey’s novelistic style: “At exactly 15 minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”
By exposing the full horror of radioactive fallout and giving names to faceless foes who had until that point been collectively known as “the yellow peril” it struck a chord with victor and vanquished alike.
That said, it was some time before it reached a Japanese readership as General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of occupying forces who effectively governed Japan until 1948, banned any reports on the consequences of the bombings.
Distribution of the relevant edition of The New Yorker and the book its article spawned was prohibited until 1949, when Hiroshima was finally translated into Japanese by the Rev Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto, one of Hersey’s six survivors. Hersey himself was 32 when he went to Japan to research his piece but as a decorated war correspondent and prize-winning novelist he was mature beyond his years.
AS THE BBC’s Caroline Raphael wrote this week: “If Hiroshima demonstrates anything as a piece of journalism it is the enduring power of storytelling. Hersey combined all his experience as a war correspondent with his skill as a novelist.
“It was a radical piece of journalism that gave a vital voice to those who only a year before had been mortal enemies. There in a cataclysmic landscape of living nightmares, of the half-dead, of burnt and seared bodies, of desperate attempts to care for the blasted survivors, of hot winds and a flattened city ravaged by fires we meet Miss Sasaki, the Rev Mr Tanimoto, Mrs Nakamura and her children, the Jesuit Father Kleinsorge and doctors Fujii and Sasaki.”
Justifying its decision to publish the piece the New Yorker said it did so “in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.”
It certainly caught the popular imagination. All 300,000 copies of the magazine immediately sold out and within two weeks second-hand copies of The New Yorker were changing hands for 120 times its cover price.
Such was the article’s global impact it was reprinted in many other publications the world over, except where newsprint was rationed.
Given the contribution that scientists had made to the creation of the bomb, certain members of the academic community were particularly disturbed by Hersey’s findings and physicist Albert Einstein decided to buy 1,000 copies of the magazine to send to fellow scientists. In the event he had to content himself with facsimiles.
The US Book of the Month Club gave a free special edition to all its subscribers because, in the words of its president: “We find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be more important at this moment to the human race.”
In the face of such a media frenzy and the high-profile support of the Nobel Prize-winning Einstein, the former US secretary for war Henry Stimson wrote a magazine article in reply. Entitled The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb, it amounted to a defiant justification in spite of the consequences.
A 1948 recording of the reading of Hiroshima remains in the BBC archives to this day. “The effect of the crisp English voices telling this harrowing story is startling,” writes Raphael. “The prose is revealed as rhythmic and often quietly poetic and ironic. One of the readers is the young actress Sheila Sim, newly married at the time to the actor Richard Attenborough.”
Hersey, who died in 1993, returned to Japan in 1985 to catch up with his interviewees on the 40th anniversary of the bombing. The result was The Aftermath, the story of what had happened to them in the intervening decades. Two of them had since died, one from radiation-related disease. macer hall is away