hiroshima human rights issue essay

Daughters of the Bomb: A Story of Hiroshima, Racism and Human Rights

...left her because of it. Kondo became an atheist. She went to college in the United States. With every anniversary, her father continued to speak about the bomb, living his commitment to help those that it hurt. Meanwhile, Kondo told herself that her father’s service-driven path would not be hers.

Kondo did not have to be a frontline activist for people to know that she hated the atomic bomb. They could sense that much without articulation. The survivors of the atomic bomb — known as “hibakusha” — often found themselves  shunned  in Japanese society, viewed as contagious or abnormal. Some  hid  their hibakusha status from their own family members, or pledged never to speak of the bomb, for fear of discrimination or alienation. Noble as her father’s activism was, Kondo told herself for a long time that his mission would not be hers to follow.

But there is no playbook for what happens to the little girl who realizes that little girls like her can be hated, maimed or murdered for who they are and where they are from. Parents cannot predict whether their child will grow up broken by such harsh truths. Or whether she will figure out a way to one day feel empowered to speak out.

When her father was the same age that Kondo is today, he tripped and tumbled to the ground. Mr. Tanimoto broke his chin and jaw. Suddenly, the man who had spent his whole life speaking up for Hiroshima survivors had lost his ability to talk at all. He never regained his words.

He died soon after. By then, Kondo’s outlook on his life’s mission had changed. She was one of the hibakusha, whose ranks grew thinner each year.

You can live a kind of middling existence for a long time. Not firmly outspoken on a side. “Reading the air” is a kind of social and  emotional intelligence , a way of silently tuning into other’s feelings. But it can also be about following a majority, reading the room to fit oneself ambiguously into a scene without disruption.

Kondo had lived in the U.S. during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, first at a junior college in New Jersey, and then as a student at American University in Washington, D.C. She learned about freedom protests for Black Americans, and she came to admire the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote: “The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody.”

Kondo realized her own calling when it came to social justice was to take on the legacy of Hiroshima. She decided she did not just want to see nuclear weapons controlled or curtailed. She wanted them abolished. And she knew that for as long as she still had her voice, she would continue to tell their story — Hiroshima’s story — to anyone who would listen. Today, Kondo has one unequivocal pursuit: a nuclear weapon–free world. “For the sake of the children,” she told me.

Chapter 3: The Purpose of Making Peace The second time I visited Hiroshima, in 2017, I brought my daughter. She was just 4, standing before the skeletal remains of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a structure that had been directly underneath the explosion yet somehow avoided total destruction. My daughter,...

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The U.S. hid Hiroshima’s human suffering. Then John Hersey went to Japan.

In the fall of 1945, a few months after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, New Yorker writer John Hersey went to lunch with his editor, the legendary William Shawn, to discuss story ideas.

One of them would change the world.

Hersey and Shawn suspected that the U.S. government’s wartime propaganda machine had covered up the human suffering of the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago this month. Pictures from Japan showed destroyed buildings and decimated neighborhoods, but little was known about the human toll, especially from radiation.

The U.S. government controlled access to the bomb sites. The War Department quietly asked American news outlets to limit information about nuclear aspects of the attacks. When reports of widespread suffering from radiation began to emerge from international journalists and Japanese officials, the American government downplayed it all as propaganda. One general even told Congress that dying from radiation was, in fact, “a very pleasant way to die.”

It was time, Hersey and Shawn decided, to find out the truth.

Hersey was 32. He had just won the Pulitzer Prize for his World War II novel “A Bell for Adano.” He traveled to Hiroshima and spent two weeks reporting the misery from the point of view of six survivors. His 30,000-word account, told in a harrowing narrative using the tools of a novelist, took up an entire issue of the New Yorker in August 1946, stirring outrage throughout the world.

The survivors, Hersey wrote , “still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition — a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next — that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see.”

He was an American child in Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb dropped

Radio hosts read the piece on air. Newspapers reprinted the story and ran editorials urging readers to read it. “The public has never been told exactly what took place at Hiroshima,” an editorial in the Bee, a Danville, Va., paper, said. “It is indeed a frightful chronicle — a story which burns its way into the soul, and which makes every human being, pagan or Christian cry out — ‘this must not happen again.’ ”

Hersey’s story, later published as a book , has been celebrated as a journalistic and historical masterpiece. A panel of journalists and critics ranked it first on a list of the top 100 works of journalism in the 20th century, two slots ahead of The Washington Post’s takedown of President Richard M. Nixon. Many historians and foreign policy experts say its impact was profound enough to help prevent future use of nuclear weapons.

“In 1946, Hersey’s story was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization,” Lesley M.M. Blume writes in her new book, “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.” “It has since helped motivate generations of activists and leaders to work to prevent nuclear war, which would likely end the brief human experiment on earth.”

In her book, Blume tells the story of how Hersey landed the story — a tale of wits, lucky breaks and hubris (the government’s, not the writer’s) that has largely gone untold over the years, mostly owing to Hersey’s desire to not talk publicly about his work and let the writing speak for itself.

David Von Drehle: Living in the shadow of the bomb

A few days before his story appeared in the New Yorker, Hersey quietly disappeared to Blowing Rock, N.C., to avoid the media. Even today, his children will not speak about their father’s work, honoring his wish that “no biography of him should be written,” according to biographer Jeremy Treglown, the author of “Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima.”

Hersey was the son of Protestant missionaries. Though tall and movie-star handsome, he was loath to take himself too seriously or attract much attention. Before his Hiroshima reporting, Hersey had written several accounts of war — fiction and nonfiction, including a New Yorker piece titled “Survivor” about the Japanese sinking of future president John F. Kennedy’s Navy patrol boat.

Those pieces made him, as Blume wrote , the perfect “Trojan Horse” to tell a story the U.S. military did not want told. By the time Hersey arrived in Hiroshima, the military had been successful, Blume argues, in burying and obfuscating the true power of atomic weapons. Reporters had either “toed the line” for the war effort or moved on to other stories.

“The government junkets, conferences, speeches, and suppressed reporting were having the desired effect: across the United States, protests and alarm had been subdued to a manageable murmur,” Blume wrote. “The idea of the atomic bomb as a reasonable mainstay weapon in the national arsenal — and a nuclear future in general — was becoming acceptable to the increasingly apathetic public.”

The U.S. government, which controlled access to Hiroshima during the American occupation, had in many ways been lulled into complacency.

When Hersey applied “for clearance to travel to Hiroshima,” Blume wrote, “there may have been some bemusement about why a reporter of his stature was asking to visit the site of the nearly year-old story. Yet the perception that the press corps was so subdued and distracted at this point — and that the story had been so successfully contained — probably worked to Hersey’s advantage.”

With permission in hand, Hersey sent word to Shawn that he was on his way. He was granted a 14-day stay. “Once there,” Blume wrote, “he would have to work fast.”

Luckily, he had a blueprint for his story in mind. A few months earlier, while sick with the flu, Hersey read Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” a tale of five strangers who die in a bridge collapse. In the novel, Wilder tells the individual stories of each character and what led them to the bridge that day.

“As Hersey read feverishly,” Blume wrote, “he realized that this would be an effective way to tackle Hiroshima as a subject,” further explaining that:

It was time for someone to describe the bomb in terms that the human mind could grasp. As Hersey finished The Bridge of San Luis Rey, he realized that emphasizing minutiae, not grandeur, was the way to drive the point home. Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war. But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people — mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks — going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck. Hersey would take readers into the victims’ kitchens, on their streetcar commutes, into their offices, back on that sunny summer morning of August 6, 1945, and show what befell them.

One of them was a Methodist minister named Kiyoshi Tanimoto.

He was away from home when the bomb was dropped. Hersey wrote :

Mr. Tanimoto, fearful for his family and church, at first ran toward them by the shortest route, along Koi Highway. He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns — of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatever.

Tanimoto and his wife had just had a baby eight months earlier. He raced through the city trying to get home. He found them alive. Hersey described the moment:

She told him that she had got home from her night in Ushida just in time for the explosion; she had been buried under the parsonage with the baby in her arms. She told how the wreckage had pressed down on her, how the baby had cried. She saw a chink of light, and by reaching up with a hand, she worked the hole bigger, bit by bit. After about half an hour, she heard the crackling noise of wood burning.

That baby grew up and became a peace activist. Her name is Koko Kondo. (In his story, Hersey mistakenly refers to her as a boy, which he later corrected when he signed her book 40 years later, scratching out the word “son” and replacing it with “daughter.”)

As the 75th anniversary approached, Kondo, who is now 75 and living not far from Hiroshima, was thinking about Hersey, his book and what the world learned from it. Of course, she was also thinking about how the bombing had transformed her own life. The radiation left her unable to have children. Today, in addition to advocating for peace around the world, Kondo works with Japanese orphans.

“I’m so glad John Hersey wrote that book because that is what happened,” Kondo said in an interview.

But she also worries that it has been forgotten. One piece of evidence in favor of that conclusion is that nuclear weapons still exist.

More countries want them.

“We have to say to the whole world that we cannot have these powerful weapons,” Kondo said. “If we use these weapons again, it will be the end of the whole world.”

Read more Retropolis:

Hiroshima’s Enola Gay carried 12 men, hope and the world’s deadliest weapon

A farm boy became a fearsome warrior at Iwo Jima. And he did it with a flamethrower.

Thousands of Japanese fought in a bloody World War II battle for the Aleutians. Only 28 survived.

This fighter pilot flew the last mission over Japan in World War II. Then he learned to love his enemy.

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Time to Confront the Ethics of Hiroshima

• Leo Maley III

Some Americans recall the event with shame and express their fervent hope that nuclear weapons never be used again. Others firmly believe that the use of atomic bombs saved American lives by ending the war prior to a bloody American invasion of Japan. More challenging to consider is whether it was an unjustifiable act in a fully justified war. August 6 marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. We Americans reflect on this event in sharply differing ways.

Those who believe the bomb's use was justified often label their opponents "pacifists," "1960s radicals," "bleeding-heart liberals" or "revisionists." These epithets merely delay the day when Americans will consider the import of having used nuclear weapons.

Our failure to grapple fully with the ethical questions stemming from our use of mass violence against civilians has meant that we unwittingly endorse an act that some would consider state terror. We rightly expect Germany and Japan to confront painful episodes from their participation in World War II. Now it's our turn.

Conservatives today are the natural candidates to take the lead in confronting our most painful episode from the war, because they were once among the most vocal critics of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Consider the following:

On August 8, 1945, two days after the bombing, former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote to a friend that "[t]he use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul."

Days later, David Lawrence, the conservative owner and editor of U.S. News (now U.S. News & World Report), argued that Japan's surrender had been inevitable without the atomic bomb. He added that justifications of "military necessity" will "never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations . . . did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children."

Just weeks after Japan's surrender, an article published in the conservative magazine Human Events contended that America's atomic destruction of Hiroshima might be morally "more shameful" and "more degrading" than Japan's "indefensible and infamous act of aggression" at Pearl Harbor.

Such scathing criticism on the part of leading American conservatives continued well after 1945. A 1947 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, at the time a leading conservative voice, claimed that President Truman and his advisers were guilty of "crimes against humanity" for "the utterly unnecessary killing of uncounted Japanese."

In 1948, Henry Luce, the conservative owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, stated that "[i]f, instead of our doctrine of 'unconditional surrender,' we had all along made our conditions clear, I have little doubt that the war with Japan would have ended soon without the bomb explosion which so jarred the Christian conscience."

A steady drumbeat of conservative criticism continued throughout the 1950s. A 1958 editorial in William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review took former President Truman to task for his then-current explanation of why he had decided to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The editors asked the question that "ought to haunt Harry Truman: 'Was it really necessary?'" Could a demonstration of the bomb and an ultimatum have ended the war? The editors challenged Truman to provide a satisfactory answer. Six weeks later the magazine published an article harshly critical of Truman's atomic bomb decision.

Two years later, David Lawrence informed his magazine's readers that itÊ was "not too late to confess our guilt and to ask God and all the world to forgive our error" of having used atomic weapons against civilians. As a 1959 National Review article matter-of-factly stated: "The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed."

But times change. In recent decades most American conservatives have become uncritical of America's use of atomic weapons and dismissive of anyone who holds a contrary view. Conservative publications now routinely defend Truman's atomic bomb decision. Critics of his decision, to quote from a representative National Review editorial from 1987, are "wrong, and profoundly offensive to all Americans and Japanese who died in that war, and to those Americans who still possess the ability to think."

Sixty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, we have an opportunity to grapple anew with the questions surrounding that event. American conservatives should renew their earlier, deeply held ethical criticism of the Hiroshima bombing instead of promoting the inaccurate but politically convenient view that criticism of the atomic bombing can only come from the left. Their response will not only tell us much about contemporary American conservatism; it will also determine whether we finally can have an honest debate about Hiroshima's destruction.

Uday Mohan, a writer for the History News Service, is a graduate student at American University who is researching and writing about Hiroshima and American culture. 

Leo Maley III, a writer for the History News Service, is a graduate students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he is researching and writing about Hiroshima and American culture.

‘Cataclysmic events’ in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, began ‘global push’ against nuclear weapons says Guterres, honouring victims

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Paying homage to those who perished as the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, as well as the many others whose lives were devastated in the years that followed, UN chief António Guterres on Tuesday underscored their “courage and moral leadership” in reminding the world of “the human cost of nuclear war”.

“The reaction to the cataclysmic events of 6 August 1945 was also the beginning of a global push to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again”, Izumi Nakamitsu, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, said on behalf of the UN Secretary-General, speaking at the Hiroshima Annual Peace Ceremony.

There is no stronger case for a world free of nuclear weapons than the stories of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings - some of whom I met last year in Japan.We are indebted to them for their courage in reminding us all about the human cost of nuclear war. pic.twitter.com/vZnh9th2xZ António Guterres, UN Secretary-General antonioguterres

The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, led by the survivors, called hibakusha in Japanese , have been at the forefront. 

“The world is indebted to them for their courage and moral leadership in reminding us all about the human cost of nuclear war”, said Ms. Nakamitsu. “Today, we are sadly witnessing a worsening international security environment”.

She elaborated that “tensions between the nuclear-armed States are rising” and the disarmament and arms-control institutions that have made the world a more secure place for decades, are being “called into question”.

Reiterating the core message that the hibakusha have travelled the world to spread over the decades, she underscored that “the only guarantee against the use of nuclear weapons is the total elimination of nuclear weapons”.

Ms. Nakamitsu recalled that nuclear disarmament was the subject of the very first General Assembly resolution back in 1946. “This objective underpins the new disarmament agenda that I put forward last year”, she stated, renewing her call on world leaders to “intensify our efforts towards that goal”.   Marking the 74 th anniversary of the first use of a nuclear weapon in war, Ms. Nakamitsu pointed out that nearly 14,000 nuclear warheads exist today, “many still on hair-trigger alert”.  

“Much work remains to be done to lessen and ultimately remove this peril”, she stressed.

In closing, the UN disarmament chief noted that “inspired by the resilient spirit of the people of Hiroshima”, she is “fully committed to working with the hibakusha and all others to realize our shared goal:  A world free of nuclear weapons”.

One little-known fact about when the United Statesis dropped the atomic bombs in 1945 is that 12 American Prisoners of War were being held close to the centre of the blast in Hiroshima at the time.  The film “Paper Lanterns” documents their stories and the extraordinary actions over the years that followed of one local humanitarian to honour their memory. Director Barry Frechette and producer Peter Grilli, recounted the incredible narrative to  UN News.

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The legacy of john hersey’s “hiroshima”.

Seventy-five years ago, journalist John Hersey’s article “Hiroshima” forever changed how Americans viewed the atomic attack on Japan.

On August 31, 1946, the editors of The New Yorker  announced that the most recent edition “will be devoted entirely to just one article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb.” Though President Harry S. Truman had ordered the use of two atomic bombs  on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a year earlier, the staff at The New Yorker  believed 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.”

Theirs was a weighty introduction to wartime reporter John Hersey’s four-chapter account of the wreckage of the atomic bomb, but such a warning was necessary for the stories of human suffering The New Yorker ’s readers would be exposed to.

Hersey was certainly not the first journalist to report on the aftermath of the bombs. Stories and newsreels provided details of the attacks: the numbers wounded and dead, the staggering estimated costs—numerically and culturally—of property lost, and some of the visual horrors. But Hersey’s account focused on the human toll of the bombs and the individual stories of six survivors of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima rather than statistics. 

View of Hiroshima after the bombing, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Hersey was both a respected reporter and a gifted novelist, two occupations that provided him with the skills and compassion necessary to write his extensive essay on Hiroshima. Born in Tientsin, China in 1914 to missionary parents, Hersey later returned to the states and graduated from Yale University in 1936. Shortly after, he began a career as a foreign correspondent for Time  and Life  magazines and covered current events in Asia, Italy, and the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1946. Hersey won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Bell For Adano  (a story of the Allied occupation of a town in Sicily) in 1944, and his talents for fiction inspired his later nonfiction writing. He spent three weeks in May of 1946 on assignment for The New Yorker  interviewing survivors of the atomic attacks and returned home where he began to write what would become “Hiroshima.”

Hersey was determined to present a real and raw image of the impact of the bomb to American readers. They could not depend on censored materials from the US Occupying Force in Japan to accurately present the wreckage of the atomic blast. Hersey’s graphic and gut-wrenching descriptions of the misery he encountered in Hiroshima offered what officials could not: the human cost of the bomb. He wanted the story of the victims he interviewed to speak for themselves, and to reconstruct in dramatic yet relatable detail their experiences. 

Portrait of John Hersey by Carl Van Vechten from 1958, courtesy of The Library of Congress.

Hersey organized his article around six survivors he met in Hiroshima. These were “ordinary” Japanese with families, friends, and jobs just like Americans. Miss Toshiko Sasaki was a 20 year old former clerk whose leg had been severely damaged by fallen debris during the attack and she was forced to wait for days for medical treatment. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was a pastor of a Methodist Church who appeared to be suffering from “radiation sickness,” a plight that befell another of Hersey’s interviewees, German-born Jesuit Priest Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge. Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura’s husband died while serving with the Japanese army, and she struggled to rebuild her life with her young children after the attack. Finally, two doctors—Masakazu Fujii and Terufumi Sasaki—were barely harmed but witnessed the death and destruction around them as they tended to the victims.

Each of the essay’s four chapters delves into the experiences of the six individuals before, during, and after the bombing, but it’s Hersey’s unembellished language that makes his writing so haunting. Unvarnished descriptions of “pus oozing” from wounds and the stench of rotting flesh are found throughout all of the survivors’ stories. Mr. Tanimoto recounted his search for victims and encountering several naked men and women with “great burns…yellow at first, then red and swollen with skin sloughed off and finally in the evening suppurated and smelly.” Tanimoto—for all of the chaos that surrounded him—recalled that “the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience.” 

“The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke.” 

John Hershey 

At the same time, Hersey also describes the prevalence of radiation sickness amongst the victims. Many who had suffered no physical injuries, including Mrs. Nakamura, reported feeling nauseated long after the attack. Father Kleinsorge “complained that the bomb had upset his digestion and given him abdominal pains” and his white blood count was elevated to seven times the normal level while he consistently ran a 104 degree temperature. Doctors encountered many instances of what would become known as radiation poisoning but often assured their patients that they would “be out of the hospital in two weeks.” Meanwhile, they told families, “All these people will die—you’ll see. They go along for a couple of weeks and then they die.”

Hersey’s interviews also highlighted the inconceivable impact of the nuclear blast. Americans may have believed that such a powerful explosion would be deafening, but the interviewees offered a different take. More than a sound, most of the interviewees described blinding light at the moment of the attack. Dr. Terufumi Sasaki remembered the light of the bomb “reflected, like a gigantic photographic flash,” through an open window while Father Kleinsorge later realized that the “terrible flash” had “reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth.” Hersey’s title of the first chapter is, in fact, “A Noiseless Flash.”

The attack also left a bizarre mark on the landscape. While buildings were reduced to rubble, the power of the bomb “had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them.” Miss Sasaki was surprised upon her return to Hiroshima in September by the “blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green” plants that grew over the destruction and the day lilies that blossomed from the heaps of debris. Others remembered eating pumpkins and potatoes that were perfectly roasted in the ground by the fantastic heat and energy of the bomb.

With its raw descriptions of the terror and destruction faced by the residents of Hiroshima, Hersey’s article broke records for The New Yorker  and became the first human account of the attack for most Americans. All 300,000 editions of The New Yorker  sold out almost immediately. The success of the article resulted in a reprinted book edition in November that continues to be read by many around the world. Meanwhile, Hersey remained relatively removed from his work, refusing most interviews on the book and choosing instead to let the work speak for itself. 

Decades later, his six interviewees remain a human connection to the attacks and the deep, philosophical questions they raised. “A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors,” Hersey said, leaving them to “still wonder why they lived when so many others died,” or “too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of the atomic power which…no country except the United States, with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an important wartime gamble, could possibly have developed.”

This article is part of a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II made possible by the Department of Defense.

Stephanie Hinnershitz, PhD

Stephanie Hinnershitz is a historian of twentieth century US history with a focus on the Home Front and civil-military relations during World War II.

From Hiroshima to Human Extinction: Norman Cousins and the Atomic Age

In 1945 the American intellectual, Norman Cousins, was one of the first to raise terrifying questions for humanity about the successful splitting of the atom.

The Most Fearsome Sight: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay  dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World with Author Lesley Blume

This presentation of FALLOUT , which premiered on the Museum’s Facebook page, recounts how John Hersey got the story that no other journalist could—and how he subsequently played a role in ensuring that no nuclear attack has happened since, possibly saving millions of lives.

Should Atomic Bombs Never Be Used as a Weapon?

From the Manhattan Project to Hiroshima and atomic diplomacy.

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D-Day Doctrine: Six Elements for a Successful Landing

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'At Last We Have Come to D-Day'

In her June 7, 1944, newspaper column series My Day , First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reflected on the news of the D-Day landings in Normandy and the long path ahead to victory in Europe.

A Long Thin Line of Personal Anguish

This column is the last of three D-Day columns written by war correspondent Ernie Pyle describing the Allied invasion of Normandy. 

Planning for D-Day: Preparing Operation Overlord

Despite their early agreement on a strategy focused on defeating “Germany First,” the US and British Allies engaged in a lengthy and divisive debate over how exactly to conduct this strategy before they finally settled on a plan for Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

'The Horrible Waste of War': The Wreckage after D-Day

This column is the second of three D-Day columns written by war correspondent Ernie Pyle describing the Allied invasion of Normandy. 

Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches on D-Day

The British landing area lay between Port-en-Bessin and Ouistreham where they would link up with 6th British Airborne Division along the Orne River, after their landing to protect the eastern flank of the Allied lodgment.  

'A Pure Miracle': The D-Day Invasion of Normandy

This column is the first of three D-Day columns written by war correspondent Ernie Pyle describing the Allied invasion of Normandy. 

If the US and its western Allies wanted to win this war as rapidly as possible, they couldn’t sit around and wait: not for a naval blockade, or for strategic bombing to work, or for the Soviets.

75th Anniversary of Hiroshima & Nagasaki Highlights Campaign For No More Nuclear Weapons

“Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.” “Our moral imperative is to work with all our powers for that day when the children of the world grow up without the fear of nuclear war.”    Ronald Reagan

On August 6th, 1945, during WWII, the first atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima by an American B-29 bomber.

This bomb led to the death of an estimated 80,000 people, in addition to the people who continued to suffer from the effects of radiation. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. It was estimated that 40,000 people lost their lives. A number of survivors and their families continue to suffer to this day, both physically and psychologically. The prominent activist survivors, known as the hibakusha, continue to plea for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The hibakusha had a role in the establishment and the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which was adopted in 2017.

Here is a video from The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). It depicts S etsuko Thurlow, a hibakusha and lifelong activist for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

When and How It All Started?

Two important facts:.

First, The Manhattan Project ; a project that began when a group of scientists in America, many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe, conducted research in nuclear weaponry. It is interesting that in 1940, the U.S. government-funded the U.S. atomic development program, which was overseen by the Office of Scientific Research and Development as well as the War Department. The scientists continued to produce nuclear materials in pursuit of an atomic bomb. These nuclear materials were sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team worked to produce a functioning atomic bomb. This is what allowed the Manhattan Project to complete its first successful test. On July 16th, 1945 the Trinity test took place at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Secondly,  in regards to the decision to use atomic bombs in Japan. The attack on Japan was led by General Douglas MacArthur and other commanders. In the early stages of the war, they considered a typical invasion strategy. MacArthur estimated that a traditional invasion of Japan would end with about 1 million U.S. soldier casualties. Despite moral reservations from the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists, Truman decided to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. This is what allowed the U.S. to achieve victory in the Pacific War.

The Brutal & Inhumane Violation of Human Rights at Hiroshima & Nagasaki

The initial number of deaths was estimated to be around 120,000 people. This is an explicit violation of the right to life, especially when these targets were predominantly civilian. Atomic weaponry cannot be used again as it would violate the new convention and declaration that relates to human rights, especially the ones that were adopted after the end of WWII. Using atomic bombs is now a violation of Article 3 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights , which states, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person.” (p 3, 1948). Additionally, the atomic bomb violates A rticle 6.1 of the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights : “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life” (p 4, 1966).

Furthermore, the atomic bomb violates the Law of War . Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, codified the Law of War into International Humanitarian Law in 1864. This process led to the establishment of the first Geneva Convention, which is an international treaty to care for civilians who are injured in war. This was followed by the establishment of four other treaties in 1948 after WWII. These four treaties established the Geneva Convention and expanded the law and rules of war that were codified.

The Law of War has many important principles. Humanity is a key principle. According to The Department of Defense of The Law of War Manual : “Humanity may be defined as the principle that forbids the infliction of suffering, injury, or destruction unnecessary to accomplish a legitimate military purpose. Humanity animates certain law of war rules, including: protections for the civilian population and civilian objects; prohibitions on weapons that are calculated to cause superfluous injury; and prohibitions on weapons that are inherently indiscriminate.” (p 58, 2015).

Sunao Tsuboi, one of the “hibakusha,” or survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, is pictured here 60 years afterwards. New York City, April 29th, 2005. He was a 20-year-old university student when the city of Hiroshima was bombed by Allied forces on August 6th, 1945. He still suffers the from the effects of radiation. MICHAEL BRENNAN/GETTY IMAGES Courtest of Al Jazeera.  

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Home Numéros 22 Violence et trauma The Violence of Hiroshima: Hersey...

The Violence of Hiroshima: Hersey, Bataille and Caruth

This article deals first with John Hersey’s 1946 Hiroshima , one of the earliest literary responses in English to the nuclear bombing of the city of Hiroshima in August 1945 and one of the most destructive acts of military violence in the 20 th century. It then focuses on French philosopher’s Georges Bataille’s singular and disquieting review of Hersey’s short book, published the following year in Critique. Finally, it discusses the somewhat unexpected return of Bataille’s text in Cathy Caruth’s 1995 seminal collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory, and endeavors to assess Bataille’s contemporary relevance to trauma studies. It appears that these three texts operate a process of traumatic transmission and literary actualization of the catastrophe.

Cet article est d’abord consacré à l’une des premières réponses écrites à la violence nucléaire ultime du bombardement d’Hiroshima, celle de John Hersey dans son célèbre ouvrage éponyme, publié en 1946. Dans un second temps, il détaille la réception singulière et déstabilisante de ce livre par le philosophe français Georges Bataille en 1947. Enfin, il s’intéresse à la résurgence du texte de Bataille dans le volume collectif Trauma : Explorations in Memory publié par Cathy Caruth en 1995, un ouvrage devenu depuis la pierre d’angle des études traumatiques. L’analyse successive de ces trois textes imbriqués permet ainsi de mettre au jour un double processus de transmission et d’actualisation littéraire de la catastrophe.

Index terms

Mots-clés : , keywords: .

« Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima »

M. Duras / A. Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour

Introduction

• 1 It has often been pointed out that statistics related either to the power of the blast or the numbe (...)

1 “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning of August 6 1945, Japanese time” (Hersey 3) occurred one of the most violently destructive events in the whole history of mankind: the dropping of “Little Boy”, the first atomic bomb ever built, over the city of Hiroshima, which, in “a noiseless flash” (Hersey 3), would cause the near-instantaneous death of over 140 000 people, although figures vary, so difficult were they to establish – not to mention the fact that they hardly convey any sense at all, statistics being essentially useless at rendering the human cost of any major catastrophe 1 .

2 The violence of Little Boy – followed, three days later, by that of “Fat Man”, dropped over the industrial city of Nagasaki – also inscribed once and for all the denouement of the Second World War in the “catastrophic age” (Caruth 11) that has characterized the post-1945 world. Finally, it cast the ominous shadow of nuclear disaster over humanity as a whole, a dark veil that has not yet been lifted.

3 One year later, American writer John Hersey (1914-1993), seasoned journalist and war correspondent for The New Yorker , published a collection of testimonies by atomic bomb survivors, known in Japan as hibakushas , which he would turn into a small book soberly entitled Hiroshima . His volume endeavored to engage literally with the act of violence of a near-unimaginable scale perpetrated by US military forces over a civilian population.

4 The success of Hersey’s book, both at the time of its publication and to this day, more than seventy years after the bombing, gives evidence of the need for new modes of narrative in the face of destruction and violence of the most extreme kind. Hiroshima , in its deceptively simple form, provided what is “arguably the most important cultural text in the mid-40s to express nuclear fear” (Halliwell 84). It is also one of the first instances in the English language of what was to become an emblematic narrative form in the second half of the twentieth century, namely the literature of testimony, irremediably bound up in a crisis of truth, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have shown in their landmark volume published 45 years later, Testimony: Crises of witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History . In the eyes of some commentators, Hersey’s Hiroshima went so far as to “transform the narrative landscape of America” (Sharp 450), challenging official narratives of the atomic blasts monitored by the US authorities.

5 Although my intention here is not to play down the intrinsic significance of Hersey’s short book, the main aim of this article is less to discuss Hersey’s collection of testimonies by Hiroshima survivors per se than to deal specifically with its reception across the Atlantic, especially in France. To do so, I will focus on the literary and ethical response it triggered in the French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962), who, in January 1947 published a powerfully unsettling review of Hersey’s book in the journal Critique . The reason for singling out Bataille’s text among the countless literary and philosophical responses surrounding Hersey’s book is its belated return, half a century later, in a seminal volume for trauma studies. Indeed, Bataille’s review of Hersey’s Hiroshima , singularly powerful as it is, might well have been forgotten had it not been unearthed to be included in the collective volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory , edited by Cathy Caruth in 1995, an essential collection that has since been regarded as the cornerstone of trauma studies across the academic world.

6 The aim of this article is thus threefold. First, it provides some elements of reflection on Hersey’s literary attempt to deal with the violence of the Hiroshima bombing. Second, it discusses Bataille’s response to Hersey’s book. Finally, it seeks to re-assess Georges Bataille’s “unclaimed relevance” to contemporary trauma theory by casting a close critical look at his unsettling stance towards the awe-inspiring violence generated by the bombing of Hiroshima and the testimonies of its survivors conveyed through his digressive review of Hersey’s book.

The humane significance of Hiroshima

7 As explained in the introduction, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a 30,000-word piece published in one single issue of The New Yorker at the end of August 1946, which was then turned into a book as early as October of that same year, not only stands as a landmark in the literary history of American letters and journalism, it was also an unprecedented way to engage by means of words and narrative with an act of equally unprecedented violence perpetrated on a massive scale.

8 It must be recalled that in 1946, the still recent nuclear catastrophe had unfolded away from western eyes as images were not as easily available to the general public as they have since become. The gap created by the knowledge of the dropping of an atomic bomb and its invisibility, somehow, had to be filled.

• 2 A delicate – even Kafkaesque – position as an American psychiatrist approaching people about their (...)

9 The various scientific and technical reports and detailed accounts of the strategy of the bombing that were provided to the American general public did not suffice, certainly not on an empathic level (Sharp 446). This ethical imperative demanded an account that “could be presented to readers so that they would care about and identify with the victims”, as Werner Sollors puts it (58). This is partly what led Hersey, as well as the editors of the magazine, to undertake his report, bypassing any official form of control and in spite of the utterly Kafkaesque situation Hersey found himself in, to echo the adjective used by psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton to qualify his own situation, some twenty years later, as another compassionate American facing hibakushas 2 .

10 Hiroshima is composed of an intertwined compilation of six survivors’ testimonies: Mr. Kioyshi Tanimoto, a Methodist Reverend; Father Willhem Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit priest who resided in a Hiroshima Catholic mission; Dr. Sasaki, a Red Cross surgeon; Miss Sasaki, an office clerk, unrelated to the surgeon, a tailor’s widow and a mother of three; and yet another physician, Dr. Fujyi. Hersey consciously selected these survivors so that the Japanese voices found in the book would differ from the dominant stereotypes of the time. As Patrick Sharp notes, “Hersey decided to focus his narrative on six survivors who would appeal to the pathos of the American audience, and who implicitly undermined the representation of the Japanese as a fanatical, militaristic Shinto horde” (445).

11 The testimonies, however, are not fully voiced by the selected hibakushas within the pages of Hiroshima. All traces of orality have been erased from Hersey’s book and the survivors’ accounts have systematically been turned into narrative report. And while Hersey’s presence as a narrator is hardly felt, a distance is constantly maintained between the reader’s experience and the survivors’ testimonies. This is partly due to the chosen narrative mode, but also to Hersey’s stylistic choices. The words of Hiroshima are sparse, factual, devoid of emotions. Metaphors are nowhere to be found, and restraint is the main stylistic concern. Hersey himself commented on his singular stylistic approach in an oft-quoted interview:

The flat style was deliberate, 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. (qtd in Rothman, par. 7)

12 It would be difficult also not to feel the influence of Ernest Hemingway’s style of writing – like Hersey, he too had been a journalist and had been strongly affected by war – even though it must be recalled that such stylistic restraint in order to depict the horror of modern warfare derives from an older American tradition of pre-war journalists turned novelists, such as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.

3 See Dwight MacDonald, in Sollors, 59.

13 While the choice of such pared down language was the only possible one for the author, his non-violent, “antiseptic New Yorker prose,” as some of his detractors put it 3 , may be regarded as rather problematic in the face of the horror he was dealing with. As we shall see in the next part of this discussion, Georges Bataille’s opted for a very different writing mode in his response to Hersey’s book. Yet before moving on to Bataille, some textual evidence from Hersey’s Hiroshima may at this stage prove useful.

14 The first excerpt is found at the very end of its first section, entitled “A Noiseless Flash”, referring to the illumination that accompanied the blast. Despite its apparent neutrality, this expression brims with traumatic undertones, echoing the startling lines of Japanese poet Kyokyu Kayenama, who wrote that: “ the flash that covered the city in morning mist was much like an instant dream ” (qtd in Lifton, p. 34).

15 At this point, we have been following Miss Sasaki, an employee trapped in her workplace, more than one mile away from the center of the explosion, when the bomb’s impact is suddenly felt:

Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moments of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books. (Hersey 23)

16 This rather paltry image of books incongruously conjured up in the midst of nuclear destruction is possibly the only moment in the text when the author’s efforts to draw up a symbolic comparison between the violence of the bombing and his act of writing are made explicit. Elsewhere in this passage as in the rest of the book, Hersey always seems intent on neutralizing his writing and “careful to universalize the locals’ reactions” (Sollors 58). By doing so, he may have been striving to become an agent of “symbolic reconciliation” (Lifton 355) and even present “a model of individual commitment to universal principles” (332).

17 The second textual example is taken from the second section of the book, entitled “The Fire”. It provides the reader with the image of a devastated universe, one of the first visions of horror of a nuclear apocalypse in the history of literature that seems, somehow, to foreshadow the most spectacular moments of post-nuclear fiction, yet in a highly restrained manner:

Mr. Tanimoto (…) was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (…), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatever. (Hersey 39-40)

4 http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php

18 The complete absence of expression on the survivors’ faces mentioned in the final line of the excerpt seems to be consciously mirrored in the complete absence of stylistic ornamentation, as though the collective numbing derived from the shock and the devastation of the bomb could translate into self-imposed stylistic numbing. Nevertheless, Hersey’s restraint did not seek to hide the horror of the bomb. Hiroshima was the very first book to shed light on the crude reality of nuclear violence, and the few descriptions of utter devastation such as the one quoted above did impact readers’ minds very strongly. As Steve Rothman puts it: “certainly the vivid depictions in the book must have been a strong contributor to a pervasive sense of dread (and guilt) about nuclear weaponry felt by many Americans ever since August 1945 4 ”. That same sense of dread and guilt certainly did pervade in Georges Bataille’s reading of Hersey’s text, in which the French philosopher saw a prophetic warning about the gloomy future of mankind:

5 “Le livre de Hersey prend en ce sens valeur de lampe : j’imagine qu’il donnera pour un temps leur i (...) It is not particularly surprising if Hersey’s book takes on, in this sense, the meaning of a lamp : I imagine for a while it will give intolerable brilliance to the possibilities of human suffering, whose signal and sign it has even become even as those possibilities exceed it infinitely. (Bataille 1995, 232) 5

Bataille’s violent reader-response

19 The piece by George Bataille under consideration was originally a review of Hersey’s book, published in the French philosophical journal Critique at the beginning of the year 1947. Critique was founded by Bataille himself in association with the Editions de Minuit . He worked there as editor in chief from 1946 to 1962, the year of his death. The article in question, entitled “ A propos des récits d’habitants d’Hiroshima” can also be found in the eleventh volume of Bataille’s Complete Works published in 1991. It remains uncertain whether Bataille actually read Hersey’s book in the original version of the 1946 Penguin edition, the publications details of which feature in the opening title of the Critique review, as all the quotations from Hiroshima appear in French in the body of the text. A footnote of the Oeuvres Completes indicates that the French newspaper France Soir published a full translation of Hersey’s text in installments during the month of September 1946.

• 6 Bataille coined the word “heterology” in relationship to the writings of the Marquis de Sade. The w (...)
• 7 “Sont hétérogènes tous les phénomènes sociaux caractérisés par la violence, la folie, la démesure e (...)

20 As the philosophy and method of Critique dictate, Bataille’s review soon turns into a fifteen-page essay, which, given Hersey’s volume’s concision, is considerable – the textual volume of the review amounting to a good third of the book that is under review. Bataille’s piece is a challenging and often unsettling piece on humanity’s entrance into the “Age of atom”, using Hersey’s accounts as a springboard for a sweeping reflection that exceeds the conventional metadiscursive exercise of literary criticism. While at first Bataille’s words may unsettle and even confuse readers, his essay soon becomes a crucial attempt at intellectualizing and assimilating an experience placed beyond the limits of understanding and witnessing, an experience that could certainly be defined, to use an adjective coined elsewhere by the philosopher himself, as radically “heterological 6 ”. In his remarkable biographical study of Bataille, Michel Surya wrote that “all social phenomena characterized by violence, madness, hubris and delirium can be defined as heterogeneous, all of them are impossible to assimilate 7 ”. In that respect, the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima and the almost immediate death of over one hundred thousand of its inhabitants deserves to be considered as a paragon of heterogeneity, possibly the most radical clinamen in the whole history of mankind.

21 Bataille’s review opens with a somewhat ambivalent stance, mingling a general sense of ontological unease and anxiety in the immediate post-war years with a more biting tone. He begins his piece with a brutally provocative comment on the near-uselessness of lamenting the war victims, given the natural cycle of life and death in the whole universe. This is followed by a no less striking comparison of the inhabitants of Hiroshima with termites, helpless victims of a vast operation of eradication, submitted to “the unintelligible destruction of [their] nest[s]” (227). At that point, that is to say after five pages out of fourteen, and while some readers may have felt tempted to dismiss Bataille’s words as a near-nonsensical and heartless rant, there occurs a major articulation in his tonality and argumentation.

22 It soon appears that Bataille’s initial provocative stance is to be read as evidence of an intimately felt outrage linked to the painful, sudden realization that such destruction underscores the terrible reality of the atomic age. He writes on:

I can at this point explain myself. What struck me on first reading Hiroshima was that, if I had not had any other reason, the isolated view of horror would have left me, as it were, indifferent. If, however, I read in anguish, feeling the contact with the most oppressive reality, it was because I knew: right away I related all the banal reactions to the consciousness and possibilities opened up by the manufacturing of atomic bombs. I understood then that the annual death of fifty million human beings had no humane meaning. (…) But the death of sixty thousand is charged with meaning, in that it depended on their fellow men to kill them or let them live. The atom bomb draws its meaning from its human origin; it is the possibility that the hands of man deliberately hang suspended over the future. (226)

• 8 “L’homme de la sensibilité souveraine ” (180), an expression used repeatedly by Bataille and that ra (...)

23 From that point onwards, Bataille’s discussion of Hersey’s book turns into a sharp diatribe against “the man of sovereign sensibility 8 ”, which he also calls, in a noticeable footnote, the man of the atom since “the Greek word ‘atom’ served to designate the instant in Aristotle’s and St Paul’s writings” (235).

24 In that sense, “the multiplication of details, monstrous and minute” (227) in Hersey’s book matters less to Bataille than the appalling awareness of the new age that the bombing of Hiroshima has inaugurated.

25 Eventually, in a third and final articulation in the last part of the essay, Bataille infuses his text with an unexpected and rather destabilizing religious dimension, calling up – seemingly incongruously – the crucial and near-ecstatic meditation of “the Christian on the Cross or the Buddhist on the boneheap” (230). He writes:

Both these meditations, far from plunging the spirit into the depth of depression, create a rapid movement of “communicating vessels” from extreme anguish to “joy that transcend joy”. (231)

9 See Arnaud Tellier (30-42).

26 While such a radical narrowing of scale may surprise some readers, those familiar with Bataille will recognize here the author’s singular merging of the transcendental and the horrible wrapped up in an almost mystical experience. It may be right to state that the reading of Hersey’s Hiroshima placed Bataille beside himself, in a state of ec-stasy that his digressive and disquieting review literalized. Besides, this sudden religious, even mystical turn of the text also connects the plight of the survivors in Hersey’s Hiroshima with Bataille’s own intimate traumatic image, that of the Supplice des cent morceaux , a photograph representing a Chinese prisoner tied to a pole and being skinned alive, piece by piece. This infamous picture was given to him by his psychoanalyst in 1925. It never ceased to haunt Bataille throughout his whole writing career, and beyond 9 .

27 Ultimately, Bataille’s review ends with a dreadful existential categorical imperative: to remain on the surface of “the old sponge of anxiety that is the world of activity, whose movement leads to destruction” (234) and live up to the catastrophe of Hiroshima.

28 As a whole, it may be said that Bataille’s review does not seek to engage dialectically with Hersey’s small book. Rather, it proceeds differentially, turning the rather toned-down accounts of the survivors compiled by the American writer into a springboard for indignation and illumination, made possible by the geographical and philosophical standpoint that severs him from the “sovereign sensibility” he repeatedly denounces throughout his essay. Bataille, from his privileged vantage point as an external observer, feels somehow able to intellectualize the catastrophe that occurred at Hiroshima and to which Hersey’s book bears witness. His review thus becomes an instance of nuclear violence become scriptural. Bataille’s reader-response actualizes itself in an act of writing of a particular intensity, becoming itself catastrophic and echoing lines written a decade earlier in Sacrifices in which the philosopher had already envisaged the possibility of such catastrophic mental actualization:

10 “Dans la position de l’objet comme catastrophe , la pensée vit l’anéantissement qui la constitue com (...) Positing the object as a catastrophe, human thought experiences the annihilation that constitutes it as a vertiginous, endless fall. Thus thought does not only hold catastrophe as its object: its very structure is catastrophic. Something enormous breaks out from all quarters with the might of a vertiginous cascade; it issues forth from the unreal regions of infinity and yet falls back there in a swoop of inconceivable power 10 .

29 In spite of its sheer pessimism, Bataille’s response, which somehow “atomizes” Hersey’s book, is radically opposed to an act of resignation. His review is to be read as a negative epiphany, combining indignation and illumination, two words which, incidentally, share the same etymology in Japanese:

It is significant to note that the Japanese word for resignation ( akirame ) is derived from a verb ( akiramu ) one of whose early meanings is “to probe or illuminate”, and conveys the idea of active confrontation of powerful forces, rather than the more or less passive submission now generally associated with the concept of resignation. (Lifton 371)

Bataille’s relevance to contemporary trauma theory

• 11 Anecdotally, Mr Keenan now works as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, possibly a (...)

30 While it has been shown that George Bataille’s reading of Hersey’s Hiroshima does raise a number of complex and intricate issues such as compassion for the victims and ethics, his inclusion in Caruth’s celebrated 1995 volume also raises some others, mostly retrospective, which I will now endeavour to address by way of conclusion. In Cathy Caruth’s authoritative collection of essays, the presence of George Bataille’s text is intriguing in more ways than one. Not only is he the sole philosopher in the collection (all the other authors come from the fields of psychiatry, history, sociology or the arts) he is also the only contributor to have been dead for over thirty years at the time when the volume was published. This makes Bataille the only voice from beyond the grave to resound within the pages of Caruth’s seminal volume, and very possibly one that is rather out-of-tune with the general euphony of the collection. It is also the only translated piece in the whole volume. Bataille’s text, as it features in Trauma: Explorations in Memory , was translated in its entirety, and for the first time, by Alan Keenan, then a member of staff at the University of California and a specialist in political theory 11 . Bataille’s original text, extremely dense, often verbose and bordering on the agrammatical, does not provide its readers with a comfortable reading experience. The English translation of the text strives to achieve great accuracy combined with that same degree of opacity and does so rather successfully.

31 Furthermore, the very first pages of Caruth’s introduction make no secret of her psychoanalytically-oriented approach to the intricacies of trauma. In that respect, Georges Bataille is far from being the most likely figure to be summoned up from the past. His own relationship with psychoanalysis was a short-lived and troublesome one. His analysis, which he undertook with Adrien Borel in 1925 when Bataille was involved in the Surrealist circles, was rather abruptly ended in 1927. As a rule, psychoanalysis is not granted much consideration in Bataille’s writings. The author favored an excessive mode of being and writing, inspired notably by Nietzschean philosophy, mysticism, as well as an ever-renewed inclination towards a writing of excess, a combination perhaps best illustrated in Bataille’s own philosophical manifesto, L’expérience intérieure , published in 1943.

32 Moreover, the piece included in Caruth’s volume is far from being Bataille’s best-known. So much secondary literature and criticism was produced in the aftermath of Hersey’s Hiroshima that the choice of including th at little-known review by a French author is definitely intriguing. T he question therefore somehow remains to fully validate Bataille’s presence in a collection otherwise composed exclusively of contemporary thinkers or artists involved in the weaving of what was then becoming the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies, all alive twenty years ago.

33 In the context of 1995, closer to us than the days of Hiroshima, how does the French philosopher add elements of reflection to the potential violence of the man of the atom on the one hand, and on the trauma of the survivors on the other? Does his scandalized urge to confront the cataclysm of Hiroshima still hold today? Or could it be precisely the temporal dislocation at the heart of our contemporary reception of the piece that makes it an essential contribution to Caruth’s reflection on trauma and history? In 2016, reading Caruth reading Bataille reading Hersey makes the reader feel both involved in a complex process of transmission and part of a chain reaction. Chronology also matters. While Bataille’s reading of Hersey’s Hiroshima occurred within a relatively short lapse of time – just over two years between the explosion of the A-bomb over Hiroshima and Bataille’s infuriated review – our contemporary reading of his review takes place some fifty – even seventy – years later. Consequently, we read belatedly, adopting a belatedness that is inherent to the history of trauma (Caruth 11). Thrice removed from the testimonies of the hibakushas in Hersey’s Hiroshima , the reader of Bataille’s piece in Cathy Caruth’s 1995 volume is placed in a finely calibrated ethical position, as one who must , indirectly and belatedly, “understand the past of others (…) within the traumas of contemporary history” (Caruth 11).

34 Whereas Georges Bataille’s violent reading of Hersey’s Hiroshima may at first sight appear startling and somehow out of place in Explorations in Memory , it nevertheless provides us first and foremost with a very powerful moment of “witnessing, precisely, of impossibility ” (Caruth 10). More specifically, it seems to come up with an answer to Caruth’s question about how exactly one does listen to what is impossible (10). Bataille’s piece presents a listening that does not seek to cure nor to offer any explicit compassion for the victims. Rather, it illustrates the way a traumatic catastrophe can be turned into a literary act, and as such it becomes a rather unique instance of intercultural traumatic circulation and repercussion. To quote the final lines of Cathy Caruth’s introduction to her 1995 volume, the transmission and working through of trauma “can only take place through the listening of another” and “in our catastrophic age, [it] may provide the very link between cultures” (11). In that sense, with Bataille’s review, we are invited not only to listen to the survivors of Hiroshima and register the heterological violence and aftershock of the first atomic bombing, we are also taking an ethical path that must be regarded as an urge to live up to the dimension of the catastrophe, and to respond to it individually, with dignified indignity:

12 “Il vaut mieux vivre à la hauteur d’Hiroshima que gémir et n’en pouvoir supporter l’idée (…) l’homm (...) Certainly it is better to live up to Hiroshima than to lament to it, unable to bear the idea of it (…); we must confront man, [who] is equal to all possibilities, or rather, whose only measure is impossibility. 12 (Bataille 232).

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. “A propos des récits des habitants d’Hiroshima” ( Critique, 1947) in Œuvres Complètes vol. 11, Paris : Gallimard, 1991: 172-187.

---. Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima . Translated by Alan Keenan in Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995: 221-235.

Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction”. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Edited by Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995: 3-12.

Halliwell, Martin. Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry and American Culture. 1945-1970. New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2014.

Hersey, John. Hiroshima. London: Penguin Books, 1981.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Death in Life. The Survivors of Hiroshima. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1969.

Rothman, Steve. “The Publication of Hiroshima in The New Yorker ”. http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php (last accessed 13 November 2015)

Sharp, Patrick B. “From Yellow Peril to Wasteland: John Hersey’s Hiroshima ”. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46 N°4, Literature and Apocalypse (Winter 2000) : 434-452.

Sollors, Werner. “ Holocaust and Hiroshima: American Ethnic Prose Writers Face the Extreme” . PMLA , Vol. 118, No. 1, Special Topic: America: The Idea, the Literature (Jan., 2003), pp. 56-61

Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille. La mort à l’oeuvre. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

Tellier, Arnaud. Expériences traumatiques et écriture. Paris: Anthropos, 1998.

1 It has often been pointed out that statistics related either to the power of the blast or the number of people killed in Hiroshima convey no sense of the human loss at the heart of the catastrophe, if only because “statistics don’t bleed”, as psychiatrist Robert J Lifton caustically put it (13).

2 A delicate – even Kafkaesque – position as an American psychiatrist approaching people about their feelings concerning the bomb. (7, my emphasis)

5 “Le livre de Hersey prend en ce sens valeur de lampe : j’imagine qu’il donnera pour un temps leur intolérable éclat à des possibilités de douleur humaine dont il est le symbole et le signe qui l’excèdent infiniment” (Bataille 185). The English translation used in the following pages is that published in Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory. More information about the specificities and history of this translation is provided in the opening lines of the final part of the article.

6 Bataille coined the word “heterology” in relationship to the writings of the Marquis de Sade. The word first appears in “La Valeur d’usage de D.A.F. de Sade” (in Œuvres Complètes vol. II, pp. 63-70.) For an in-depth discussion of that operative concept, see Hétérologies. Pour une dé-neutralisation de la critique littéraire by Groupe H3, Perpignan: Presses universitaires de Perpignan, 2006.

7 “Sont hétérogènes tous les phénomènes sociaux caractérisés par la violence, la folie, la démesure et le délire, phénomènes qui ont tous en commun d’être inassimilables” (My translation).

8 “L’homme de la sensibilité souveraine ” (180), an expression used repeatedly by Bataille and that raises a number of questions as to its exact definition. In the English version of the text found in Caruth’s volume, the translator notes that “a full understanding of the text would require attention to the differing uses of these words and their resonances with each other” (Keenan in Caruth 235).

10 “Dans la position de l’objet comme catastrophe , la pensée vit l’anéantissement qui la constitue comme une chute vertigineuse et infinie ; ainsi n’a-t-elle pas seulement la catastrophe en tant qu’objet : sa structure même est la catastrophe. Quelque chose d’immense se libère de toutes parts avec l’ampleur d’une cataracte, surgit des régions irréelles de l’infini et cependant y sombre dans un mouvement d’une force inconcevable.” Georges Bataille, Sacrifices , 1936. Quoted in Tellier (42). Many thanks to Jonathan Pollock for his help with the translation.

11 Anecdotally, Mr Keenan now works as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, possibly a concrete example of how trauma studies find themselves at the crossroads of many fields of knowledge and action.

12 “Il vaut mieux vivre à la hauteur d’Hiroshima que gémir et n’en pouvoir supporter l’idée (…) l’homme est à la mesure du tout possible, ou plutôt l’impossible est sa seule mesure” (185).

Electronic reference

Jocelyn Dupont , “ The Violence of Hiroshima: Hersey, Bataille and Caruth ” ,  Sillages critiques [Online], 22 | 2017, Online since 30 March 2017 , connection on 29 May 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4906; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.4906

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John Hersey, the Writer Who Let “Hiroshima” Speak for Itself

By Russell Shorto

Seventy years ago, this magazine devoted its entire August 31st issue to an article by John Hersey titled “ Hiroshima .” It became a landmark in journalism, in publishing, and in humanity’s awareness of itself and its own awful potential. It detailed the lives of six people who had survived the American atomic attack on the Japanese city, which had taken place a year earlier. Much reporting had been done in the aftermath of the bombing, most of which was technical or philosophical, focussing on the power of the weapon or on the wisdom of using it. In choosing instead to report on individual victims, to follow the unfolding of their lives in minute detail from the moment the bomb fell and as they struggled to exist through the ensuing weeks, Hersey did something altogether different. He bore witness.

The issue of the magazine sold out at newsstands. The thirty-one-thousand-word article was read over the radio; parts of it were excerpted in newspapers; three million copies of it were sold in book form. It has been in print ever since.

Yet while Hersey, who was thirty-two at the time of publication, and who had covered the war extensively for  Time  and  Life , received accolades, and some criticism, in the aftermath of “Hiroshima,” he remained somehow outside the glare of the attention it generated. Likewise, for all the humanity of the article, its author, who died in 1993, seems scarcely present in it; it seems almost not to have an author. And the man who wrote what has been called the most important work of journalism of the twentieth century, as well as a shelf of best-selling novels and works of nonfiction, seems largely forgotten today.

As it happens, one of John Hersey’s sons, Baird, is my brother-in-law. Through the years, at holiday gatherings, we have chatted about his father. With this anniversary in mind, we had a more purposeful conversation. I asked Baird, who is a musician and composer living in upstate New York, about the man his father was, about his approach to writing “Hiroshima,” and about the enigma of his authorial persona.

“My father had a very strong moral compass,” Baird said. “I think it was because his parents were missionaries. He lived in China, where they were doing Y.M.C.A. mission work, until he was eleven. Even though he wasn’t a religious person—he eventually reacted against being raised in that world—he had a strong sense of right and wrong, and a humility, and that colored his approach to ‘Hiroshima.’ ”

Hersey was on a Navy ship on his way to Japan to report the story when he fell ill and someone gave him books to read, one of which happened to be Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” It was a novel that traced the stories of five people who are killed when a bridge collapses. “It struck my father that that would be a good vehicle for presenting the story of the people who were subjected to the atomic bomb,” Baird said. “He told me about getting the idea of using novelistic devices to structure his reporting. He wanted to put faces and names to the story. Prior to that, we had been at war with Japan, and everyone had this opinion of ‘the Japanese.’ He wanted to show their humanity in a way that people in this country could connect to—to convey the enormity of what had happened.”

The structure of “Hiroshima” was one of the things that resonated with readers. Its use of fictional devices, such as building to a suspenseful moment with one character and then switching to another, was radical at the time, and made it a precursor to the New Journalism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Hersey himself said that the profundity of the nuclear attack, and his consequent need to try to convey the reality of it to readers, forced him outside of journalistic conventions. With journalism, Hersey once said, the reader is always conscious of “the person who’s writing it and explaining to you what’s taken place.” He said he wanted to have “the reader directly confronted by the characters,” so he tried to write the piece in such a way that, as he put it, “my mediation would, ideally, disappear.”

The disappearing writer was not just a feature of the work itself but, in a sense, of Hersey’s career. “He was quite young when he had his success, but it didn’t go to his head,” Baird told me. “I think he found the acclaim and attention to be hollow.” As a result, the author of the biggest publishing sensation of its time was a virtual stranger to the world of publicity. “He never went on tour. He never wanted to ‘flog his wares,’ as he said. He didn’t go on TV or radio, didn’t give lectures. He only did two interviews in his life. He was a member of the generation that developed the cult of the author—people like Norman Mailer were doing ‘The Dick Cavett Show’—but he didn’t want any part of that.”

Baird’s memories of his father are of a private man, but not a recluse. Hersey had a small circle of close friends, which included Lillian Hellman, William Styron, Ralph Ellison, Jules Feiffer, and Anthony Lewis. He belonged to civic organizations, spoke out against the Vietnam War, and taught writing at Yale. But he was guarded about his work. “He had this theory that you should never talk about a book you were working on,” Baird said. “He felt that writers would lose the energy of their stories by talking about them. So we didn’t even know what he was writing. Then there would be a dinner after he had sent the manuscript to the publisher, and he would share with the family what the book was about.”

Baird was born after the publication of “Hiroshima.” His memories are of his father at work on later books. They lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Hersey wrote in a small cottage some distance from the house. “I used to climb a tree, knock on the window, and ask if he could come out. He was very regular in his habits. Every morning he would write, in longhand, double-spaced, so that he could make corrections. In the afternoons he would answer correspondence. He got lots of mail, and there was only one kind of letter he would not answer. If the name was spelled ‘Hershey,’ it went in the trash can.”

Baird doesn’t remember his father making a big deal about any of his work, or his fame. “He was very reserved, which I think he regretted, because he had a loving and warm side,” he said. “If my parents were having a dinner party and I couldn’t sleep, he’d come up and rub my back.”

In a perfect world, fathers exert a firm and wise influence on their children. Perhaps that rarely happens. But Baird told me that his father’s philosophy on work and the world coalesced for him in one conversation they had. Baird was himself about the age his father had been when “Hiroshima” was published. “We were on Martha’s Vineyard, where he always spent his summers. I had built up a body of work as a musician. I had just had a record come out that had gotten some attention but didn’t break out. I was in that phase of my career, trying to figure it out. I guess I had something in me that pulled me toward wanting fame. I wanted to know how he had managed things early in his career. And what he said, essentially, was you can’t look to the outside world to make you whole. That affected me profoundly.”

Hersey’s refusal to flog his wares continues in effect. His daughter, Brook Hersey, a clinical psychologist living in Manhattan, who is his literary executor, told me that when it comes to ancillary projects that people bring to her—movie deals, prospective biographies—“I have tried to make decisions based on what I think he would have wanted, and that was to let his works speak for themselves.” As a result, she said, “I’ve always erred on the side of saying no.”

The slow fade in popular awareness of Hersey is surely in part a result of that, as well as of the simple passage of time. But Hersey’s sensibility, so at odds with today’s, suited its era. The authorial anonymity—the humility—in “Hiroshima” made it the most respectful way to present the people Hersey encountered in a post-nuclear city, and the clearest way to show Americans what they had done.

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August 6, 2020, the enduring power of john hersey's "hiroshima": the first "nonfiction novel", on the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, hersey's taut, unflinching story remains a masterpiece of narrative reporting.

By Jacqui Banaszynski

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John Hersey as a correspondent for TIME magazine in World War II, photographed in 1944 in an unknown location. He went on to write "Hiroshima," a nonfiction account of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, which was published in August 1946 in the New Yorker. Illustration using an AP photo

Seventy-one years ago today, on Aug. 6, 1949, my oldest brother was born. He was the first of five of us. Our father was, from what little I can glean, in the Army Air Force, stationed somewhere in the Pacific Theater. I have no idea what he did during the war, or where he was when the bombs were dropped. He was of that cohort of young men who answered the call to war, came home, got married, got a job, raised a family — and put a cap on the bottle of whatever had happened in the theater of battle. My brother’s name was Greg.

A mushroom cloud rises moments after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. On two days in August 1945, U.S. planes dropped two atomic bombs, one on Hiroshima, one on Nagasaki, the first and only time nuclear weapons have been used. Their destructive power was unprecedented, incinerating buildings and people, and leaving lifelong scars on survivors, not just physical but also psychological, and on the cities themselves. Days later, Japan surrendered to Allied powers and World War II ended. AP file photo

Even as a young girl, I knew about the atomic bomb. Or at least that there had been one, and we didn’t want there to be another. I was not only the child of a WWII veteran, but of the Cold War. Duck-and-cover drills in elementary school. The hushed conversations of adults during the Cuban missile crisis. The terrifying Daisy Girl ad , in which Lyndon Baines Johnson used the threat of nuclear war to defeat conservative — some would say war-mongering — Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 to continue the presidency he inherited when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The wallpaper of my childhood carries the stamp of a mushroom cloud. And every Aug. 6, as my mother and I frosted my brother’s birthday cake, the daily newspaper landed in the driveway with the inevitable headline about the anniversary of Hiroshima, much as every December 7, it brought us a reminder of Pearl Harbor.

These memories lead down a long hallway lined with doors, each door opening to stories, which always open to more doors and more stories. One of those rooms I always stop at is my brother’s. He has been gone 24 years now, killed by a distracted teenaged driver. I hunted down the kid’s name after the accident; I always wondered if he bothered to learn my brother’s.

But today, in this setting and for this community, I want to stop at a door that opens to journalism, and to another name: John Hersey . For all of those personal connections to the anniversary of Hiroshima — and despite a kick-ass high school history teacher — it was Hersey’s book of the same name that stays with me, and that I return to year after year.

Learning from the “first nonfiction novel”

“Hiroshima” sits on a shelf in my makeshift home office with dozens of other books about and of journalism. But it has the distinction of being one of a handful I consider must-reads for anyone who wants to do this work. I have no idea when I first read it, except that it was far too late in my career. (Why wasn’t it required reading when I was in journalism school in the 1970s? Was everyone too distracted by Vietnam and Watergate? Is everyone today too distracted by politics and the pandemic to deliver what would normally be an endless march of headlines for an anniversary of this magnitude? ) I do remember the opening passage, which introduces six characters in brief work-a-day scenes just as the bomb drops. That passage is one long paragraph, launched with a clause — actually a series of clauses — before the first character is introduced:

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed about Hiroshima …

The passage ends in that same, single paragraph, with no more than a period separating the characters and the foreshadow of the unimaginable events to come:

A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.

At that point, I knew just one thing: I had to know more. And as I read on, it became clear: This was how journalism was done. Or, more to the point, how it should be done.

“Hiroshima” is a portable masterclass in history, humanity and journalism. The New Yorker published the original version, structured in four chapters, as a single take in August, 1946; it remains the only story that was granted an entire edition of the magazine. This week, the New Yorker reposted it online, along with the “Aftermath,” which Hersey added in 1985 after he followed up on the fate of his six characters, and a small collection of related stories. Among them, “John Hersey and the Art of Fact,” in which Nicholas Lemman, emeritus dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, profiles Hersey as pioneering a new form of journalism while adhering to a “sacred” rule: “The writer must not invent.” From Lemman’s piece:

“Hiroshima” is told entirely in an unadorned, omniscient third-person voice, which is why it’s often called the first nonfiction novel.

Hersey apparently considered himself a novelist more than a journalist — he won a Pulitzer for his World War II tale, “A Bell for Adano.” But the tributes and profiles I’ve read tend to cite his unflinching, unembellished journalism — which may have been an extension of his personality.

Nonfiction author Peter Richmond (Nieman class 1989) stumbled his way into a senior writing seminar taught by Hersey at Yale some 40 years ago. In a 2013 essay for Storyboard, Richmond recalled the first thing Hersey said to 12 awed and still-arrogant young writers: “If anyone in the room thinks of himself or herself as an artist, this is not a course for you. I teach a craft.” Storytelling as craft! How humbling — and how bold. Richmond struggled through the semester, but left with wisdoms he’s clung to ever since. Among them:

1) In good fiction, the reader absorbing a compelling narrative never notices the writer as intermediary. In nonfiction, that translator’s presence is inevitable. 2) Let the story, invented fictitiously or real-world, speak for itself. 3) Editors are there for a reason: not because they aren’t good writers, but because they are very good at what they do. 4) If what you leave out is essential, then the details you choose to leave in must be essential. 5) Never veer far from the story.

I expect it would be hard to find a successful narrative journalist who hasn’t been influenced by Hersey, whether directly or through some force of the cosmos. Pulitzer winner Mark Bowden surely is one of them. The former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter busted into a career of books and movies with “ Black Hawk Down,” the harrowing account of 18 Army Rangers killed during a failed raid on warlords in Somalia in 1993. Bowden was teaching journalism in 2012 when Paige Williams, then the editor of Storyboard, asked a few of us what we included on our course reading lists . Bowden cited “Hiroshima:”

…because of its historical importance in the genre of literary nonfiction, because of its relative simplicity as a piece of reporting and writing, and because it is a powerful and compelling read. Hersey illustrates the importance of asking, “Who and what, at the most basic level, is this story about?” In the case of the atom bomb, it was the one piece of the story that had not been reported — and which was the most important.

I had “Hiroshima” on my syllabus, too. This is what I wrote in that same Storyboard piece:

I have found nothing that better demonstrates the  reporting that is both required and possible for powerful literary nonfiction. We analyze what Hersey would have had to notice and ask to reconstruct such precise, vivid and credible scenes. As for the writing, it is a study in simplicity. Hersey uses verbs that are strong but seldom flashy, sentences that are tight and direct, and a minimum of embellishment to let the raw drama of the narrative come through.

If I were still in the classroom, I might ask today’s students to pitch how they would cover the same story with multi-media tools. What reach and layering might be gained? What purity and power might be lost?

The need to name — and remember

This time, something else struck me in a new light: The names.

Getting the names of our story subjects and sources is more than pro forma journalism; it is the prime directive. That can be hard to explain to those we interview, or even to the public, which is quick to judge our invasiveness. But names — real names, spelled correctly — stand as a bulwark between credible journalism and the temptations of shortcuts. Even in the limited circumstances when we don’t use them, we need to know them. As much as anything we do, names matter.

Greg. Not just a traffic fatality, but a remembered son, brother, husband and father.

The Enola Gay. Little Boy. Fat Man. Not just equipment, but remembered instruments of both destruction and salvation.

Hatsuyo Nakamura, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Toshiko Sasaki, Dr. Masakaza Fujii, Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Not just convenient fictions for conflated events, but real people. As much as they shared a common event, their travails and triumphs were unique. By honoring each of them for who they were and what they went through, Hersey honored every victim of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were the survivors who lived to tell the tale we need to remember.