hiroshima day essay writing

Essay on Hiroshima Day

Students are often asked to write an essay on Hiroshima Day in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Hiroshima Day

Introduction.

Hiroshima Day, observed on August 6th, commemorates the day in 1945 when an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II.

Significance

This day is significant as it marks the first use of nuclear weapons in war. The devastating impact caused immediate and long-term suffering, reminding us of the horror of nuclear warfare.

On Hiroshima Day, people globally advocate for peace and nuclear disarmament. Ceremonies, peace marches, and educational events are held to remember the victims and promote a peaceful future.

Hiroshima Day serves as a stark reminder of the destruction caused by nuclear weapons, urging us to strive for a world free from such threats.

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250 Words Essay on Hiroshima Day

Significance of hiroshima day.

Hiroshima Day, observed on August 6th, is a solemn reminder of the catastrophic aftermath of nuclear weapons. It marks the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 by the United States during World War II. The day is commemorated to pay tribute to the victims and to advocate for world peace and nuclear disarmament.

The Tragedy of Hiroshima

The bombing of Hiroshima resulted in the immediate death of approximately 70,000 people, with the death toll eventually rising to 140,000 due to radiation sickness and injuries. The city was left in ruins, and the survivors, known as Hibakusha, faced lifelong physical and psychological trauma. The event profoundly shaped Japan’s post-war identity and pacifist constitution.

Symbol of Peace and Disarmament

Hiroshima Day serves as a stark reminder of the devastating potential of nuclear weapons, prompting global efforts towards disarmament. The day is marked by peace ceremonies around the world, with the most significant being held at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan. The park, built on the hypocenter of the bomb, stands as a symbol of peace and a pledge to a nuclear-free world.

Lessons for the Future

As we observe Hiroshima Day, we are reminded of the importance of diplomacy, negotiation, and peaceful conflict resolution. The day calls for introspection on our collective responsibility to prevent such catastrophic events in the future. It underscores the need for international cooperation in achieving a world free from the threat of nuclear warfare.

In conclusion, Hiroshima Day is a poignant reminder of humanity’s capacity for destruction and our collective responsibility to strive for peace. It is an opportunity to reflect on our past and work towards a safer and more harmonious future.

500 Words Essay on Hiroshima Day

Hiroshima Day, observed on August 6th every year, is a solemn reminder of the devastating power of nuclear weapons and the tragic consequences of war. It marks the day in 1945 when an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, resulting in the immediate death of approximately 80,000 people and subsequent deaths due to radiation exposure.

The Historical Context

The bombing of Hiroshima, followed by Nagasaki three days later, marked the end of World War II. However, these actions initiated a new era of fear and uncertainty, the nuclear age. The horrific scenes of destruction and the long-term effects on the survivors, known as Hibakusha, served as a stark warning against the use of such weapons.

The Significance of Hiroshima Day

Hiroshima Day serves multiple purposes. Primarily, it is a day of remembrance for the victims of the bombings. It is also an opportunity to educate people about the consequences of nuclear warfare, fostering a sense of global responsibility to prevent such atrocities from recurring.

Peace Education and Nuclear Disarmament

Hiroshima Day is also a platform for peace education and nuclear disarmament advocacy. The city of Hiroshima itself has become a symbol of peace, with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the iconic Genbaku Dome, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, standing as poignant reminders of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. On this day, peace advocates, politicians, and ordinary citizens worldwide unite in their call for a world free of nuclear weapons.

The Role of Youth

The youth play a crucial role in commemorating Hiroshima Day. As future leaders, their understanding and commitment to peace and nuclear disarmament are vital. They are encouraged to learn about the historical, political, and ethical aspects of nuclear warfare, and to engage in dialogues and activities promoting peace.

Hiroshima Day stands as a powerful testament to the human capacity for destruction, but also our capacity for resilience, peace, and change. It is a day to remember the past, reflect on the present, and envision a future where conflicts are resolved not through violence, but through dialogue and mutual understanding. As we commemorate this day, let us renew our commitment to peace and strive for a world free of nuclear weapons.

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87 Hiroshima Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best hiroshima topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 simple & easy hiroshima essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on hiroshima, ❓ hiroshima essay questions.

• “Hiroshima” by John Hersey The book Hiroshima traces some of the survivors of the war and lists two women, two religious people, and two doctors who narrate the events from a few hours before the bomb was dropped up […]
• Memory by Analogy: Hiroshima Mon Amour It is quite painful to recall the events that took place in Japan during the Second World War in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Historic Attitudes Surely, the atomic bombing of the two cities could not have been the only way to get the Japanese to surrender.
• Hiroshima Bombing in Berger’s, Hardy’s, Hersey’s Works Berger used excerpts of the actual witnesses of the bombing to illustrate the scope of the tragedy and made generalizations concerning the horrors of Hiroshima in the historical and global context.
• Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombing In addition, the refusal of Japanese troops to surrender and Japan’s “all-out war” have also been put forward as arguments in favor of the bombing that stopped the atrocities of the “all-out war” of Japanese […]
• Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Long-Term Health Effects Nevertheless, exposure to neutrons from the incidence of A-bomb in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is currently thought to have been the sources of just 1-2% of the entire dose of ionizing radiation.
• Hiroshima and Its Importance in US History Hiroshima is the capital city of Hiroshima district, which is situated in the south west of the province Honshu in Japan.
• The Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima The effects of the bombing were devastating; the explosion had a blast equivalent to approximately 13 kilotons of TNT. Sasaki says that hospitals were teaming with the wounded people, those who managed to survive the […]
• Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Theory of Just War The theory of Just War is meant to provide a philosophical framework, upon which the use of military force is justified. Was the use of the bomb a last resort?
• Hiroshima Bombing Occurrence and Impacts Additionally, all the other disasters follow a path that is off firebombing as compared to the Hiroshima that saw the only use of nuclear weapons. However, research that is more empirical should to establish the […]
• Did the USA need to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? However, the war continued along the Pacific Ocean due to the resistance of the Japanese Emperor to sign the instrument of surrender.
• Hiroshima: Rising from the Ashes of Nuclear Destruction After a few years, the city of han was abolished and Hiroshima became the capital city of the whole Hiroshima region.
• The Atomic Weapons Attacks On Hiroshima And Nagasaki
• Lifton and Mitchell’s Hiroshima in America
• The War Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki Ended The World War II
• Hiroshima And The Inheritance Of Trauma
• Was Bombing Hiroshima And Nagasaki Necessary To End World War 2
• US Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Cannot be Justified
• Truman ‘s Announcement On Bombing Of Hiroshima
• Speculations about the Cause and Effect of the Atomic Bomb and Its Consequences on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• US Government Justifies Dropping of Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima
• Things Fall Apart By Chinua Achebe And Hiroshima
• Was the U.S. Right or Wrong Using the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima
• Swallowing the Poison Mushroom – America After Hiroshima
• The Atomic Explosion Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki
• The Events Before and After the Explosion in John Hersey’s Hiroshima
• The Alternatives to Dropping the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• To What Extent Were The Bombings Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki
• The Dropping of the Atomic Bomb the Japanese City of Hiroshima
• John Hersey’s Interviews of Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Victims
• Weapons Of Mass Destruction Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki
• The Bombing Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki During World War II
• The Devastation in the City of Hiroshima After the Atomic Bombing in 1945
• Hiroshima And The American Naval Base At Pearl Harbor
• Horrors Caused by the Dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• The Aftermath When the Bomb Went off in the Book Hiroshima by John Hershey
• Why President Truman Decided To Drop Atomic Bombs On Hiroshima And Nagasaki
• Saving Lives by Dropping Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• The Background Information of the Hiroshima Bombing and Its Place in U.S. History
• The Events in 1945 During the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima in Japan by the U.S
• Was the Dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Justified
• The Background of the Atomic Bomb Little Boy Dropped on Hiroshima in 1945
• The Consequences of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States
• The Unnecessary Nuclear Attacks On Nagasaki And Hiroshima
• The Controversy and Justification Around the Use of Nuclear Weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Imperil Global Disarmament Efforts After Nagasaki and Hiroshima Bombings
• The Ethical Analysis of the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Literary Documentation of the Cold War in John Hersey’s Hiroshima
• The Attack On Hiroshima And Nagasaki
• Was America Justified in Dropping the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945
• Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings as the Events that Ended World War II
• The Bombing of Hiroshima Changed Six Individuals
• The Debate Over the Ethics of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Why Did The Americans Drop The Atomic Bomb On Hiroshima
• Was the US Justified in Dropping Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• The US Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima
• Hiroshima Nagasaki: Entering Into The Atomic Age
• Why the United States Should Have Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima
• Why America Bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Was The Atomic Bombing Of Hiroshima And Hiroshima Justified
• Hiroshima Almost Wiped off From the Face of the Earth
• The Bombing of Hiroshima and the Attack on Pearl Harbor During the WWII
• Were Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki Necessary to End World War 2?
• Was the Atomic Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima Justified?
• Was the U.S. Right or Wrong Using the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima?
• Why Did the US Pick Hiroshima To Bomb?
• What Did the Hiroshima Bomb Do to Humans?
• How Many Were Killed in Hiroshima?
• Were the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings the Acts of Genocide?
• How Do the Japanese Feel About Hiroshima Many Years Later?
• How Many Years Does It Take for Hiroshima To Fully Recover?
• How Long After Hiroshima Did Japan Surrender?
• Why Was the Bombing of Hiroshima Immoral?
• Was Hiroshima a Human Rights Violation?
• Was Hiroshima Bombing a Secret Message to Soviets?
• What Were the International Politics Before and After Hiroshima?
• What Is the Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy?
• What Is the Incidence of Leukemia in Survivors of the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima?
• Does Tourism Illuminate the Darkness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
• What Is the Effect of Bombing on Pregnancy Termination in Hiroshima?
• Why Did the US Drop the Second Atomic Bomb After Hiroshima?
• Is There Still Radioactivity in Hiroshima?
• How Long Until Hiroshima Was Habitable and Why It Takes Time?
• How Did Hiroshima Recover So Quickly?
• Did the US Help Japan After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
• How Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Survivors Have Transformed Our Mindset?
• What Were the Genetic Effects of Radiation in Hiroshima Survivors?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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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.

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Writing Lessons From John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”

“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote.  Nowhere do we witness this eternal struggle more movingly than in Hiroshima , John Hersey’s unforgettable account of that fateful day on August 6th, 1945 when the atomic bomb was dropped.  Hailed as the “most celebrated piece of journalism to come out of WWII,” Hiroshima  follows six survivors as they navigate the devastating aftermath of nuclear war.  Obliterating 100,000 lives in an infernal blast that will reverberate through the centuries as human history’s “most unspeakable crime,” the atom bomb  is an unsettling reminder that the human heart is neither wholly good nor evil.

Hiroshima  stands as a masterpiece of reporting for its ability to  humanize the Japanese people at a time when words were weaponized as instruments of war.  Rather than reduce them to a one-dimensional demonized “enemy,” Hersey revealed Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, Father Wilhem Kliensorge, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Toshiko Sasaki, and Hatsuyo Nakamura as ordinary people: people who were staring out windows and sitting at their desks just as they had hundreds of times when their lives were forever shattered by an unprecedented act of war.  

While some reporters marveled at man’s ability to harness the cataclysmic power of atomic energy ( New York Times  staff member William Laurence, the only journalist to witness the terrible technology first hand, wrote with wonder, “It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire.  It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.” ), others focused on calculating the staggering number of lives lost or capturing the wasteland left behind ( New York Herald Tribune’s Homer Bigart observed when he visited Hiroshima in September 1945 that  “across the river there was only flat, appalling desolation, the starkness accentuated by bare, blackened tree trunks and the occasional shell of a reinforced concrete building.” )  

Hersey took a different approach.   Hiroshima , originally published as a 30,000 word feature in the August 1946 issue of the  New Yorker , is now considered a landmark of new journalism, a style of reporting that blended the impartial facts of traditional journalism with the pacing and storytelling of a novel.  By funneling the harrowing events of that historic day through the soul-expanding subjectivity of stories instead of the heartless objectivity of mere numbers, Hersey was able to demolish the barricade between ally and enemy so often erected by war.  The result is a compassionate document that — as one critic put it — “stirs the conscience” of the soul.

Hiroshima’s  first line is perhaps one of journalism’s best-known:

“At exactly fifteen 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.”

In his instructive new book  The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing , journalist and Poynter Institute senior scholar Roy Peter Clark seeks to break down this stellar first sentence so we can better understand how it works.  A curator of spellbinding sentences and lover of lively prose, Clark contends the secret to writing well is hidden in literature’s masterworks or — as Matthew Arnold might say — in “the best that’s been thought and said” in the world.  If we want to be compelling writers, we just have to crack the code.  “Cracking the code” means paying attention to  how  an author mesmerizes us with his words.  Like Hemingway, does he seduce us to turn the page by revealing less information than he withholds ?  Or like Plath, does he create a sense of unity by repeating an overarching motif or symbol ?  In much the same way authors of that endlessly edifying guide to close-reading  How to Read a Book  revere books as absent teachers , Clark believes literature has a wealth of writing wisdom to offer.

So how, Clark wonders, does Hersey manage to captivate us from Hiroshima’s  very first line?  

The sentence itself is rather simple: 63 words, 32 of which are only 1-syllable.  There is no flamboyant expression, no elaborate sentence structure, no theatrical melodrama.  Even the subject matter is mundane: other than the offhand reference to the bomb “flashing above Hiroshima,” the sentence focuses on the ordinary and everyday, particularly one Miss Toshiko Sasaki, who’s doing the most uninteresting thing you could possibly conceive: turning her head to chat with a co-worker.  So why is this one of the most riveting first lines in all of literature?  For Clark, the secret is pacing:

“This feels like a most unconventional way to begin a story.  In spite of the importance of time to the telling of all narratives, we rarely see this degree of temporal specificity in a first line.  The word  exactly  is not a modifier but an intensifier.  We then learn the minutes, the hour ante meridiem, the month, day, year, and time zone.  That’s seven discrete time metrics before a verb.  The rhetorical effect of such specificity is that of a historical marker.  Something world-changing is about to happen (a meteor struck the earth; a volcano exploded; a jet plane flew into the Pentagon).  Chaucer’s springtime at the beginning of  The Canterbury Tales  is generic and cyclical.  In  Hiroshima we are about to meet a group of pilgrims who share an experience that is triggered at a specific moment in time.  

In a way, time is also about to stand still.  Clocks and watches, damaged by the atomic blast, stopped at the moment of destruction.  This symbol of the stopped watch in relation to Hiroshima is repeated as late as 2014 in the updated version of the movie  Godzilla.   The original was made in Japan in 1954 and is widely recognized as a science-fiction, monster-movie allegory of the consequences of nuclear destruction.  In the updated version, Japanese actor Ken Watanabe carries around the talisman of a pocket watch owned by his grandfather, killed at Hiroshima.  The time is frozen at eight fifteen.”  

As writers, what can we take away from this unforgettable first sentence?  Just as Hersey uses temporal specificity to stop time and signal that something history-making is about to happen, we can decelerate —  or “freeze frame” — our narrative to amplify drama and build suspense:

Writing Lesson #1 

“Stories are about time in motion.  But there are moments when time seems to stop, at least in narrative terms: when the atom bomb drops, when Kennedy is shot, when the  Challenger  explodes.  As a writer, you can mark that moment when time stands still.  Freeze a movie into a still frame.”

Hiroshima  is not only a paragon of pacing — it’s a matchless example of understatement.  “If ever there was a subject calculated to make a writer overwrought and a piece overwritten, it was the bombing of Hiroshima,” observed  New Yorker journalist and political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg.  When a story is as momentous as Pearl Harbor or September 11th, it seems made for the newspapers.  There’s conflict, there’s catastrophe, there’s lives lost.  But though it’s tempting to hyperbolize, a good writer will restrain himself.  What makes Hiroshima  so powerful is the way Hersey lets the material speak for itself.  Instead of indulging in melodrama — say, by sensationalizing the carnage or heavy-handedly accentuating the scene’s pathos — Hersey writes in a matter-of-fact style, employing only plain words all the while maintaining a dispassionate, journalistic tone.  As Clark explains, when a story is “big,” the key is to write “small”:

“In bringing us finally to the main part of the sentence, the author puts into practice two reliable rhetorical strategies, one from ancient Greece, the other from the American newsroom.  The name for the first is litotes, or understatement- the opposite of hyperbole.  While an unwise writer might overwhelm us with the visceral imagery of destruction, Hersey chooses to introduce a most common scene of daily life: one office worker turning to another, allowing the drama to unfold.  In the face of astonishing content, step back a bit.  Don’t call undue attention to the tricks of the writer.  

A related strategy comes from an old bit of newsroom wisdom: “The bigger the smaller.”  Nowhere was this strategy used more than in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York City on September 11th.  Faced with almost apocalyptic physical destruction and the loss of nearly three thousand lives, writers such as Jim Dwyer of the  New York Times  looked for ways to tell a story that seemed from its inception “too big.”  Dwyer chose to highlight physical objects with stories hiding inside of them: a window washer’s squeegee used to help a group break out of a stalled elevator in one of the Twin Towers; a family photo discovered in the rubble; a paper cup used by an escaping stranger to give water to another.  

The author of Hiroshima  offers readers something akin to writing teacher Robert McKee’s “inciting incident.”  This is the moment that kicks off the energy of the story, the instant when normal life is transformed into story life.  All the characters described in the first paragraph are experiencing a version of normal, everyday life- given the context of an ongoing world war- but whatever their expectations, they were changed forever at the exact moment the atomic bomb flashed over Hiroshima.”  

Writing Lesson #2 

“Given the exact nature of the news and the death toll, the author’s narrative feels somehow underwritten, in a good way.  There are no elaborate metaphors.  The author keeps the focus on the cast of characters and not on his own feelings or emotions.  In general, this is a good rhetorical strategy.  The more powerful or consequential the content, the more the author should “get out of the way.”  This does not mean that craft must be set aside.  Instead, it means craft must be used to create a feeling of understatement.”

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Beyond the World War II We Know

How We Retain the Memory of Japan’s Atomic Bombings: Books

Literature is a refuge we turn to when we are forced to confront contradictions that lie beyond reason, writes the Japanese novelist Yoko Ogawa.

By Yoko Ogawa

In the latest article from “ Beyond the World War II We Know ,” a series by The Times that documents lesser-known stories from the war, we asked Yoko Ogawa, an award-winning Japanese author, to reflect on the literature unleashed by the atomic bombings. This article was translated by Stephen Snyder.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima occurred on Aug. 6. The bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9. The announcement of surrender came on the 15th. In Japan, August is the time when we remember the dead.

This year, the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings would have been observed during the Tokyo Olympics. But the Games were postponed because of the spread of the novel coronavirus, and we will be left instead to offer our prayers for the dead in an atmosphere of unexpected calm.

The final torch bearer at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics was a relatively unknown, 19-year-old, track and field competitor named Yoshinori Sakai , a young man who was born in Hiroshima on the day the bomb was dropped. There was something extraordinary about the sight of him, clad simply in white shirt and shorts , running up the long stairway that led to the caldron he was meant to light. He embodied purity, a sense of balance and an overwhelming youthfulness. Those who saw him must have been amazed to realize that the world had gathered in Japan to celebrate this festival of sport a mere 19 years after the end of the war. Yet there he was, a young man born of unprecedented, total destruction, a human being cradling a flame, advancing step by step. No doubt there were political motivations behind the selection of the final runner, but there was no questioning the hopeful life force personified by this young man from Hiroshima.

Sadly, in the intervening years, we have failed to realize the dream of a nuclear-free world. Even in Japan, the memories fade. According to a 2015 survey conducted by NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting organization, only 69 percent of the residents of Hiroshima and 50 percent of the residents of Nagasaki could correctly name the month, day and year when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. At the national level, the rate fell to 30 percent. The cloud of oblivion rises, and the time is coming soon when it will no longer be possible to hear directly from witnesses about their experiences.

So, what can those who have not seen with their own eyes do to preserve the memories of those who have? How do we ensure that witnesses continue to be heard? In the wake of unimaginable horrors — endless wars, the Holocaust, Chernobyl, Fukushima … not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki — humankind has constantly confronted the problem of the continuity of memory. How do we inscribe within us things that happened long ago and far away that have no apparent connection to our lives, not simply as learned knowledge but exactly as though we had experienced them ourselves? How do we build a fragile bark to carry these memories safely to the far shore, to the minds of the next generation? One thing is certain: It is a task for which political and academic thinking and institutions are poorly suited, quite simply because the act of sharing the memories of another human being is fundamentally an irrational one.

So we appeal to the power of literature, a refuge we turn to when forced to confront contradictions that lie beyond reason or theory. Through the language of literature, we can finally come to empathize with the suffering of nameless and unknown others. Or, at very least, we can force ourselves to stare without flinching at the stupidity of those who have committed unforgivable errors and ask ourselves whether the shadow of this same folly lurks within us as well.

I myself have listened intently to the voices of those who lived during the era of Nazi Germany, by reading and rereading Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl,” Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and Primo Levi’s “If This Is a Man.” From Frank, for example, I learned the invaluable truth that a human being can still grow and develop even when living in hiding. From Frankl’s observation that “the best of us did not return” from the concentration camps, I learned to feel the boundless suffering of those who survived and were forced to live on. And when, through these books, the connection was made between my existence here and now and that earlier time when I was not yet alive, I could feel my horizons expanding, a new field of vision opening.

Likewise, Japanese literature continues to tell the story of the atomic bombs. Bomb literature occupies a special place in every genre — fiction, poetry, drama, nonfiction. For example, anyone born in 1962, as I was, would be familiar with Miyoko Matsutani’s “Two Little Girls Called Iida,” the story of a magical talking chair that unites two girls across time in a house where the calendar is forever frozen on Aug. 6. Or, with one of the indispensable works of modern Japanese literature, Masuji Ibuse’s “Black Rain,” with its excruciating account of the aftermath of the bomb. Kenzaburo Oe, still in his 20s and barely embarked on his literary career, visited Hiroshima and gave us “Hiroshima Notes,” his report on the extraordinary human dignity of the bomb victims enduring the harsh reality of survivors. There is no end to similar examples.

But there is one novel so admired and avidly read, even today, that it is regularly included in school textbooks: Tamiki Hara’s “Summer Flowers.” A work by a bomb victim himself, it records the period and experience in precise detail.

Born in Hiroshima in 1905, Hara had been living in Tokyo, contributing fiction and poetry to literary magazines, when his wife died suddenly in 1944. In February 1945, he returned to his birthplace, exactly as though he’d “had a rendezvous with the tragedy that was coming to Hiroshima,” as he later wrote. On the morning of Aug. 6, he was at home in his windowless bathroom — a fact that possibly saved his life. Fortunate to have escaped serious injury, Hara spent the following days wandering the burning city and recording his experiences in his notebook, a record that later became “Summer Flowers.”

The novel begins two days before the bombing, as the protagonist pays a visit to his wife’s grave. He washes the stone and places summer flowers on it, finding the sight cool and refreshing. But this opening passage is haunted by sadness, a horrible premonition of the impossibility of accounting for the loss of his beloved wife and the innumerable corpses he will see a short time later.

The author’s description of the protagonist as he flees to the river for refuge is detailed and almost cold in tone. The language is concise, and words that might express sentiment are nowhere to be found. Horrors of the sort no human being had ever witnessed unfold one after the other before the narrator’s eyes, and he finds himself unable to express anything as vague as mere emotion.

Faces so swollen that it was impossible to tell whether they were men or women. Heads charred over with lumps like black beans. Voices crying out again and again for water. Children clutching hands together as they whispered faintly, “Mother … Father.” People prying fingernails from corpses or stripping off belts as keepsakes of the dead. The narrator describes a city filled with the stench of death: “In the vast, silvery emptiness, there were roads and rivers and bridges, and scattered here and there, raw and swollen corpses. A new hell, made real through some elaborate technology.”

When the atomic bomb snatched away all things human, it might have incinerated words themselves at the same time. Yet, led perhaps by the hand of providence, he tucked a notebook and a pencil in with his food and medicine. And what he wrote down in his notebook was not mere words. He created a symbol for something he had heard from the dead and dying that simply could not be expressed in words. Vestiges, scraps of evidence that these human beings who had slipped mutely away had, indeed, existed.

Having lost his wife to illness and then, in his solitude, encountered the atomic bomb, Hara’s creative work was constantly rooted in the silence of the dead. He was a writer, a poet, who stood in the public square, not to call out to his fellow man but to mutely endure the contradiction of putting into words the voiceless voices of those whose words had been taken from them.

Hara is the author of a short poem titled “This Is a Human Being,” a work that transcends bitterness and anger, seeking to gently capture the failing voice of someone who no longer appears human:

This is a human being. See how the atom bomb has changed it. The flesh is terribly bloated, men and women all taking the same shape. Ah! “Help me!” The quiet words of the voice that escapes the swollen lips in the festering face. This is a human being. This is a human face.

Reading it, we can’t help being reminded of “If This Is a Man,” by Primo Levi, chemist and concentration camp survivor. Right at the outset, Levi poses the question:

Consider if this is a man Who works in the mud Who does not know peace Who fights for a scrap of bread Who dies because of a yes or a no

I have no idea whether Levi and Hara were acquainted, but we can hear the resonance between their words. One asks whether this is a human being; the other answers that it is. In their work, we find the meeting of one man who struggles to preserve the quality of humanity and another who is determined not to lose sight of that same quality — a meeting of the minds that continues to reverberate into the future. In the world of literature, the most important truth can be portrayed in a simple, meaningless coincidence. With the help of literature, the words of the dead may be gathered and placed carefully aboard their small boat, to flow on to join the stream of reality.

A further coincidence: perhaps with the sense that they had accomplished their duty as survivors, or perhaps because the burden of living with the horrors of their pasts was too great, the two men took their own lives, Hara in 1951 and Levi in 1987 (some dispute that Levi’s death was a suicide).

As I write, I have in front of me Hiromi Tsuchida’s collection of photographs of bomb artifacts offered by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I am struck by a picture of a lunchbox and canteen that belonged to a middle school student named Shigeru Orimen. His class had been mobilized for the war effort and was working in the city on the morning of Aug. 6. Shigeru was 500 meters from ground zero when the bomb fell. His mother discovered his body among the corpses piled on the river bank and recovered the lunchbox and canteen from his bag. She remembered he had left that morning saying how much he was looking forward to lunch, since she had made roasted soybean rice. The lunchbox was twisted out of shape, the lid cracked open, and the contents were no more than a lump of charcoal.

But, in fact, this tiny box contained something more important: the innocence of a young boy who had been full of anticipation for his simple lunch, and his mother’s love. Even when the last victim of the atomic bomb has passed away and this lunchbox is no more than a petrified relic, as long as there is still someone to hear the voice concealed within it, this memory will survive. The voices of the dead are eternal, because human beings possess the small boat — the language of literature — to carry them to the future.

Yoko Ogawa is the author of numerous books, including “The Memory Police,” a 2019 National Book Award finalist. Stephen Snyder is the Dean of Language Schools and Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont.

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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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Hiroshima Day - [August 6,1945] Cause & Effect On Hiroshima

What is hiroshima day.

Hiroshima Day is observed on 6th August every year.

The United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 th August 1945 during the course of the Second World War leading to the deaths of over 20,000 soldiers and about 70,000–126,000 civilians. A similar bomb was dropped on another Japanese city of Nagasaki three days later leading to a further 80000 deaths. This was the first and only instance of the usage of nuclear weapons in the world. Read more about this incident for the IAS exam .

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Hiroshima Day – Series of Events

• The war in Europe had concluded after Germany surrendered on 8 th May 1945. But the war in the Pacific continued between the Allies and Japan.
• The Allies asked for an unconditional surrender from Japan at the Potsdam Declaration in July 1945. This ultimatum was, however, ignored by Japan who continued waging the war.
• The US had been developing nuclear weaponry through the Manhattan Project since the 1940s, especially after receiving information that Nazi Germany was also involved in such research. By August, the project had developed two kinds of atomic bombs.
• The US army had created a separate unit in 1944 called the 509 th Composite Group in order to operationalize the nuclear weapons usage in the war.
• After shortlisting five targets, the ‘Target Committee’ selected Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of their importance and industrial and military facilities.
• The orders for the atomic bombs to be used in Japanese cities were issued on July 25 th .
• On 6 th August, a B-29 (US army bomber) dropped the ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima. Little Boy was the codename for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima which was a uranium gun-type bomb.

Impact of Bombing  – Hiroshima Day

• Between 90000 and 146000 people died in Hiroshima. The city was immediately devastated after the bombing.
• For months after the bombing, people continued to die because of radiation sickness, burns and other wounds. Malnutrition and illness also compounded matters. Although most of the victims were civilians, some military personnel also were killed.

Other Similar Events (Cause & Impact)

• In Nagasaki, which was bombed on 9 th August, about 80000 people were killed. The bomb dropped on this city was nicknamed ‘Fat Man’. It was a plutonium implosion-type bomb.
• On 15 th August 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allies. The War officially ended on 2 nd September when Japan signed the instrument of surrender.
• While many in the US defended its use of the atomic bombs arguing that it brought an end to the war which otherwise would have cost more lives, the legality and ethicality of the use of those weapons are still debated.
• Japan became a pacifist and non-nuclear country as a result of the horrendous effects of nuclear weapons.
• The effects of the radiation on the cities continued for decades with increased risks of cancer, birth defects and other anomalies in the survivors.
• In Japan, the survivors are called ‘Hibakusha’ (Japanese for ‘explosion-affected people’). There is about 650000 Hibakusha recognised by the government.
• Every year, August 6 th is observed as ‘Hiroshima Day’ in memory of the victims.
• The use of atomic bombs by the US also led to the Soviet Union starting its nuclear weapons program. The Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949. This was the beginning of the Cold War .

1862 : The Madras High Court was inaugurated. 1925 : Death of Surendranath Banerji, former president of the Indian National Congress.

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Notable Narratives

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.

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Hiroshima: Synopsis, Ideas, and Writing Connections

Hiroshima : Synopsis, Ideas, and Writing Connections

Hiroshima follows the lives of six Japanese who survived the 1945 atomic bombing of the city that became the title of the book. The initial four chapters of the nonfiction book were written in 1946. An additional chapter was added in 1985, briefly recounting each character's previous four decades.

Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk, had just sat down in her office when the bomb struck. For many hours she lay buried beneath a pile of books. Her leg was crushed. Finally, she was dragged out and left under a lean-to for days. When at last she was treated, her leg healed improperly and, despite several operations, she walked with a limp. Her fiance abandoned her and she eventually became a nun, administering group homes.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a wealthy physician, watched his house tumble into a river; he was trapped in tree branches while wearing only his underwear. After struggling free, he escaped to a friend's house in the north. Years later he drowned himself in alcohol and luxury. He died after spending nine years in a coma brought on by a suicide attempt.

Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widowed seamstress, was caught in her home's rubble with her children, but managed to free them and escape to a relative's home. Impoverished, she suffered many years with radiation sickness, finally finding a job that accommodated her handicaps. She retired in 1966, moving into a pleasant old age.

Jesuit Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, later called Father Takakura, was reading in his room when the bomb struck. He lost consciousness and later found himself wandering aimlessly through the home's gardens. Dedicated to service, Father Kleinsorge spent the next few weeks tirelessly ministering to the bomb victims. Despite his debilitating radiation illnesses, he continued similar ministry until his death in 1977.

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki was working in a Hiroshima hospital on August 6, 1945. One of the only surviving medics in the area, he spent the next three days treating thousands of patients with barely any supplies. He became a very wealthy physician in later years, only lightly affected physically by the bomb, but haunted by the mass cremations of unidentified bomb victims in the days following the blast.

Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, also barely affected physically, ministered to bomb victims immediately after the explosion, and spent the following decades lobbying for peace and the treatment of the disfigured.

The responses of each hibakusha – bomb survivor – vary greatly and their lives curiously intertwine.

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• History of China

The Bombing of Hiroshima

Updated 18 October 2023

Subject History of China ,  World War II ,  Asia

Downloads 49

Category History ,  War ,  World

Topic Hiroshima ,  Atomic Bomb ,  Japan

As World War II was drawing to a close

The US released two nuclear weapons upon the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombings took place on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively. It happened right after the states obtained the consent of the United Kingdom which was a requirement by the Quebec agreement. The bombs resulted in the deaths of approximately 226,000 people, majority of whom were civilians and in the following five months. The children flesh – who attended Honkawa elementary school - did not hold up within the concrete walls of the school. Nothing was left, absolutely nothing. No remnants of their parents to bury. No single human being who was within a 1.2-kilometer radius of the hypocenter survived within a few seconds of the 8:15 a.m. bombing. (Asada, 1988, 2007)

Why bomb Japan?

In his article, "Japan's Delayed Surrender," Herbert P. Bix's 1995 focused on Emperor Hirohito's conditions to delay Japan's surrender during the month’s preceding Japan's bombing. On the contrary, the emperor said that it was a "sacred decision" to delay the surrender in which the states took advantage of the divided government. Lawrence Freedman and Saki Dock rill (1994), proclaims that the States followed "a clear and coherent strategy of shock," which was a success. President Harry S. Truman had been issued with a warning by some of his advisers. They told him that any attempt to attack Japan would result in American casualties. But all advice fell into deaf ears as he later gave the order to allow the new weapon to be used on Japan. An American bomber, Enola Gay, was instructed to drop the bomb over Hiroshima. In just 72 hours later, the states dropped another bomb Nagasaki, and these actions prompted Japan to announce its surrender.

In recent years since the inhuman massacre of the Japanese

Some Japanese and other historians suggested that the main aim of the weapon was based on two primary objectives. One of the two was to bring the Japanese war with other nations to an offensive end and consequently additional American lives. Secondly, it was to demonstrate the new weapon's power to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had poorly deteriorated hence the weapon would have proved its worth. The havoc bestowed upon Hiroshima was not enough to convince the Japanese War Council to accept defeat and call for an unconditional surrender. The States had already planned to deliver another blow by a bomber, nicknamed "Fat Man," on August 11. However, the meteorologists said that there was bad weather expected for that day and hence the states pushed the date to August 9th. Nagasaki was bombed at 11.02 pm, and the Japanese government had no alternative other than to surrender. (Asada, 1988, 2007)

The main reason why Hiroshima was targeted

And not any other city was because it had not been previously targeted by the United States air force conventional bombings on Japan. Therefore, it was regarded as the best place to experiment the effects of the nuclear weapon. The allies had a fear that any attempt to attack Japan would result in fatalities since Japan had a robust military base that coincidentally, has its support in Hiroshima. The bomb was seen as the only suitable way to bring the war to an end. (Asada, 1988, 2007)

Effects of the bomb on Japanese

The United States bombings on Japan resulted in horrific casualties and significant long-term effects. Some of the effects are the exposure to radiations which increased the rates of cancer among the survivors. Many scientists up to date are under the influence that the survivors faced health effects and are at high rates of getting cancer. (Roesch, 1987)

Over the next few years, the cities of Japan saw a spike in leukemia. It was the most deadly long-term side effect that occurred two years after the bombing. It was estimated that people caught up in the blast had a 46% chance being affected by leukemia. Later, there were increased cases of breast cancer. Young women were at a higher risk of getting breast cancer if and only if they were exposure of more than 100 rads. (Wanebo, et al., 1968) The exposers to radiation are three times as likely to develop breast cancer, than someone who wasn't exposed to radiation. Similar, there was an increase in patients with anemia, a disease relating to a situation where the blood fails to create enough red blood cells. To some individuals, the effect lasted for a long time lasting to even ten years. Increase in Cataract is when the lens of the eye becomes foggy. Cases cataracts came several years after the bombs. The first case was exactly three years after the bombing. (Folley et al., 1952)

Keloids. In 1946, keloids also developed. Keloid is a situation in which a scar is healing but heals too much, causing swelling and later abnormal growth. Radiations are believed to be the sole causes of keloids. The scar tissue grows and ends up looking like a crab. (Folley et al., 1952)

Birth Complications. A handful of surveys specifically completed in Nagasaki proved a high rate of infant deaths. The study demonstrated that 98 pregnant women exposed in the blast out of a possible 113 women gave birth to babies with some disabilities. The children suffered in the growth and the general development of their bodies and this resulted in some children being born with microcephaly, a condition where the head is smaller than required. Microcephaly cannot be cured. However, it can be treated. (Roesch, 1987)

When the bombs were dropped, they destroyed everything including the crops. People were worried that the waste fields could not support the growth of any plans and that the radiations were too much for them to live there. It was not safe. Only are some few years that the cities began to rebuild and the soil could inhabit some crops. As time passed by, the levels of radiation dropped significantly, and hence the places were considered safe for human inhabitation. (Roesch, 1987)

The effects of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more negative than positive. The bombs resulted in the death of many innocent civilians in the attempts to stop the war, which we might say was a positive effect of the bomb. However, we should not rest on the conclusion that nuclear bombing is the sole answer to surrendering. The United States should have sorted other ways to end the war without causing the devastating effects if the bombs in Japan. Eliminating nuclear weapons, no matter how worthy a project is, on its own cannot and will not put an end to "man's inhumanity to man." Therefore, the humanist position must always emphasize the importance of human life over political expediency.

Works Cited

Asada, Sadao. "The shock of the atomic bomb and Japan's decision to surrender: a reconsideration." Pacific Historical Review 67.4 (1998): 477-512.

Asada, Sadao. Culture shock and Japanese-American relations: Historical essays. University of Missouri Press, 2007.

Folley, Jarrett H., Wayne Borges, and Takuso Yamawaki. "Incidence of leukemia in survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan." The American journal of medicine 13.3 (1952): 311-321

Freedman, Laurence and Saki Dockrill. “Hiroshima: a strategy of shock.” From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. Palgrave Macmillan, London 1994. 191-212.

Herbert P. Bix, "Japan's Delayed Surrender: A Reinterpretation," Diplomatic History, 19 (1995), 197-225.

Roesch, William C. "US-Japan joint reassessment of atomic bomb radiation dosimetry in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. DS86. Dosimetry System 1986. Vol. 1." (1987).

Wanebo, C. K., et al. "Breast cancer after exposure to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." New England Journal of Medicine 279.13 (1968): 667-671.

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