I discovered The Saturday Review of Literature in the
early seventies, after reading an article about Norman Cousins, the then
editor. About a decade later, the
magazine ceased publication. The second
thing which struck me was a blurb on John Hersey’s Hiroshima: “Everyone able to read should read it.” The early seventies were the days of antiwar
rallies, and calls to ban nuclear weapons.
Of course I had heard of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the
justifications for using the atomic bomb in 1945 as a way to end World War II
quickly and save many millions of military and civilian lives. John Hersey’s work really opened my eyes to
the horrors of nuclear weapons.
The original history
was updated about four decades later to show the long term effects of the
bomb. Hersey tells the story through the
memoirs of six civilians who were in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 at 8:15 AM
when the bomb exploded. The curious
thing is the completely random steps these individuals had taken which took
them out of the direct effects of the blast.
Hersey wrote, “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 guess. At
that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fuijii was settling down to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private
hospital, […]; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of
her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the
path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German
priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top
floor of his order’s three-story mission house, […]; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a
young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross
Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen […];
and the Revernd Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church,
paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and
prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from the town in
fair of the massive B-29 [bomber] raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to
suffer” (3-4). These six individuals
lived to describe the aftermath of the explosion.
At first, they all
thought a bomb had hit close to their location, but when they emerged from the
wreckage, the amount of destruction was beyond imagination. As time passed and those who had lived
through the terror, did not want to refer to themselves as “survivors” in fear
of causing some slight insult to the victims.
Instead, they referred to themselves as “hibakusha” or literally,
“explosion-affected persons” (92). The
“hibakusha” struggled for years to hold together what remained off their
families, friends, and their own lives.
For example, it wasn’t until 1951 that Mrs. Nakamura was able to move
into a new house. Dr. Sasaki spent the
next five years removing ugly keloid scars from residents of the city. Of course, as long term effects of the
explosion began to surface, the full extent of the horrors of nuclear war
emerged.
Yet today, we live
on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Nations struggle to build nuclear weapons. Some call for using these weapons to further
religious, political, or economic interests.
As is the case in so many examples of war, some have forgotten the
lessons of history. The Saturday Review was correct: “Everyone able to read [John
Hersey’s book] should read it. 5 stars.
--Chiron, 12/6/16
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