Brief summary

'Hiroshima' by John Hersey is a journalistic account of six survivors' experiences in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. It provides a sobering look at the devastating effects of nuclear warfare.

Table of Contents

What’s in it for me? Discover what happened to six people in Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped.

How does it feel to experience an atom bomb explosion? What does it do to a city and the people in it? And how does it feel to be a survivor when more than a hundred thousand around you die?

These are the questions that the journalist John Hersey asked in 1946, the year after the United States dropped an atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

His astonishing account, first published in the New Yorker and later as a stand-alone book, tells the story of six of the relatively lucky ones, all stationed far enough out from the center not to have died immediately. Their intertwining tales tell of shock, compassion, pain, and determination.

Hersey’s book is a journalistic classic, which helped pave the way for the New Journalism school of the likes of Truman Capote several decades later, using novelistic techniques to tell real-life stories with amazing impact.

In 1985, Hersey returned to the city and discovered what had happened to the six in the decades since, writing a new chapter.

This Blink takes you right through from the moment the bomb landed to the mid-1980s. You’ll hear about all six of Hersey’s interviewees.

Needless to say, it contains some distressing material.

In this Blink, you’ll learn

how the explosion affected the weather;
how the people of Hiroshima tried to help each other; and
how the experience shaped their lives in the decades after.

The blast

It was exactly 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, and the chance movements of six Hiroshima residents – which way they were walking, where they were sitting, the precise way they were leaning over in their chair – happened to mean they survived.

When the atomic bomb dropped, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was helping a friend move his belongings to the edge of the city in case an air raid came. It was a still, quiet morning.

A huge flash of light appeared, and the two men ducked for cover. Mr. Tanimoto dove between some rocks. Like others, he heard no noise.

For Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a war widow, the flash was an intense white. She’d followed official advice to evacuate the city center, and was on the outskirts with her three young children, watching a neighbor reluctantly tear his house down – a measure taken to prevent the spread of fire, in case of an attack.

The intense white blast hurled her across the room. She was buried in debris, but unhurt. She heard a cry, “Mother!” How lucky they were: all three children survived and she was able to pull them free.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a jovial lover of middle-aged prosperity, was sitting on the porch in his underwear, reading the newspaper. At 8:15, before he knew it, he found himself suspended in the river, trapped fortuitously between two timbers – parts of the now submerged private hospital in which he’d been living.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit, was in the mission house, also reading in his underwear. The next thing he remembered, he was wandering around the vegetable garden, surveying a scene of utter devastation.

The only unhurt doctor at the Red Cross Hospital, the young Terufumi Sasaki, had come into work earlier than usual as he hadn’t slept well. He was walking down a corridor holding a blood specimen when the flash came. He ducked down, saying to himself, “Be brave!” His glasses and slippers flew off and the blood smashed on a wall.

Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a clerk at a tin works – not a relation of the doctor’s despite their shared surname – was at her desk in a room lined with books. She was turning her head away from a window when the entire building collapsed around her, trapping her under a mound of books and bookcases. Her leg hurt horribly.

But, by chance, she was alive.

Mr. Tanimoto

Mr. Tanimoto, the man helping a friend move to the edge of the city, poked his head out from between the rocks. It was an apocalyptic scene. The first thing he noticed was a parade of soldiers, dazed and covered in blood, emerging from a dugout they’d made in the hillside. The sky, previously so clear, was darkened by dust. It looked like twilight.

Rebuilding

These six, of course, were among the lucky ones. In the years and decades that followed, they all rebuilt their lives. Survivors of the bomb were known as hibakusha, and were treated with wariness by their compatriots. It was years before they began to receive state support.

Key ideas in Hiroshima