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| The editorial that accompanied John Hersey's "Hiroshima" when it appeared in a 1946 issue of The New Yorker. |
This
coming August will mark the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The way we choose to memorialize particular historical
events is of course a fraught and complex process (case in point: the recent debates over the meaning and message of the
World Trade Center Memorial).[1] Come August, I’m certain there will be a
profusion of thoughtful commemorative events both both in the US and abroad,
but I’d like to propose a more humble way to memorialize the bombings: read (or
re-read, as the case may be) John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
Hiroshima first appeared as an article in the August 31, 1946 issue of the New Yorker. At the time, the editors
felt so strongly about the story’s narrative power and political import that
they devoted the entire issue to it.[2]
Later that year Knopf published it as a book. Hiroshima follows six survivors from the moments immediately
preceding the bomb’s detonation to one year after. We meet Toshiko Sasaki, a
local factory worker, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a pastor at the Hiroshima Methodist
Church, Willhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit priest, Masakazu Fujii, a family
doctor, Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widower seamstress, and Terufumi Sasaki, a hospital
physician, as they navigate the confusion wrought by a city that had been
suddenly obliterated in a matter of seconds. Most immediately striking about Hiroshima is its level of detail.
Hersey’s interlocutors recall scenes of human carnage and horror with
remarkable clarity. Hersey’s lucid prose style amplifies the immediacy of the
narrative; it is as though the survivors are recounting their stories directly
to us, with Hersey merely acting as the medium of transmission.
The book was an
immediate bestseller, and its publication is often pointed to as an event that forced
Americans to come to terms with the morality and meaning of atomic bombs. And
indeed, Hiroshima did indeed do the
important work of giving a human face to the realities of nuclear war. Thinking
about the book in the context of broader contemporaneous culture, however, I
wonder if we haven’t overstated the book’s impact. In fact, by continuing to
follow the life of one of Hersey’s informants into the years after the book’s
publication, we can see just how ambivalent Americans remained about their
complicity in the bomb.
Ten years after Hiroshima’s publication, Kiyoshi
Tanimoto, the Methodist pastor whose story Hersey told, was featured as the
subject of an episode of “This is Your Life,” a television show that surprised guests
with figures from their past who had in some way influenced the way their lives
had turned out. In Tanimoto’s episode (which can be viewed here),
we meet his former classmates from theology school, his wife, and a mentor from
his youth, but the climax is his introduction to Captain Robert Lewis. Lewis
was one of the co-pilots of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on
Hiroshima. In this moment, Tanimoto is stone-faced and visibly uncomfortable,
saying only a few words to Lewis. Lewis nervously describes the experience of
receiving the order and dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, explaining that after
the mission was complete, he wrote in his log book: “My God, what have we
done?” Lewis’ appearance is the only point in the show where we see an
expression of remorse. Otherwise, the bombing is described almost as if it had
been a natural disaster: something that had caused death and destruction on an
unfathomable scale, but that no one could have prevented. In its sentimentalizing
of Tanimoto’s life experiences and the reduction of blame to a single pilot,
this “This is Your Life” episode, in my mind, is more emblematic of the state
of American thought on the bomb than Hiroshima.
Taken together, Hiroshima and
“This is Your Life” represent the conflict Americans faced in grappling with
the bomb: a recognition that what had happened had caused profound death and
destruction, but an inability to accept that their citizenship made them in
some way personally complicit in the act.
[2] For those readers looking for a more
explicitly history of science-related book, Susan Lindee’s Suffering Made Real is a good place to start.
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