About Hiroshima

I first read John Hersey’s Hiroshima when I was in my early twenties. Hiroshima is a name I’ve known for as long as I can remember; my parents were active in their local branch of CND in the late 1970s into the early 1980s. As a child, I, and my brothers, were taken on marches and demonstrations: the slogans “No more Hiroshimas”, “No more Nagasakis” were ever present, along with images on placards, and, at home, on CND literature (the CND publication, Sanity, would fall through the letterbox with regularity), always present, somewhere, on the bookshelves. On a road outside our local swimming baths, on what I retrospectively realise must surely have been the fortieth anniversary, a series of outlines of human figures were painted on the tarmac, appearing, again, with the words: “No more Hiroshimas”. Possibly at the same time, I remember a display at the adjacent library with a map, which my parents helped create, showing the destruction of a single nuclear strike on central London, and what the effects would be on our dormitory suburb. Were they also involved in the act of civil disobedience outside the swimming baths?

Although I did look at the CND material at home, I didn’t read Hiroshima until much later. The threat of nuclear annihilation in the atmosphere of renewed Cold War tension at the time was part of the background to my childhood, infecting my dreams and nightmares: I recall When The Wind Blows (the book, Raymond Briggs had been a favourite due to Fungus and Father Christmas; I didn’t see the film until much later), Threads (which I didn’t watch; my parents did; other children at school had been allowed to watch it and described scenes from it with gory fascination the next day), the CND demos and their apocalyptic imagery, cruise missiles, Aldermaston and the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, being very aware of the air raid siren on top of a tall pole, which we would pass on the way to the nearest tube station, no doubt a remnant from the previous war, ominously, silently waiting to fulfil its purpose.

An early key text for Undertow Research was an article by Roy Peter Clark titled The power of understatement in the age of hyperbole. Under a photo of President Trump, this was a short article which itself referenced an earlier piece by Clark on Barack Obama’s visit to Hiroshima in 2016. This piece, For Obama’s visit, let’s revisit ‘Hiroshima’ — the book, not the city, analyses the first “remarkable” sentence of John Hersey’s Hiroshima:

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.

Breaking down this sentence into its three component parts, Clark shows how the structure itself creates the understatement, a model for Hersey’s style throughout: beginning with its temporal exactitude, then placing the detonation of the bomb almost as a throwaway aside, and ending with a detailed description of a woman’s mundane start to her working day. In a similar fashion, the second, long sentence introduces the other five survivors around which Hiroshima is structured. Hersey interviewed many more eyewitnesses, but concentrating on just six allows the reader to follow a clear narrative: Hiroshima is considered to be a forerunner of the New Journalism in its novelistic reportage technique. Originally intended to run, serialised, across four issues of The New Yorker in 1946, a year after the bombing, William Shawn, its managing editor, suggested to Harold Ross, founder and editor-in-chief, that Hersey’s piece would benefit from being published in its entirety. This necessitated devoting the entire August 31st issue to Hiroshima. This was done with strict editorial secrecy. The August 31st number of The New Yorker appeared with a ‘holiday issue’ cover with no indication of the contents within; there were the usual listings, then a terse editorial statement explaining the unusual nature of the issue. At the time, although there had been reports on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these had focussed of the destructive power of the atomic bombs, concentrating on numbers - numbers often too massive to comprehend. Hiroshima told the first hand experiences of six people instead. Although there seems to be little explicit information as to what determined Hersey’s choices, those six appear carefully chosen: two notably quite different doctors, Dr Masakazu Fujii and Dr Terufumi Sasaki, the unrelated Miss Toshiko Sasaki, Mrs Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widow with young children, and two priests, the Methodist Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto and Jesuit Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, the latter, although German, perhaps importantly, given the wartime demonisation of Japan, a European, a Westerner.

In The power of understatement in the age of hyperbole, Clark distills his previous analysis of that first sentence to the rhetorical figure of litotes - the opposite of hyperbole: “How do you begin to write about one of the most terrifying and momentous events in human history? The answer is ‘softly’ or ‘slowly.’” Clark is revisiting his earlier article reflecting on Obama’s visit to Hiroshima in light of tensions between North Korea and the United States, and the reactions of Obama’s successor, not given to understatement, noting “The job of a reporter and the job of a president are different. But it should be noted that it has been a tradition in presidential language – especially during crises – to speak softly, knowing that the stick is there if you need it.” Hersey later wrote that in Hiroshima, "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.” Clark writes, “With overstatement – as often demonstrated in the tweets of President Trump – attention goes to the speaker or writer. With understatement, you barely notice the writer.“

It’s difficult to retrospectively recapture the impact of Hiroshima’s publication in 1946. The New Yorker sold out within hours of publication; it was read in its entirety on the radio in the US, and in Britain; and published in book form within weeks, and has not been out of print since. I first read it as a blue-spined Penguin paperback, reprinted in the 1970s. The New Yorker republished it digitally on their website to mark the 70th anniversary of the bomb; in July 1985, forty years after, The New Yorker published Hiroshima - The Aftermath, in which John Hersey returned to Hiroshima to follow the lives of the six eyewitnesses (this became the fifth chapter to later editions of the book). Father Wilhelm Kleisorge had become a Japanese citizen, changing his name to Makoto Takakura, and had died in 1977; Dr. Fujii successfully rebuilt his medical practice and died in 1973; Toshiko Sasaki endured months of surgery to repair her badly broken leg, worked in a orphanage, and became a nun; Dr. Sasaki had carried out important research into radiation sickness in the immediate weeks and months ofter the bombing before founding a geriatric hospital; Reverend Tanimoto translated Hersey’s Hiroshima into Japanese after the US Occupation administration lifted the suppression of its publication in Japan, undertook fund-raising speaking tours of the States, and (without warning) met Robert Lewis, pilot of the Enola Gay, on This is Your Life; Hatsuyo Nakamura, suffering ill-health, found it difficult to support herself and her children in the immediate years after 1945, forced to sell her sewing machine for treatment, resorting to menial odd jobs for many years before her life improved:

As Nakamura-san struggled to get from day to day, she had no time for attitudinizing about the bomb or anything else. She was sustained, curiously, by a kind of passivity, summed up in a phrase she herself sometimes used—‘Shikata ga-nai’, meaning, loosely, ‘It can’t be helped.’


Nicholas Middleton

Roy Peter Clark, The power of understatement in the age of hyperbole, and For Obama’s visit, let’s revisit ‘Hiroshima’ — the book, not the city
John Hersey, Hiroshima, and Hiroshima - The Aftermath
Steve Rothman, The Publication of "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker
Caroline Raphael, How John Hersey's Hiroshima revealed the horror of the bomb