Everybody already knew the facts and the statistics and the devastating outcome of August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. But nobody understood or was able to establish some palpable sense of how horrific those moments leading up to the bombing was. In Hiroshima, or at least in the first chapter of John Hersey’s “journalistic masterpiece,” a human face is given to any speculation of what transpired that tragic morning. The first chapter is told through the memories of six survivors: Miss Toshiko Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Hersey grants readers the ability to empathize—albeit superficially—with the victims by giving us an account through the perspectives of the actual people who lived through the event.
Though I can understand how one can interpret Hersey’s objective tone to be too dry and journalistic, I think the way he masterfully recounts each survivor’s story “makes up” for what may be perceived as indifference. Hersey deftly weaves their poignant narratives through the intimate and meticulous details of that day’s events for each person. In his storytelling, there is a tangible patience as he is intent on the reader absorbing every single action made and thought had by the person being written about and every single feature of the setting the person was in. He depicts the paranoid culture and the day-to-day insecurity through the drudgeries and descriptions of those six survivors.
For the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto: “…almost sick with anxiety…Hiroshima has been getting such warnings almost every night for weeks…a rumor was going around that the Americans were saving something special for the city” (Page 2). The details of Mr. Tanimoto’s physical attributes on Page 3 were sharply contradictory in a way that added to the tense and “uneasy days before the bomb fell.” Mention of “a sleepless night, weeks of worry and unbalanced diet” (Page 3) and “people obsessed with a fear of being spied upon—perhaps almost obsessed himself—he found himself growing increasingly uneasy” (Page 4) drew an image of what the citizens were suffering through. For Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura: “she thought of the number of trips they had made in past weeks, all to no purpose” (Page 7). For Dr. Masakazu Fujii: “he began turning patients away, on the ground that in case of a fire raid he would not be able to evacuate them” (Page 10). For Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge: “he felt the strain of being a foreigner in an increasingly xenophobic Japan” (Page 11). Dr. Terufumi Sasaki has an “unpleasant nightmare” (Page 13), while Miss Toshiko Sasaki attends the memorial service of a former employee who had committed suicide. Hersey gives us an accurate portrayal of what happened on that day through the eyes of survivors who had been in the vicinity of where the bomb hit.
This relates back to our discussion from last week: what responsibility do we have to the subject we are writing about? I believe Hersey was respectful in his recounting of their stories because he pays so much attention to and makes sure to include their mundane routines and everything that happens to them on that day. There are some seemingly trivial observations in the moments leading up to the bombing that Hersey includes that create a sense of foreboding. For instance, “The morning was perfectly clear and so warm that the day promised to be uncomfortable…The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant” (Page 4/5) and “Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker” (Page 6) and “a terrible hullabaloo of hammering, wedging, ripping, and splitting” (Page 7).
There is also a pattern in the way Hersey tells each of the survivors’ stories. Hersey makes a point to indicate that all six survivors “had time to react” as they all were far enough away from the center due to “small items of chance or volition…that spared him” (Page 2). Though I’m not sure why he writes about the survivors in the order he does, of if there even is any significance to it, I noticed that he comes full circle in his first chapter, beginning his account with Miss Toshiko Sasaki and ending with her story. The fundamental difference here between this piece and the pieces by Obama and Kinkaid, Hurston and Levi is clearly the subjective vs. objective. Hersey’s piece is a work of reportage and of supreme objectivity. He does not—at least as far as I can tell from the first chapter—judge the decision to use the phone, he is purely telling the true stories of six survivors and putting the consequences of the bomb in context of the effect it has on their lives.