Mother Jones
The Lost Hiroshima Memoir
At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a minister who presided over a Methodist church in Hiroshima, was two miles outside the city, when a tremendous flash occurred in the sky. Uninjured by the blast, he rushed toward his home and his family, passing hordes of the dead and the gravely wounded—people severely burnt, some holding their eyeballs in their hands—and scenes of horrific devastation, as an immense conflagration consumed his city. He didn’t know what had happened. No one did. This level of destruction was incomprehensible. Tanimoto also couldn’t know at that moment, as he feared for his wife, young daughter, and his parishioners, that he would become one of the best-known survivors of this first act of nuclear warfare and devote the rest of his life to preventing a recurrence of such a hellish catastrophe.
Though I never met Tanimoto, I feel as if I know him. That’s because about two years ago, I was asked to edit his poignant and gripping memoir of that horrible day and the weeks and months that followed, an account that had been lost for decades. Today, the book is being published by Random House’s Modern Library under the title Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir. It’s a harrowing tale of the atomic bombing from ground zero and details the heroic action—though Tanimoto never called it that—he took to ferry the wounded across a river, using a small boat he found and only a pole to push it along, so these victims might find medical attention. As the city burned and he tended to survivors who had lost much of their flesh—many would not live long—he kept repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” The horror was numbing. An eyewitness later called Tanimoto a “rescuing angel.”
Kai Bird, a co-author of American Prometheus, the biography that inspired Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, praises Tanimoto’s work as a “stunning historical discovery and a heartrending testimony of human suffering.” Tanimoto bore witness to one of the most significant days in human history, and his remembrances—as gruesome and disturbing as they are—ought to be read by all.
My involvement in bringing his memoir to the public began with a trip I took to Japan two years ago. Early in my journalism career, I focused on arms control and nuclear proliferation issues—and then moved on to other topics after a year or two of having nightmares about nuclear attacks. In Japan, I felt compelled to visit Hiroshima, where I was moved by how the city had rebuilt, creating a Peace Park at its center, and dedicating itself to the abolition of nuclear weapons. The memorials to the estimated 140,000 killed by the atomic bomb were inspiring because they were free of bitterness and promoted a never-again message.
Upon my return to the United States, I wrote an essay for this newsletter, in which I observed, “Hiroshima is certainly a reminder that we live in a world imperiled by nuclear arsenals and that we have yet to fully address that danger—and that human cruelty can be excessive and that the total annihilation of human civilization remains a possibility. But the city’s commemoration of the tragedy has a beautiful side.”
A few months later, I was contacted by Donald Rosenfeld, a veteran film producer who as a young man was president of Merchant Ivory Productions (Howards End, A Room with a View, Jefferson in Paris, The Remains of the Day). He informed me he was currently developing a feature film dramatizing one of the greatest journalistic feats of the 20th century: John Hersey’s article on Hiroshima published by the New Yorker a year after the bomb was dropped.
This 30,000-word account—written after Hersey visited the devastated city—consumed a full issue of the magazine and was the first comprehensive depiction in Western media of what happened to the residents of Hiroshima that day, as well as how they were affected by radiation poisoning in the months afterward. For a year, the media had generally shied away from fully describing what had befallen the people of Hiroshima, and the military had downplayed—even dismissed—the injuries and deaths resulting from the bomb’s radiation. The American public had mostly been exposed to images of rubble, not photographs or accounts that showed the pain and suffering of the civilian victims.
The coverage was incomplete—or sanitized—for a variety of reasons. The US military, then occupying Japan, controlled access to the city and was not keen to have reports on the gruesome effects of the bomb, and anti-Japanese racism and antipathy toward a WWII enemy inhibited sympathy for those vaporized, crushed, or wounded in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hersey changed all this. His article, which would soon be a bestselling book, told the separate stories of six Hiroshima residents who had survived. The piece recreated the day from each of their vantages—a just-the-facts recounting of the horror, no adjectives. His intent was to let readers envision what would happen to them and their loved ones if their city or town were hit by an atomic bomb. One of the six witnesses was Tanimoto.
Hersey’s work was an instant phenomenon. The issue sold out. His article prompted stories in newspapers and magazines around the globe. It was serialized on the radio. Albert Einstein asked the New Yorker for a thousand copies that he could distribute. But no copies were left. Hersey made the world see—and understand—what an atomic blast truly did. It was one of the most consequential acts of journalism in modern history. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and much-acclaimed war correspondent—he was only 32—Hersey went on to a long and illustrious career as a journalist and writer. He died in 1993.
Rosenfeld was looking to make a movie covering Hersey’s pursuit of the Hiroshima story—there are twists and turns to the tale—and he asked if I wanted to be part of the project. Of course, I did. While we were figuring out my role in this endeavor—I read an early script and gave notes—he informed me that among Hersey’s papers stored at Yale University was a 221-page manuscript in English that Tanimoto had written in 1947 chronicling his experiences in Hiroshima. It was a more detailed accounting than what had appeared in Hersey’s article, told from the Japanese minister’s distinct perspective. At some point, Tanimoto, who passed away in 1986, had sent the typewritten manuscript to Hersey, and for years it had sat in a folder in a box. Tanimoto’s own family did not know it existed. Only a few researchers and scholars had come across it, and then Hersey’s grandson, Cannon Hersey, spotted the manuscript in late 2022.
As a side project to the Hersey film, Rosenfeld hoped to publish Tanimoto’s memoir. He asked if I would edit it and compose an introduction. I immediately said yes. What an honor it would be to help bring Tanimoto’s story to the public. Rosenfeld’s aim was to try to find a publisher for the memoir, but if that failed, he had a small publishing company of his own that could publish the work. I didn’t foresee huge market potential for the memoir but believed it would be a good deed to turn this forgotten manuscript into a book, no matter what happened after that.
So as the second Trump administration began, I found an escape from that chaos in editing Tanimoto’s terrifying reminiscences of August 6, 1945, and the months afterward, during which he contended with severe health problems, strove to rebuild his church, and headed toward what would be a decades-long career as an international peace activist.
Tanimoto had studied at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta prior to World War II and knew English. But passages in the memoir were written in a stiff English, some tough to understand. The manuscript included loads of details about routine church affairs. My goal was to make his memoir readable so this act of witnessing would have a chance to reach a wide audience. I dug up old maps of Hiroshima to check the names of streets, neighborhoods, rivers, and other geographic features. (In the memoir, Tanimoto notes his spelling skills were lacking.) I had to make sense of sections with confusing chronologies.
I did what editors do—and preserved Tanimoto’s straightforward recounting of the apocalyptic scenes he experienced, his rescue efforts, the many tragedies he saw, and the hardships he and other Hiroshima residents endured long after the bombing. In his memoir, he contemplated the morality of the nuclear attack—without bearing any ill will against the Americans—and its impact on human society. He described how he came to see his duty to spread the Christian faith as intertwined with his mission to prevent any more atomic bombings. As I note in an introduction to the book—which serves as a biography of Tanimoto and covers his long-lasting relationship with Hersey—Tanimoto encountered many travails as an antinuclear campaigner. His projects did not always pan out. But he stayed true to this cause until his last days.
Tanimoto’s memoir is more than a historical document. It’s a warning that the existential threat posed by the nuclear arsenals held by nine nations remains. We all live in peril, and human extinction—and global destruction—is only a few bad decisions away. That prospect is hard to grasp and absorb into our daily lives. As did Hersey, Tanimoto shows us the ghastly and inescapable reality of nuclear war—an alert that cannot be sounded often enough. The editors at Modern Library agreed. They acquired the memoir and are now enthusiastically promoting it widely.
As for the Hersey movie, the project is moving forward. Director Phil Joanou has written a script, and Rosenfeld is lining up financing. Tanimoto is a main character in the film, which, if it comes to be made, will further spread his crucial testimony. Until then, this book will share the simple but profound message to which he devoted his life: Do not forget.
In a moving foreword, his 81-year-old daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo, who as an infant survived the bombing because her mother managed to push her through an opening in the burning wreckage of their home that had collapsed on them, writes, “Human memory is fragile. It’s so convenient to forget unpleasant things, much easier than facing them. But if nuclear weapons are never used again, it will only be because of the memory of what happened to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. My father was one of the first to understand this clearly.” Tanimoto spent decades prodding people and governments throughout the world to not permit the memory of Hiroshima to fade. With this book, he is still reminding us.
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
