HIROSHIMA, 8:15

A long-forgotten firsthand account of one of history’s greatest tragedies.

On the hot morning of August 6, 1945, Methodist minister Tanimoto was helping a neighbor move furniture when “a sharp flash of light streaked out of a dim, brown cloud from the east toward the west.” A frightened Tanimoto fell face-first between two large garden rocks and rode out the blast of fiery wind that followed. Eventually, he got up and, though in shock, began to comprehend that his city had been the victim of what he thought was “a full-scale, massive air raid” of the sort that had burned Tokyo to the ground in March of that year. A German Catholic priest told him otherwise, that it was a uranium bomb, adding, “Similar ones have been studied in Germany.” Tanimoto’s record of what happened next, not unexpectedly, relates an ever-unfolding hellscape. That record of incinerated bodies and unquenchable fires is valuable in itself, but a notable point distinguishes it further, namely his contribution to John Hersey’s Hiroshima, in which his story was first told. When Tanimoto finished writing his own account (in English, in which he was fluent), he sent it to Hersey, who filed it away. The manuscript wound up at Yale, where Hersey’s papers were housed, and was rescued in December 2023 by Hersey’s grandson, Cannon. Hersey’s own book was published in a Japanese translation prepared by Tanimoto after having been blocked for several years by the occupation government for fear that it would stir up resentment. Among the many memorable turns in Tanimoto’s book are his notes on the Japanese people’s growing anger at a corrupt military leadership that concocted “a reckless war that could not be won”—with the surprising rejoinder that “the American use of the bomb could not have been avoided, so far as it had been a war.”

An essential addition to the literature of nuclear warfare.