February 2017.
I read this short book when I was in high school, preparing a history essay on the Hiroshima bombing in August 1945. A few years ago I ran across the same green, hardcover edition that I read in Canada at a used bookstore here in Tokyo. so I bought it first just to have it around, and second with the vague idea that I might re-read it. I finally got around to re-reading it. I'm glad I did.
Hiroshima
by John Hersey
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1946)
B-san, or Mr. B, as the Japanese, with a mixture of respect and unhappy familiarity, called the B-29.
Pages 4-5.
Hiroshima was a fan-shaped city, lying mostly on the six islands formed by the seven estuarial rivers that branch out from the Ota River; its main commercial and residential districts, covering about foursquare miles in the center of the city, contained three-quarters of its population, which had been reduced by several evacuation programs from a wartime peak of 380,000 to a out 245,000.
Page 7.
Under what seemed to be a local dust loud, the day grew darker and darker.
Page 10.
As much of Hiroshima as he could see through the clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma. Clumps of smoke, near and far, had begun to push up through the general dust.
Page 25.
Except at the very enter, where the bomb itself ignited some fires, most of Hiroshima’s citywide conflagration was caused by inflammable wreckage falling on cooking stoves and live wires.
Page 28.
New fires were leaping up, and they spread quickly, and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot air and showers of cinders made it impossible to stand on the bridge any more.
Pages 32-33.
Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred.
Pages 33-34.
Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together. Many people were vomiting.
Page 35.
In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or domed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt.
Page 35.
Houses all around were burning, and the wind was now blowing hard.
Page 36.
On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns - of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.
Pages 39-40.
In general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery.
Page 40.
A great number sat and lay on the pavement, vomited, waited for death, and died.
Page 47.
They all felt terribly thirsty, and they drank from the river. AT once they were nauseated and began vomiting, and they retched the whole day. Others were also nauseated; they all thought (probably because of the strong odor of ionization, and “electrical smell” given off by the bomb’s fission) that they were sick from a gas the Americans had dropped.
Pages 47-48.
To distinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for most of the people lay still, with their eyes open.
Page 48.
The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke.
Page 49.
It began to rain. … The drops grew abnormally large, and someone shouted, “The Americans are dropping gasoline. They’re going to set fire to us!” (This alarm stemmed from one of the theories being passed through the park as to why so much of Hiroshima had burned: it was that a single plane had sprayed gasoline on the city and then somehow set fire to it in one flashing moment.)
Page 52.
The change was too sudden, from a busy city of two hundred and forty-five thousand that morning to a mere pattern of residue in the afternoon. The asphalt of the streets was still so soft and hot from the fires that walking was uncomfortable.
Page 53.
Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses.
Page 62.
At two minutes after eleven o’clock on the morning of August 9th, the second atomic bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki. It was several days before the survivors of Hiroshima knew they had company, because the Japanese radio and newspapers were being extremely cautious on the subject of the strange weapon.
Page 75.
About a week after the bomb dropped, a vague, incomprehensible rumor reached Hiroshima - that the city had been destroyed by the energy released when atoms were somehow split in two. The weapon was referred to in this word-of-mouth report as genshi bakudan - the root characters of which can be translated as “original child bomb.” No one understood the idea or put any more credence in it than in the powdered magnesium and such things.
Page 82.
Disposal of the dead, by decent cremation and enshrinement, is a greater moral responsibility to the Japanese than adequate care of the living.
Page 83.
The hospitals and aid stations around Hiroshima were so crowded in the first weeks after the bombing, and their staffs were so variable, depending on their health and on the unpredictable arrival of outside help, that patients had to be constantly shifted from place to place.
Pages 90-91.
Over everything - up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charged tree trunks - was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them ... It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna see had been dropped along with the bomb.
Pages 91-92.
Because so many people were suddenly feeling sick nearly a month after the atomic bomb was dropped, an unpleasant rumor began to move around … It was that the atomic bomb had deposited some sort of poison on Hiroshima which would give off deadly emanations for seven years; nobody could go there in all that time. … This rumor suddenly aroused them to more hatred and resentment of America than they had felt all through the war.
Pages 94-95.
The scientists noticed that the flash of the bomb had discolored concrete to a light reddish tint, had scaled off the surface of granite, and had scorched certain other types of building material, and that consequently the bomb had, in some places, left prints of the shadows that had been cast by its light.
Pages 95-96.
As the symptoms revealed themselves, it became clear that many of them resembled the effects of overdoses of X-ray, and the doctors based their therapy on that likeness.
Page 102.
By November 1st, the population, mostly crowded into the outskirts, was already 1237,000, more than a third of the wartime peak - and the government set in motion all kinds of projects to put them to work, rebuilding the city. It hired men to clear the streets, and others to gather scrap iron, which they sorted and piled in mountains opposite the city hall.
Page 105.
The ruined city had flourished - and had been one of the most important military-command and communications centers in Japan, and would have become the Imperial headquarters had the islands been invaded and Tokyo been captured.
Pages 105-106.
Since many people died of a combination of causes, it was impossible to figure exactly how many were killed by each cause, but the statisticians calculated that about twenty-five per cent had died of direct burns from the bomb, about fifty per cent from other injuries, and about twenty per cent as a result of radiation effects.
Page 106.
General MacArthur’s headquarters systematically censored all mention of the bomb in Japanese scientific publications, but soon the fruit of the scientists’ calculations became common knowledge among Japanese physicists, doctors, chemists, journalists, professors, and, no doubt, those statesmen and military men who were still in circulation.
Page 108.
The Japanese scientists were somewhat amused at the efforts f their conquerors to keep security on atomic fission.
Pages 108-109.
In Japan, face is important even to institutions.
Page 113.
“People of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for Emperor’s sake.”
Page 116.
A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it to want to think about it at all.
Page 116.