Erin Smith John Hersey’s Hiroshima: Devastating Aftermath that Rebuilds Community August 6th, 1945 at 8:15 am Hiroshima, Japan was brutally, without chance, bombed by the first atomic bomb from the United States. John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, is a masterpiece, stories being told in the eyes of survivors recalling this horrendous time. These recollected memories expose this gruesome attack for what it was, pure evil. Genocide could be a word used to describe this time in history, furthermore
When Hiroshima was bombed in August of 1945, over 150,000 were killed. In John Hersey’s book Hiroshima he writes of 6 survivors: Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Masakuzu Fujii, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, and Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, all of whom exhibited courage and perseverance. Of the six survivors three made sure to keep Japanese culture and collectivism (the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it) alive by using emotions
Excuse me for having no burden like yours” said Mr. Tanimoto . The words of Mr. Tanimoto, a Reverend who survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, is a parallel of my initial response to reading Hiroshima. I cannot fathom the atrocity that the victims and survivors of Hiroshima must have felt, but my immediate response to the book Hiroshima written by John Hersey was that the suffering of the Japanese could have been avoided if the United States would have enforced proportionality. The atomic bomb
August 6th, 1945: the first atomic bomb was dropped. One bomb was all it took for the American army to utterly destroy the city of Hiroshima and its 245,000 occupants. With 100,000 dead and another 100,000 injured, only few lived to tell the story. In John Hersey’s novel, the lives of six survivors are narrated. The book starts out describing the main characters everyday activities in the moments before the bomb is dropped. Mr. Tanimoto, a Methodist Reverend, is helping a friend two miles outside