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 itself was disproportionate because it not only hurt the army but “a hundred thousand people,” including civilians. Moreover, the survivors experienced environmental contamination. Some of these experiences John Hersey was able to embed in his book…show more content… Hersey was the voice of the six initial survivors of the bombing. The initial survivors of the bomb that Hersey wrote about were Miss Sasaki a clerk, Dr. Fuji a physician, Mrs. Nakamura tailor’s widow, Father Kleinsorge a German priest, Dr. Sasaki a young surgeon, and Reverend Tanimoto a pastor. The story begins with each of the characters experiencing the atomic bomb. Hersey utilizes pathos and ethos to determine if the total war was justifiable in the bombing of Hiroshima. I argue that America bombing the of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was disproportional. I will show Hersey how the rhetoric made me as the reader feel the suffering of Dr. Fuji, Father Kleinsgore and Miss Sasaki to establish that the atomic bomb was not justifiable.
Hersey aligns the experiences of Mrs. Nakamura, Mr. Tanimoto, and Dr. Sasaki to allow the audience to empathize with them. The pathos and ethos that Hersey uses to establish suffering rhetoric allow the reader to understand the disproportionateness the atomic bomb. After reading the stories of Mrs. Nakamura, Mr. Tanimoto, and Dr. Sasaki, I initially felt the sadness because of the suffering that the survivors felt during and after the explosion. At the end of the book I felt hopeful because of the triumph some