The Mammoth Book of Journalism by Jon E. Lewis

Author:Jon E. Lewis [Lewis, Jon E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, journalism
ISBN: 9781780332734
Google: XFDBBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-08-04T23:31:30.582186+00:00

JOHN HERSEY

HIROSHIMA

New Yorker, August 1946

In August 1946, the New Yorker gave over its entire space to John Hersey’s reconstruction of the atomic bombing of Hirsohima. The print run sold out immediately, and Hiroshima the article became a story itself. An except follows.

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on 6 August, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen watching a neighbour tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defence fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-storey mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition – a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one street-car instead of the next – that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time none of them knew anything.

The Reverend Mr Tanimoto got up at five o’clock that morning. He was alone in the parsonage, because for some time his wife had been commuting with their year-old baby to spend nights with a friend in Ushida, a suburb to the north. Of all the important cities of Japan, only two, Kyoto and Hiroshima, had not been visited in strength by B-san, or Mr B, as the Japanese with a mixture of respect and unhappy familiarity, called the B-29; and Mr Tanimoto, like all his neighbours and friends, was almost sick with anxiety. He had heard uncomfortably detailed accounts of mass raids on Kure, Iwakuni, Tokuyama, and other nearby towns; he was sure Hiroshima’s turn would come soon.

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