Hiroshima
Chapter 1 – A Noiseless Flash
The story starts out by a mini intro of the characters. Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the East Asia Tin Works, was sitting down talking to the girl of the next desk. Dr. Fuji was sitting down the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital. Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tear down his house. Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s mission house. Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s Red Cross Hospital, walked along in the halls carrying a blood specimen. Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist was carrying some of his possessions to a rich man’s house in fear of the massive B-29 raid, which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer.
Reverend Mr. Tanimoto
Mr. Tanimoto was a small man, quick to talk, laugh, and cry. His hair parted in the middle and rather long; the prominence of the frontal bones just above his eyebrows and the smallness of hi mustache, mouth, and chin gave him a strange, old-young look, boyish and yet wise, weak and yet fiery. He woke up a 5:00 because he could not sleep. He was worrying about his wife and kids, and a massive raid on their town. Mr. Tanimoto had studied theology at Emory College, in Atlanta, Georgia. He started to carry his things and belongings from the church with his friend Mr. Matsuo to Mr. Matsui’s house, a man who let a large number of his friends and acquaintances, so that they might evacuate whatever they wished to a safe distance from the target area. Mr. Tanimoto and Mr. Matsuo made a quick stop to Mr. Matsuo’s house to carry a large Japanese cabinet. They arrived to Mr. Matsui’s house tired and exhausted. A tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. They were 2 miles from the center of the explosion. Mr. Matsuo dived in the bedrolls. Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps into the house and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden. There was no roar. When Mr. Tanimoto looked up, he saw Mr. Matsui’s house was in to pieces. Mr. Tanimoto dashed out to the streets and noticed everything around him was in ruins too.
Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura
Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, lived in the section called Nobori-cho. She set her three children- a 1...
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.... They put two together, end to end, and made a chapel. They commissioned a contractor to build a 3-story mission house. He found it very hard to sleep like Dr. Fujii said.
Mr. Tanimoto
Mr. Tanimoto also came down with a huge fever of 104. He sent for a doctor, but the doctor was too busy so instead, a nurse came and gave him Vitamin B injections. He spent a month in bed and then later he took the train to his father’s house in Shikoku, there he rested another month.
Mr. Tanimoto draped a tent over a house he rented in Ushida. He gave his services there. He became quite friendly with Father Kleinsorge and saw the Jesuits often. He envied the church’s wealth; they seemed to be able to do anything they wanted.
Dr. Sasaki
Dr. Sasaki and a few colleagues discover three stages to the radiation sickness. Stage 1- a reaction to the radiation. Stage 2- falling hair. Stage 3- high fevers and diarrhea. They also discovered other things and factors pertaining to the radiation sicknesses. Dr. Sasaki worked in the hospital non-stop for about 6-months until the hospital was fully back to normal. He felt really tired all the time. He too also returned to normal.
warnings of intruder planes coming in the area. It talked about how a lot of
As a matter of first importance, the characters in the story are incredibly affected by the Hiroshima bomb dropping. The bomb being
In the book Hiroshima, author paints the picture of the city and its residents' break point in life: before and after the drop of the "Fat Boy". Six people - six different lives all shattered by the nuclear explosion. The extraordinary pain and devastation of a hundred thousand are expressed through the prism of six stories as they seen by the author. Lives of Miss Toshiko Sasaki and of Dr. Masakazu Fujii serve as two contrasting examples of the opposite directions the victims' life had taken after the disaster. In her "past life" Toshiko was a personnel department clerk; she had a family, and a fiancé. At a quarter past eight, August 6th 1945, the bombing took her parents and a baby-brother, made her partially invalid, and destroyed her personal life. Dr. Fujii had a small private hospital, and led a peaceful and jolly life quietly enjoying his fruits of the labor. He was reading a newspaper on the porch of his clinic when he saw the bright flash of the explosion almost a mile away from the epicenter. Both these people have gotten through the hell of the A-Bomb, but the catastrophe affected them differently. Somehow, the escape from a certain death made Dr. Fujii much more self-concerned and egotistic. He began to drown in self-indulgence, and completely lost the compassion and responsibility to his patients.
...gs Left Legacy of Terror, Pain.” Associated 10 Mar. 2005: n. pag. Web. 26 Feb. 2010. . The firebombings of Tokyo was a event that impacted Japanese civilian morale, and destroyed several factories. This secondary source helped me see the impact of the bombings,
Dutto, Rev. L. A. The Life of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the First Leaves of American Ecclesiastical History St. Louis, MO: B. Herder 1902
Soon after being freed, Sorry and his uncle Abram heard the news on the radio. The Japanese have been crippled. "The Americans have invented a terrible new bomb. They dropped it on Hiroshima, a city in Japan, this morning. The Japanese are saying that thousands are dead. The whole city has been destroyed. One bomb. Just one bomb " The uneasy feeling on the bomb was about to get worse.
In John Hersey's book, Hiroshima, he provides a detailed account of six people and how the bombing of Hiroshima affected their lives. John Heresy felt it was important to focus his story on six individuals to create a remembrance that war affects more than just nations and countries, but actual human beings. Moreover, the book details the effect the bomb had on the city of Hiroshima. “Houses all around were burning, and the wind was now blowing hard.” (Hersey, 27).
The non-fiction book Hiroshima by John Hersey is an engaging text with a powerful message in it. The book is a biographical text about lives of six people Miss Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, Mrs. Nakamura, Father Kleinsorge, Dr. Sasaki and Rev. Tanimoto in Hiroshima, Japan and how their lives completely changed at 8:15 on the 6th of August 1945 by the dropping of the first atomic bomb. The author, John Hersey, through his use of descriptive language the in book Hiroshima exposes the many horrors of a nuclear attack.
In August of 1945, both of the only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare were dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. These two bombs shaped much of the world today.
“My God, what have we done?” were the words that the co-pilot of Enola Gay wrote in his logbook after helping drop two bombs, one in Hiroshima and one in Nagasaki, that killed an estimated two-hundred thousand individuals. The bombings were completely unnecessary. Japan was already defeated because they lacked the necessary materials to continue a world war. The Japanese were prepared to surrender. There was no military necessity to drop the atomic bombs nor is there any factual information stating that the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped to “save the lives of one million American soldiers.” The United States bombed Japan in August of 1945. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were uncalled for and could have been avoided.
Soon after Pearl Harbor was bombed, the government made the decision to place Japanese-Americans in internment camps. When Jeanne and her family were shipped to Manzanar, they all remained together, except her father who was taken for questioning. After a year he was reunited with them at the camp. On the first night that they had arrived at there, the cam...
Miles, Rufus E. Jr. “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved.” International Security (1985): 121-140.
Long before the causes of disease were known and long before the processes of recovery were understood, and interesting thing was observed: if people recovered from a disease, rather than suc...
“This story takes place in Tokyo after World War II” and the drop of the atom bomb. After Hiroshima, countless lives were disrupted the shock of this event changed many peoples lives forever. The author Yukio Mishima uniquely describes this evolution from the female perspective. Probably an ability acquired from his youth “That was dominated by his grandmother.” In the story the lead characters Toshiko’s comfortable life is interrupted when her nanny graphically gives birth to a son in the middle of her child’s nursery. This one horrific experience causes the character’s personality to complete alter from self-centered individual to someone so engrossed with this child’s life that she becomes selfless.
Poolos, J. The Atomic Bombing of Hirsoshima and Nagasaki. New York: Info Base Publishing, 2008.