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.
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...
In this chapter a war becomes abrupt into the capital, and it forces everyone to leave. Takiko’s mother hears about it and tells her husband t...
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.
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.
The signs plastered all over town creates an unpleasant atmosphere in the woman 's life which affects her psychologically in several ways. She was associated with the middle class as seen in her silk dress and white gloves. However, nine days after the evacuation notice, she still was not finished packing which left me to believe she and her family were not ready to face the unknown or unfamiliar events yet to come. During the Internment, all who were taken were called not by their own name, but only by numbers. The unnamed characters left a distinctive perception of how the woman
2. Leckie, Robert. "131. Hiroshima." Delivered from Evil: The Saga of World War II. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. 938-42. Print.
The protagonists of the story are the six characters. The six characters struggle to survive after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. They had to overcome diversity due to the disfigurement, loss of love ones and their homes due to the bomb.
Throughout December of 1937, the historic city of Nanking was invaded by the Japanese military, which will gradually proceed on to rape and kill helpless civilians as well as carry the death toll to exceed that of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, put together. What took place there is certainly retold throughout three views, that of the troops who executed the assault, of the people who survived and suffered, and lastly of the chosen number of Europeans and Americans who battled to save over three hundred thousand people in this abomination. That sort o...
"The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Hiroshima & Nagasaki Atom Bombs. N.p., n.d. Web. 30
These personal stories help to show how Hiroshima had no unity as people lived their own lives. For instance, most characters we encounter live by themselves and people who have families like Dr, Fuji does not live with them where his wife resides in Osaka, and Fuji resides in Hiroshima. These anecdotes show that Hiroshima had no united political or nationwide reaction to the attack, however, after the bomb, all the affected came together as one community despite their differences. “One feeling they did seem to share, however, was a curious kind of related community spirit . . . Pride in the way they and their fellow survivors had stood up to a dreadful ordeal’’ (Hersey
“Hiroshima,” brings to light the psychological impact the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima had. Following the atomic bomb, over a hundred thousand people were dead and another one hundred thousand people severely injured in a city with a population of 250,000. Dr. Sasaki and Mr. Tanimoto were left wondering why they had survived while so many others had perished, this is known as survivor’s guilt and it can be very heavy and dangerous baggage to carry. On the historic day of the first use of the atomic weapon, Mr. Tanimoto spent most of his time helping people however, one night he was walking in the dark and he tripped over an injured person. He felt a sense of shame for accidentally hurting wounded people, who were in enough pain
As Mr. Tanimoto was helping those who were still holding onto to life when he got this sudden feeling of anger towards his own, wondering why they have yet to come help. For example, “and he had for a moment a feeling of blind, murderous rage at the crew of the ship, and then at all the doctors. Why didn’t they come to help these people?”(Hersey 46) Mr. Tanimoto wasn 't angry at the fact that this atomic bomb that was dropped by the U.S. killed many of his neighbors, family, and friends but more concerned and angry with his own military and doctors for failing them throughout this crisis. In the article “Lieutenant William B. Walsh: first U.S. doctor in Hiroshima after the bomb, with previously unpublished photographs” by Robert J Wilensky, Dr. Walsh shares a similar story of when he arrived to Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped to help
John Berger is a European writer, artist, and intellectual. He published “Hiroshima” which first appeared in 1981 in the journal New Society, and later in his essay collection The Sense of Sight in 1985. He argues that we should look beyond the statistics to see the reality of the events that occurred during the bombing of Hiroshima. As Berger declared, “I refrain from giving the statistics: how many hundreds of thousands of dead, how many injured, how many deformed children” (Berger 11). The...
Shoji’s trauma has a physical and mental manifestation. Due to exposure to radiation, Shoji developed bad hearing and vision and her teeth fell out (Stillman par. 12). Shoji’s granddaughter, Keni Sabath, has developed secondary trauma upon learning of her grandmother’s experience at a young age. Doctors thought Sabath was “haunted by the ghosts of Hiroshima” (Stillman par. 16). As a child, Sabath visited Japan and feared American planes flying over for fear of being bombed (Stillman par.
Poolos, J. The Atomic Bombing of Hirsoshima and Nagasaki. New York: Info Base Publishing, 2008.