The Lost Memoir of a Hiroshima Survivor Was Rediscovered. Now, It Will Be Published as a Book and Adapted for Film

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent Add as preferred source Mushroom clouds from atomic bombs over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons On the morning the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, resident Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, was on his way out of town transporting a handcart of items to a home in the suburb of Koi, some two miles away. Tanimoto had slept poorly and risen early that day—the air-raid warnings were disruptive overnight—and he arrived at the house he was traveling to at 8:15 a.m., the exact moment “Little Boy” flashed in the sky, killing more than 60,000 people instantly. “Immediately after the explosion, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the bloody soldiers at the mouth of the dugout they had been digging, attached himself sympathetically to an old lady who was walking along in a daze, holding her head with her left hand, supporting a small boy of three or four on her back with her right, and crying, ‘I’m hurt! I’m hurt! I’m hurt!’” wrote the journalist John Hersey in his now-famous 1946 New Yorker article, “Hiroshima,” about how six people, including Tanimoto, experienced the blast. That piece, which was also published as a book, immortalized the name Tanimoto. But the minister also did some writing of his own. Overwhelmed by the devastation he saw and experienced in Hiroshima, he filled some 230 pages with brutal, precise details of post-bomb life and suffering in the Japanese city. “Skin from faces, hands, arms, and breasts was stripped off or hanging loose,” Tanimoto wrote, according to Publishers Weekly. “People were moving... without expression... following one after another in silence... like a procession of ghosts.... Everything was beyond their comprehension.” This memoir, written in English in 1947, recently resurfaced in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, among papers that once belonged to Hersey. Hersey’s grandson, Cannon Hersey, found it in the archive, reported the Japan Times’ Himari Semans. Now, Tanimoto’s writing is set to be published in August as a book, Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir. It is also being adapted into a feature-length film, which is set to begin production in November. “It’s an in-depth look at what this terrible bomb did,” Donald Rosenfeld, the film’s producer, tells the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge. “It is so topical now with the Iran situation and North Korea. You can’t imagine anything worse than Hiroshima, but it could be worse—supposedly 10,000 times stronger today. We really have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Did you know? Consequences of the bombing The memoir will be distributed by Random House in the U.S. and Penguin worldwide, after a competitive three-way auction for the book’s rights. The book will include a 9,000-word forward by Tanimoto’s daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo, who is now 81 years old. “For many years I could not live in Hiroshima, the city of my birth,” Kondo writes in the book, according to the Guardian. “On the day the atomic bomb dropped I was eight months old, a baby in the arms of my mother. It was 40 years before she could bring herself to tell me, in her own words, how I had survived. Few people would talk about that time. Their memories kept them quiet.” Kondo is a producer for the film. She has spent her life advocating for Hiroshima survivors and for peace. Her efforts to keep this story alive echo what her father told Hersey decades ago. “If you can’t tell this story to the world,” Tanimoto told Hersey, according to the Japan Times, “we are going to die twice.” Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal. Email Powered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Privacy Notice / Terms & Conditions)

The Lost Memoir of a Hiroshima Survivor Was Rediscovered. Now, It Will Be Published as a Book and Adapted for Film

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