Re-Reading Hiroshima

John Richard Hersey, son of China missionaries, was perhaps able to bring a personal history of growing up in Asia to an unimaginable event in terms and tones that are both haunting and yet accessible. His story carries a quiet, deep respect for the Japanese victims, a humanizing story of their lives that brings them immediately and intimately to life. This is part of the power of his telling, which appeared as an article in The New Yorker in 1946. Doctors, secretaries, seamstress, mothers, priests, soldiers, and urban mix of everyday lives carry this cautionary tale.

Through the story of six key characters we experience the moment, then the long hours, and longer days that stretch from 8:15 a.m. August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, Japan to August 9th in Nagasaki, and beyond for all its unfathomable mysteries to its morbid, mundane miseries. The lingering images are of putrefying wounds, pus and melting flesh, skin coming off as “gloves” and hair being combed out by the brush full, physical responses so grotesque as to be quickly numbing.

One hundred thousand lives extinguished effectively in an instant, though for many it was a slow, painful death.

Today the story’s lingering power is a kind of understatement. The cautionary tale is that as unimaginable and unfathomable as the hydrogen bomb and nitrogen bomb were in their day (their one day each), what they most frighteningly unleashed was the reality that they could be used. There is no argument, I expect, that their fifth generation derivatives would be such orders of magnitude more powerful and destructive as to bear little resemblance to the original Little Boy. And they will be used. How can we doubt it? Unless they are all destroyed. Eliminated.

“Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences…?” (John Richard Hersey, Hiroshima, Bantam Books, New York, 1959, p.115)

This would be a good day to tell the political leaders of the world to destroy the arsenal, entirely.