Hiroshima by John Hersey is many things. It is an early piece of New Journalism, it is the first accurate account of what happened in Hiroshima on the day the bomb was detonated, it is a piece of non-fiction writing that challenges how we define “non-fiction”. But my goal here today is to explain what this book really did, what John Hersey wanted to be taken away from this historically significant piece of journalism, Hiroshima. He used novelistic devices as well as an omniscient point of view to reinforce and achieve the meaning of the book that he pushed on readers without coming off too strong as the author; he let the characters speak for themselves and tell this story:

I believe Hirohsima by John Hersey changed the world’s perspective on the atomic bomb and nuclear power.

 

John Hersey and his editor realized that the American government was using wartime propaganda to cover up the human suffering of the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war department even asked journalists and reporters to limit information surrounding nuclear aspects of Little Boy and Fat Man. But Hersey wanted to find out the truth and based on the fact that I just finished reading the book almost 80 years later and am writing this literary critique piece on it right now, I would say he succeeded. “The public has never been told exactly what took place at Hiroshima”, an editorial in the Bee said. So these stories of the six survivors were a shock to Americans after their initial victory and A-Bomb “Honeymoon Phase.”

This wasn’t too different from my own feeling as I read through the book, pure shock,  about how “burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders” due to the radiation, “their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow” because of the explosion, and how “many people were vomiting” with radiation sickness. Hersey chose specific details like this to include in his New Yorker Issue to really set the tone, one of graveness and warning to really send home the message about what’s Americans had done to the Japanese, what they had done to actual humans, what could happen to them if nuclear power was put in the wrong hands. 

The atomic bomb developed in the Soviet Union

Forty years later when Hersey writes an additional chapter, The Aftermath, to describe how the bomb changed the Hibakusha’s life, he inductively reasons by revealing, chronologically, how nuclear power had in fact fallen into the wrong hands, how it had fallen into the rest of the world’s hands: “On September 23, 1949, Moscow Radio announced that Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb.” Bombs continued to be built and tested, hydrogen bombs were researched but not one had or has since been used. 

The conclusion that I am coming to, the criticism that my thoughts, insights, and research are amounting is that what really makes the theme that I mentioned earlier true, is how the author wrote the story. This is what made both the article and the novel so profound, so controversial, so influential, so timeless. “Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just turned her head to chat with the girl at the next desk“, as the bomb crashed into Hiroshima, Japan and changed her life forever. Anyone could and anyone can comprehend a story about a regular person, these are the terms that the story had to be told in so that the human mind could grasp the absolute power that these weapons hold. 

John Hersey’s Hiroshima stirred outrage throughout the world that “many historians say … was profound enough to help prevent future use of nuclear weapons” and I agree. It has continued to motivate activists and leaders to prevent nuclear war even today, generations after Hiroshima, ultimately ending this fleeting human experiment once and for all. His writing implicitly forces us as readers to decide “whether total war ….. is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose” and over time society has decided that in the case of Hiroshima it is not, that we need to listen to Hersey’s warning and remember what these weapons of mass destruction have the potential to do. What potential they have to obliterate our lives if we forget. That is the perspective Hersey aimed to instil in each of his readers through careful writing and use of syntax and literary devices. 

“His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty.”