especially from radiation-related illnesses; the struggle to put lives back together after the physical and emotional trauma of the atomic bombing; and the intensely personal way in which each of the six individuals endured largely alone despite living in a culture that is well-known for its emphasis on the notion of community. 

A “Publisher’s Note” preceding Hershey’s text places the latter’s narrative into a particular historical and social context.  That note explains the history of this project intended to humanize for American readers the people against whom the United States had just fought a protracted and incredibly bloody war.  The New Yorker, the note points out, dispatched journalist Hershey to Japan to:

“find out what had really happened at Hiroshima: to interview survivors of the catastrophe, to endeavor to describe what they had seen and felt and thought, what the destruction of their city, their lives and homes and hopes and friends, had meant to them; in short, the cost of the bomb in terms of human suffering and reaction to suffering.”

During the war, especially in the days immediately following the Japanese surprise attack on the U.S. naval installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, American images of the Japanese reflected the most primitive of racial stereotypes, with Japanese soldiers portrayed in American propaganda as savages unsparing in their desecration of human life.  While not without substantial foundation in fact – the Japanese occupation of China and Southeast Asia involved wide-scale and unbelievably horrific acts on the part of Japan’s military – the cumulative effect of those images, especially as portrayed in films intended to support the war effort, was to completely dehumanize the Japanese people.  Hershey’s article and subsequent book was instrumental, at least to a degree, in tearing away that façade and revealing the humanity common to all ethnicities and races.  Hershey’s subject matter – those six individuals – provided a portrait of a people who had suffered terribly as a direct consequence of the American atomic bombing of their city.  These were not savages, but decent human beings most of whom had dedicated their lives to helping others, either physically or spiritually.  Hershey’s themes of resilience, suffering and emotional isolation are powerfully depicted.  Some of these individuals interviewed by Hershey had survived the bombing physically unscathed – or so they had initially thought. The unique characteristics of this particular bomb, however, would manifest itself in complications not experienced in other bombings.  In one passage, Hershey describes Hatsuyo Nakamura, the widow with three children, discovering that the absence of cuts and bruises and burns such as those experienced by so many others did not mean that she had escaped the bomb’s effects:

“As she dressed on the morning of August 20th . . . Mrs. Nakamura, who had suffered no cuts or burns at all, though she had been rather nauseated all through the week . . . began fixing her hair and noticed, after one stroke, that her comb carried with it a whole handful of hair; the second time, the same thing happened . . . [I]n the next three or four days, her hair kept falling out of its own accord, until she was quite bald.  She began living indoors, practically in hiding.”

Mrs. Nakamura, of course, was suffering from radiation sickness, and tens of thousands of others in Hiroshima would similarly be forced to endure the painful and sometimes disfiguring effects of the bomb’s blast. The city could eventually be rebuilt; and the broken bones would heal, but the long-term effects of history’s first atomic bombing would be felt for decades to come.

Hiroshima presents the very human side of the American atomic bombing of that city in the closing days of World War II.  In the chaos and destruction and suffering that followed not just the atomic bombings (Nagasaki would be targeted for an even larger atomic bomb several days later) but the wide-scale conventional and fire bombings of Tokyo and other cities would ensure that those six individuals and hundreds of thousands of others would have to endure largely alone.  Hershey’s themes of emotional isolation, the resilience of the human spirit, and the scale of carnage associated with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima are present throughout his book, and the themes continue to resonate today.

John Hersey’s Hiroshima is an account of the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 9, 1945. According to the publisher’s notes, the book was written for The New Yorker magazine to give some balance to the reportage of the event, as most accounts up to that time did not focus on the people who suffered as a result of the world’s first nuclear attack.

Hersey interviewed and wrote about six relatively ordinary people, showing what they were doing before the blast, how the actual blast felt and looked to them, and how they dealt with the subsequent disaster.

Sometimes it can be a little tricky to determine a writer’s thesis if he does not directly state it. Hersey was attempting to write an objective account of the attack, and in so doing he kept his own opinions out of the book. In such a case, the thesis can sometimes be a matter of opinion based on the evidence provided by the writer in the work. Obviously, Hersey is concerned with the suffering and fates of those who lived through the blast. A reasonable thesis could be something like, “Although the bomb represented a step forward scientifically and hastened the end of a devastating war, there was a profound cost in human suffering and the loss of human life.” The following excerpts help illustrate this thesis.

One of the people Hersey interviewed was actually a Caucasian priest named Father Kleinsorge. As he tries to help others who have been harmed more than he, he encounters one horrific sight after another:

He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.

At one point a little later he encounters a group of soldiers staggering through the woods:

He saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.

However, by the time the reader has finished the short book he has read about more than suffering and death. The people Hersey describes move forward with a sort of heroic stubborness, saving what and who they can while dealing stoically with the disturbing images they see.

Notice that Hersey reports this material in a “matter-of-fact” style. There is no need to embellish the brutal effects of the blast with hyperbolic description; the imagery speaks for itself.