"At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk."
This is the opening sentence from John Hersey's 30,000-word
article in The New Yorker, headlined Hiroshima. The story, ranked first on a
list of the top 100 works of journalism of the 20th century, has been
celebrated since as a journalistic and historical masterpiece.
Immediately after the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs
were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S.
Government’s wartime propaganda machine went into overdrive covering up the
human suffering. The War Department released pictures of destroyed buildings
only, and asked all American news outlets to limit information about the death
toll and widespread suffering from radiation. One U.S. general even told
Congress that dying from radiation was “a very pleasant way to die.” Thanks to
this organized suppression, the public had started to accept that the atomic
bomb can very well be a reasonable mainstay weapon.
One man changed that. Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey
visited Hiroshima a year after the bombing, and wrote his article for The New
Yorker by emphasizing on the stories of six survivors, regular people for whom
6th August 1945 started like any other normal day. Instead of focusing on the
grandeur of the mushroom cloud, this article told us about the horrifying
effects of the atomic bomb as seen by the witnesses. Three hundred thousand
copies of that particular edition of The New Yorker were immediately sold out.
The American public were aghast. They felt shame and guilt at the widespread
suffering of their fellow human beings. They realized, for the first time, that
their enemy was not the Japanese people. They questioned their own government
about the need for nuclear weapons. Two months after this article came out, it
was printed as a book, that has sold more than three million copies, and has
never been out of print.
Much of what has been achieved worldwide in terms of
regulations for nuclear weapons under international law, is because of this one
man's account of what happened at Hiroshima.
Today is 6th August. I wanted to tell you about John Hersey, so that we know what good journalism looks like, so that we know what a good story can do.
