Lost memoir of Hiroshima survivor found after decades in US archive
Written in 1947, Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s account of the horrors of the atomic bomb attack will be published in August and is being made into a film
Dalya Alberge
The memoir of a man who survived the horrors of Hiroshima is to be published for the first time this summer after its discovery in a US archive.
The 230-page memoir was written almost 80 years ago by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who witnessed the city’s destruction after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. He will now be portrayed in a feature film by Takehiro Hira, whose acclaimed roles include the detective in the Netflix Japanese-British drama Giri/Haji. Pre-production begins in November, ahead of the shoot in February 2027.
The film is being produced by Donald Rosenfeld, a former president of Merchant Ivory Productions, whose period classics include Howards End, starring Emma Thompson. Rosenfeld told the Guardian that with today’s impending nuclear threats, a film about Hiroshima and the publication of a survivor’s account could not be more timely.
“It’s an in-depth look at what this terrible bomb did,” he said. “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.”
On 6 August 1945, the US attacked Hiroshima with an atomic bomb in an attempt to end the second world war. The world’s first nuclear attack decimated the city, reducing it to rubble. An estimated 120,000 people were killed within the first four days after the blast. Bodies were burned and disfigured through acute exposure to radiation. Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing about 73,000 people. On 15 August, Japan surrendered, bringing an end to the war.
Tanimoto, who died in 1986 aged 77, was a Hiroshima Methodist priest, whose life was spared because he happened to be away that day, transporting a wardrobe to another town.
He returned to find unimaginable horrors. Having thought they could never be put into words, he eventually decided that a memoir “would help ensure that no one experienced it ever again”, his daughter Koko Tanimoto Kondo said.
In the memoir’s foreword, Kondo writes of the need for future generations to remember it as “memory is our hope for survival as human beings”.
Having lain unpublished and forgotten in a US archive, the memoir will be published on 6 August, Hiroshima’s anniversary, by Random House in the US and Penguin worldwide. The book has already been sold in most major territories. Rosenfeld described it as “beautifully written”.
The memoir will be released by publishers worldwide this summer, with a 9,000-word foreword by Kondo, now 81. She writes: “For many years I could not live in Hiroshima, the city of my birth. 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.”
She adds that “the blast flattened almost everything in central Hiroshima” and that the heat was about 4,000C at ground level: “It burned through wood, tile, concrete and human flesh.” She is also involved with the film, introducing the film-makers to survivors or their families as part of their research.
The film takes its title, Hiroshima, 8:15, from the exact time the bomb was dropped. It is being directed and written by Phil Joanou, who made the crime drama State of Grace.
The memoir was found in the Beinecke rare book and manuscript library at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, among the papers of John Hersey, the American Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who died in 1993.
Hersey had struck up a friendship with Tanimoto when visiting Hiroshima eight months after the bomb, which inspired his 1946 nonfiction account, titled Hiroshima, on which the film is also based.
In the screenplay, seen by the Guardian, Tanimoto returns to a city engulfed by towering flames and toxic smoke, its buildings and people broken and burned, while thick black droplets rain down “almost like oil falling from the sky”. He encounters men, women and children whose clothes have been shredded from their bodies.
In one scene, he comes across a tram, toppled over, its side ripped open. “The occupants inside incinerated. He is drawn to the victims. Frozen. Like Pompeii. Each in a different pose. Their bodies carbonised. Charcoal black.”
While British prisoners of war were among those who suffered extreme brutality at the hands of their Japanese captors, Tanimoto says in one scene: “We deserved to lose. We could not win. Did we deserve the atomic bomb? Perhaps ... perhaps not. But no one yet understands ... what it was like here.”
