Four decades after the publication of his landmark on-the-ground reporting about the atomic bomb experiences of six Hiroshima survivors, journalist and author John Hersey returned to Japan to document what had become of his subjects over the years. Some embraced their hibakusha (the Japanese term for Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors) identity, becoming regular presences on the speaking and memorial circuit. Others had preferred to keep their experiences private at first, and engaged with the public later in life. Most experienced medical fallout for the rest of their lives, and some died before Hersey could return.
“His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty,” Hersey wrote of one survivor, decades after the bombing that killed some 80,000 to 150,000 civilians.
Now, four more decades later, M.G. Sheftall, an American professor living in Japan, has taken another crack at making sure the world’s memory remains clear. In Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses, he painstakingly reports on the lives of several other survivors in what, with remaining witnesses nearing 100 years old, could be the final firsthand recounting of the events of August 6, 1945. His subjects include a promising young student, girls tasked with working to prepare the city for an American invasion and a young military aide.
The similarities to Hersey’s findings do not stop with a title. Though Sheftall’s subjects were, generally, much younger than Hersey’s on the day the U.S. dropped the bomb, their lives tracked similar paths: chronic and debilitating medical conditions, survivor’s guilt, internal struggles over whether to publicize their experiences and a complicated blame game focused on both the Americans who wrought the destruction and a militaristic Japanese society that brought the war home.
Sheftall’s story is brutal but necessary (a second volume about Nagasaki survivors is on the way). In carefully recording the experiences of remaining hibakusha, he is providing crucial labor in service to our collective memory. But he does so with a literary flair that belies any stereotypes of academic writers and at times surpasses Hersey’s famous work of journalism.
Painful in substance but lyrical in form, Hiroshima should be required reading for political leaders, those interested in war and peace, and anyone who has grown numb to the specific horrors of World War II.
