Lost memoir of Hiroshima survivor found after decades in US archive | Books
The memoirs of a man who survived the horrors of Hiroshima will be published for the first time this summer after being discovered in a US archive.
The 230-page memoir was written by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who witnessed the destruction of the city after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, almost 80 years ago. Tanimoto will now be played in a major feature film by Takehiro Hira, whose acclaimed roles include the detective in the Netflix Japanese-British drama Giri/Haji. Pre-production will begin in November before shooting in February 2027.
The film is being produced by Donald Rosenfeld, the former head of Merchant Ivory Productions, whose credits include period classics such as Howards End starring Emma Thompson.
Rosenfeld told the Guardian that, given today’s looming nuclear threats, the making of a film about Hiroshima and the release of a survivor’s account could not come at a more appropriate time.
“It’s an in-depth look at what this terrible bomb does,” he said. “The situation in Iran and North Korea is so topical right now. You can’t imagine anything worse than Hiroshima, but it could be worse; it could be supposedly 10,000 times stronger today. We really have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
On August 6, 1945, the United States attacked Hiroshima with an atomic bomb in an attempt to end World War II. The world’s first nuclear attack destroyed most of the city, reducing it to rubble. It is estimated that approximately 120,000 people died in the first four days after the explosion. Bodies were burned and disfigured as a result of acute exposure to radiation. Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing approximately 73,000 people. On August 15, Japan surrendered and the war ended.
Tanimoto, who died in 1986 at the age of 77, was a Hiroshima Methodist minister whose life was spared because he was away that day to transport a wardrobe to another city.
He returned to encounter unimaginable horrors. Because she thought it could never be put into words, she eventually decided a memoir would “help make sure no one has to go through this again,” said her daughter Koko Tanimoto Kondo.
Kondo writes in the foreword to her memoir that future generations should remember this: “Memory is our hope for survival as humans.”
The memoir, unpublished and forgotten in the US archive, will be published by Random House in the US and Penguin worldwide on August 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima. The book has already been sold in most major territories.
Rosenfeld called it “beautifully written”.
The memoir will be published by publishers worldwide this summer, with a 9,000-word foreword by Kondo, now 81. He writes: “I was not able to live in Hiroshima, the city of my birth, for many years. The day the atomic bomb fell, I was eight months old, a baby in my mother’s arms. It took 40 years before she could tell me in her own words how I survived. Very few people talked about that period. Their memories have been preserved. They are silent.”
