A lost memorial to Hiroshima survivors was found decades later at the US Archive | Books

Traditions of a survivor the horrors of Hiroshima it is due to be published for the first time this summer when it becomes available in US archives.

The 230-page memoir was written almost 80 years ago by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who witnessed the destruction of the city after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. Now it will be featured in a film by Takehiro Hira, whose best-known work is as a Netflix investigator in the Netflix Japanese-British drama Giri / Haji. Pre-production begins in November, before the film is released in February 2027.

The film is being produced by Donald Rosenfeld, former president of Merchant Ivory Productions, whose past credits include Howards End, starring Emma Thompson. Rosenfeld told the Guardian that with nuclear threats looming today, a film about Hiroshima and the publication of a survivor’s story would not be timely.

He said: “I see deeply what this terrible bomb did. “It’s the news now with the situation in Iran and North Korea. You can’t imagine anything worse than Hiroshima, but it could be worse – today it has to be 10,000 times bigger. We have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima to end World War II. The world’s first nuclear attack destroyed the city, turning it into a wasteland. About 120,000 people were killed in the first four days of the explosion. The bodies were burned and decomposed due to exposure to radiation. After three days, the Americans left a plutonium bomb in Nagasakikilling about 73,000 people. On August 15, Japan surrendered, ending the war.

Tanimoto, who died in 1986 at the age of 77, was a Hiroshima Methodist priest, whose life was not saved because he was not there that day, carrying clothes to another town.

He returned to see unimaginable horrors. Thinking that he could not be mentioned in words, he finally decided that a memoir “would help that no one would have to face it again”, his daughter Koko Tanimoto Kondo said.

In the introduction to the memoir, Kondo writes about the need for future generations to remember that “memory is our hope for survival as a human being”.

Having remained out of print and forgotten in US archives, the memoir will be published on August 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima, by Random House in the US and Penguin worldwide. The book has already been sold in many major markets. Rosenfeld described it as “well written”.

The story will be released by publishers around the world this summer, with a 9,000-word foreword by Kondo, who is now 81. He writes: “For many years I could not live in Hiroshima, the city where I was born.” “On the day the atomic bomb was dropped, I was eight months old, the baby is in my mother’s arms.” It was 40 years before I found out how I lived. he talks about that time.

He adds that “the explosion destroyed almost everything in the center of Hiroshima” and that the temperature was about 4,000C on the ground: “It was burning wood, tiles, concrete and human flesh.” They also work with the film, introducing the filmmakers to the survivors or their families as part of their research.

The video takes its title, Hiroshima, at 8:15, from the exact moment the bomb was dropped. It is directed and written by Phil Joanou, who created the crime drama State of Grace.

The memoir was found in the rare Beinecke library and manuscripts at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, among the papers of John Hersey, the American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who died in 1993.

Hersey befriended Tanimoto after visiting Hiroshima eight months after the bombing, which inspired his 1946 fictional novel, Hiroshima, on which the film is also based.

In the scene, seen by the Guardian, Tanimoto returns to a city burning with toxic fumes, its buildings and people broken and burned, while black droplets fall “almost like oil falling from the sky”. They meet men, women and children whose clothes are torn from their bodies.

In one scene, he came across a tram, which was overturned, with its side torn off. “The occupants are heated. They are drawn to the victims. Cold. Like Pompeii. Everyone is in a different shape. Their bodies are visible.

While British prisoners of war were among the worst victims of their Japanese captors, Tanimoto says in one scene: “We had to lose. We didn’t win. Did we deserve the atomic bomb?”