‘A Noiseless Flash’: Hiroshima, 80 years later

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. 

Hersey’s candor had a seismic impact: the magazine sold out, and a book version of the article sold millions of copies. Stephanie Hinnershitz, a military historian, told me that Hersey’s reporting “didn’t just change the public debate about nuclear weapons — it created the debate.” Until then, she explained, President Harry Truman had celebrated the attack as a strategic masterstroke, “without addressing the human cost.” Officials shamelessly downplayed the effects of radiation; one called it a “very pleasant way to die.” Hinnershitz said, “Hersey broke that censorship.” He alerted the world to what the U.S. government had hidden.

[Hersey's] omniscient, controlled voice felt godlike and all-knowing, free from authorial editorializing. He was hailed as a writer who “let ‘Hiroshima’ speak for itself.”

When I first read the book in 1991, I was struggling to make sense of my place among some Americans who still — 46 years after the bomb — saw someone like me as subhuman. I was a child with a Japanese immigrant father (he was born three years after the bomb) and a white mother. I grew up in a small Midwestern town as one of only a handful of Asians. … 

When my teacher, Mrs. Ott, assigned a book report about a historical event in middle school, I asked my father what I should write about.

“What about the atomic bomb they dropped on Japan?” he said, as if we had discussed this event my entire life. I had no idea what he was talking about. I only knew that once I had stumbled across my father cleaning the hot tub he had built with slabs of wood in our backyard. Staring at the sky as it began to drizzle, he muttered something about how Americans never knew “black rain.”

Kondo realized her own calling when it came to social justice was to take on the legacy of Hiroshima. She decided she did not just want to see nuclear weapons controlled or curtailed. She wanted them abolished. And she knew that for as long as she still had her voice, she would continue to tell their story — Hiroshima’s story — to anyone who would listen. Today, Kondo has one unequivocal pursuit: a nuclear weapon–free world. “For the sake of the children,” she told me.  

“My father told me we might not change the whole world,” Kondo told me before we signed off. “But if we tell our story, person to person ... someday.”