Kiyoshi Tanimoto's 230-page memoir of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, written in 1947 but never published, has been rediscovered at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, more than 79 years after the attack. Tanimoto, who was out of town when the bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, rushed back to help and chronicled the devastation he witnessed.
The rediscovery of a lost account
The memoir was found among the papers of journalist John Hersey, who befriended Tanimoto after visiting Hiroshima months after the bombing. Hersey's 1946 article "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker brought global attention to the survivors. Tanimoto's daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo, said her father struggled to put his experiences into words but felt compelled to write the memoir to ensure such horrors never recur.
In the memoir, Tanimoto recalls: "The whole city was covered with dark clouds, and conflagrations were breaking out in various directions. Could all of this have happened at once? It was then that black drops of rain, as big as blackberries, began to fall – rain caused by the atomic bomb. I wondered what had happened to my home and church. With a pale face, I ran down the Koi highway."
Impact and legacy
The atomic bomb killed an estimated 70,000 people instantly in Hiroshima, with total deaths reaching over 150,000 by the end of 1945 due to radiation poisoning and injuries. Roughly 100,000 survivors are still alive today. On the 80th anniversary last year, Florian Eblenkamp, advocacy officer for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), stressed the urgency of heeding survivors' warnings: "It's more important than ever that we listen to the remaining survivors. Their message is clear: these weapons must be abolished. If we want to honour their legacy, that's what we should focus on. We can't continue to gamble with the fate of humanity."
Forgotten victims: the children
Among the thousands killed in the bombings, 38,000 were children. Eblenkamp noted that nuclear weapons are often seen as abstract deterrents, but the anniversary serves as a reminder that they are real and devastating. Tanimoto's memoir, preserved for decades, now offers a fresh firsthand perspective on the atomic bomb's human cost.
