A thriving city .... then only ashes
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1532106,00.html
Sixty years ago, on August 6 1945, the first nuclear bomb was dropped
on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One of the first western journalists
on the scene, John Hersey recorded the experiences of six survivors
whose lives were shattered in an instant. His account, published in a
special issue of the New Yorker, shook the world. Here we republish an
edited version
Read part two of this article here
Wednesday July 20, 2005
The Guardian
At exactly 8.15am, on August 6 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when
the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, 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.
At that same moment, Dr Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged
to read as newspaper on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging
one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima. Hatsuyo
Nakamura, a tailor's widow, stood by the window of her kitchen,
watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path
of an air-raid-defence fire lane. Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German
priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on
the top floor of his order's three-story mission house, reading a
Jesuit magazine. Dr Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical
staff of the city's large, modern Red Cross Hospital (no relation to
Miss Sasaki), walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood
specimen in his hand. And the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the
Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man's house in
Koi, the city's western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full
of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid
which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer.
Hiroshima / Nagasaki
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Japan
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