In the spring of 1946, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Japanese Methodist minister who had been educated in the United States, and Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist John Hersey came together for a project of dire importance — to preserve the stories of those who had survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
“If you can’t tell this story to the world, we are going to die twice,” Tanimoto told Hersey, whose accounting was published in The New Yorker magazine on Aug. 31, 1946 — almost a year after the bombs destroyed both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The piece was titled, “Hiroshima.”
More than seven decades later, Hersey’s grandson, Cannon, made a remarkable discovery while digging through the Yale University archives: a 230-page memoir by Tanimoto and written in English, covering the two years following the Hiroshima bombing.