50 Fun Facts About Hiroshima by John Hersey

Which magazine gave the whole editorial space of one August 1946 issue to John Hersey's Hiroshima?

The New Yorker had planned to run the piece over four issues, then printed it all at once. The issue sold out at newsstands within hours.

Which famous physicist tried to order 1,000 copies of the magazine issue carrying John Hersey's Hiroshima?

Albert Einstein wanted the copies to send to fellow scientists, but the issue had sold out and he had to settle for facsimiles.

What did the cover illustration show on the magazine issue that first carried John Hersey's Hiroshima?

The cover showed a summer day outdoors, a playful, carefree drawing that gave no hint of the report inside. The editors had kept the contents secret even from most of their own staff.

What crushed the leg of the clerk Miss Toshiko Sasaki when the bomb struck in John Hersey's Hiroshima?

Falling bookcases pinned her beneath the factory's library, breaking her left leg. She lay unconscious in the wreckage for about three hours.

On which American TV show did the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto of Hersey's Hiroshima meet a member of the bomber crew?

This Is Your Life brought on Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, to shake the pastor's hand in 1955. Tanimoto had been told he was coming for an ordinary interview.

What happened to Dr. Masakazu Fujii's private hospital at the moment of the blast in John Hersey's Hiroshima?

It toppled into a river with the doctor still on its porch, leaving him wedged between two timbers with only his head above the water.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, the one foreigner among the six survivors in Hersey's Hiroshima, came from which country?

Germany was Japan's wartime ally, yet the priest still felt the strain of being a foreigner there. He had been weakened by the thin wartime diet when the bomb exploded.

Which prized possession did Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura sink in a water tank as she fled her house in Hersey's Hiroshima?

Her sewing machine was the widow's only way of earning a living, so she plunged it into the cement tank outside her house. Weeks later it was found rusted and useless.

Whose voice did the people in John Hersey's Hiroshima hear on the radio for the first time on August 15, 1945?

Emperor Hirohito announced in person that the war was over, and listeners in the ruins wept simply to hear him speak to ordinary people. The broadcast closes the book's third chapter.

In which country was John Hersey, the author of Hiroshima, born to American missionary parents?

China was his home until he was ten, and he learned to speak Chinese before he spoke English. He later went back to Asia as a war correspondent.

A 1954 magazine article by John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, about dull school readers inspired which children's book?

The Cat in the Hat was Dr. Seuss's answer to Hersey's complaint in Life magazine that school primers were too dull to teach children to read.

The author of Hiroshima earlier wrote a celebrated wartime account of which future president's survival in the Pacific?

John F. Kennedy's ordeal aboard PT-109 became Hersey's article Survival. Life turned the piece down, and reprints later helped Kennedy's election campaigns.

What did the injured clerk Toshiko Sasaki become in later life, according to the final chapter of Hersey's Hiroshima?

A Catholic nun known as Sister Dominique, she went on to direct a home for old people for twenty years. Her faith grew out of bedside talks with Father Kleinsorge.

At what local time does the atomic bomb flash over the city in the opening sentence of John Hersey's Hiroshima?

8:15 a.m. is fixed in the first words of the book, which then shows where each of the six survivors stood at that instant. The all-clear siren had sounded only minutes before.

Panic grass and feverfew, which name the fourth chapter of John Hersey's Hiroshima, are what?

Weeds growing in the ruins amazed Miss Sasaki when she was driven back into the city a month later: the bomb seemed to have stimulated the roots, and fresh green covered the wreckage.

John Hersey's Hiroshima is often called an early example of which style that tells true events with a novelist's tools?

New Journalism is usually tied to 1960s writers such as Tom Wolfe, but Hersey was doing it in 1946. He later criticised the movement for being careless with facts.

Which Japanese word for bomb survivors, used in Hersey's Hiroshima, was chosen to avoid slighting those who died?

Hibakusha literally means explosion-affected people. For years many employers refused to hire them, believing they could not work as hard as others.

Which general led the occupation government that discouraged publishers from issuing John Hersey's Hiroshima in Japan?

Douglas MacArthur later insisted the book had never been banned, but a Japanese translation did not appear until 1949. It has stayed in print there ever since.

What happened to Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura about two weeks after the bombing, in the fourth chapter of Hersey's Hiroshima?

Her hair fell out over three or four days, leaving her quite bald, and she hid indoors until it grew back. Nobody yet had a name for the illness behind it.

How did the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto carry badly wounded survivors away from the fire in Hersey's Hiroshima?

He ferried them by boat, ten or twelve at a time, pushing the heavy punt along with a bamboo pole because it had no oars.

What set the young Dr. Terufumi Sasaki apart from every other doctor at the Red Cross Hospital in Hersey's Hiroshima?

He was unhurt, so the 25-year-old faced a tide of some ten thousand wounded making for the building. He worked nineteen hours before he first tried to sleep.

Where did John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, study and later teach writing for eighteen years?

Yale University also made him master of Pierson College in 1965, the first non-academic to run one of its residential colleges. The film critic Gene Siskel was among his students.

For what purpose did the young women called the Hiroshima Maidens travel to New York in 1955, as Hersey's book recounts?

Plastic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital awaited the 25 women, who had been disfigured as schoolgirls by the bomb's flash. Dr. Fujii joined them the next year and interpreted between doctors and patients.

To which Protestant denomination did the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto's church belong in John Hersey's Hiroshima?

Methodist mission boards later brought the pastor to the United States on speaking tours, where he raised money to rebuild his wrecked church.

Which novel won John Hersey the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, the year before he wrote Hiroshima?

A Bell for Adano follows an American major running an occupied Sicilian town who tries to replace its 700-year-old bell. It was filmed the same year with Gene Tierney.

How did Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge of Hersey's Hiroshima show devotion to his adopted country after the war?

He took Japanese citizenship and with it a new name, Father Makoto Takakura. Radiation illness dogged him for the rest of his life, and he died in 1977.

At which company was Miss Toshiko Sasaki a personnel clerk on the morning of the bombing in Hersey's Hiroshima?

East Asia Tin Works stood about 1,600 yards from the centre of the blast. She had been up since three that morning doing her family's housework.

Where in the United States had the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto of Hersey's Hiroshima studied theology before the war?

Emory University left him with fluent English and American clothes, which made some neighbours suspect him of spying. The police had questioned him several times.

Where did Mrs. Nakamura, Father Kleinsorge and Mr. Tanimoto all shelter from the fires in Hersey's Hiroshima?

Asano Park was a wealthy family's garden marked as an evacuation area, and its woods drew hundreds of wounded who hoped the trees would hide them from another raid.

What did the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto read to the dying Mr. Tanaka, who had once denounced him, in Hersey's Hiroshima?

An Old Testament psalm was what the pastor chose for the rich man who had called him an American spy, and Mr. Tanaka died as he read it.

Why did the mission house where Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge lived stay standing after the blast in Hersey's Hiroshima?

Earthquake bracing saved it: a priest terrified of tremors had reinforced the wooden building years before, so it stood while its neighbours collapsed. Fire destroyed it later that day.

Why was Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura's neighbour demolishing his own house that morning in Hersey's Hiroshima?

To clear a fire lane, one of the wide gaps the authorities wanted so that incendiary raids could not spread flames across the city. She was watching him work when everything flashed white.

What did a naval officer with a megaphone promise the wounded on the evening of the bombing in Hersey's Hiroshima?

A hospital ship was on its way, he shouted from his launch, and the crowds on the banks settled down for the night comforted. It never came.

What risk had Dr. Terufumi Sasaki been running in his mother's country town before the bombing in Hersey's Hiroshima?

Practising without a permit carried a severe penalty, but he kept visiting the sick there in the evenings because the town had so little medical care.

In the last chapter of Hersey's Hiroshima, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki spends years removing keloids, which are what?

Overgrown burn scars, thick and rubbery, formed on many of the bomb's victims. He and his colleagues later decided they should not have operated on many, since the growths tended to shrink with time.

What left Dr. Masakazu Fujii unconscious in his new home in the last chapter of Hersey's Hiroshima?

A leaking gas heater by his bed was to blame, and whether by accident or design was never settled. He never recovered his health and died in 1973.

Which author's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey gave John Hersey the idea of following a few survivors in Hiroshima?

Thornton Wilder's novel traces five people who die when a rope bridge breaks in Peru. Hersey read it while ill on the voyage out and decided to write about people, not buildings.

Which New York publisher brought out John Hersey's Hiroshima as a book within months of the magazine issue?

Alfred A. Knopf published it before the end of 1946, and it has never gone out of print, selling more than three million copies.

Which subscription service rushed John Hersey's Hiroshima into print and sent it free to all its members?

Book-of-the-Month Club gave the special edition away, saying it could hardly imagine anything more important to the human race being written at that moment.

Which American radio network cleared its schedule to air the full text of John Hersey's Hiroshima in four readings?

ABC had well-known actors read the piece in four half-hour programmes, and the broadcasts earned an honourable mention at the Peabody Awards.

Where did the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto throw himself when he saw the flash across the sky in Hersey's Hiroshima?

Between two large rocks in a rich man's garden, about two miles from the centre, where he had been helping a friend unload a handcart. He heard no roar at all.

The chapter title Details Are Being Investigated in John Hersey's Hiroshima echoes the wording of what?

A Japanese radio bulletin the morning after the bombing said only that a new type of bomb seemed to have been used and that details were being investigated. Few people in the wrecked city heard it.

To which city was the ailing Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge sent for hospital care in Hersey's Hiroshima?

Tokyo doctors had seen so few atomic-bomb patients that the priest became a curiosity, examined by Japanese experts and by young American army medics who came by the dozen.

What did the blast strip from Dr. Terufumi Sasaki as he walked a hospital corridor in Hersey's Hiroshima?

His glasses flew off his face and his slippers shot out from under his feet. He carried on working in a pair of spectacles borrowed from a wounded nurse.

Where had the soldier husband of Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura died in 1942, according to John Hersey's Hiroshima?

Singapore surrendered on the very day he died, and a seven-word telegram brought his wife the news weeks later. He had gone into the army just after their third child was born.

Which product did Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura wrap for thirteen years at a factory in the last chapter of Hersey's Hiroshima?

Mothballs had a dizzying smell that made her eyes smart at first, but the owner was willing to hire bomb victims and her workmates came to call her Auntie.

Which editor persuaded Harold Ross to run John Hersey's Hiroshima as the entire contents of a single issue?

William Shawn wanted to wake people up to what the bomb had done to ordinary lives. He succeeded Ross as editor in 1952 and ran the magazine for 35 years.

Which magazine publisher, John Hersey's first mentor, resented that Hiroshima was not written for one of his titles?

Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life, had employed Hersey as a war correspondent. The two made peace years later, and Luce came to speak at Hersey's college.

In Hersey's Hiroshima, a visiting priest told Dr. Masakazu Fujii that the city had been destroyed by a spray of what?

Magnesium powder, Father Cieslik had heard from a newspaperman, was sprayed by a single plane and exploded on touching the city's live wires. Almost nobody there yet understood what an atomic bomb was.

What was Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge wearing when he came to in the mission's vegetable garden in Hersey's Hiroshima?

Only his underwear: after Mass and breakfast he had undressed and stretched out on his cot to read. He never knew how he had got out of the house.