Marco Werman: David, thank you for joining us. Tanimoto-san died in 1986. Who was Kiyoshi Tanimoto?

I mean, his writing is straightforward and chilling, but it’s been described as a lost manuscript. Barely anyone had read it, and it sat in the archives at Yale University for a bunch of years. How did it make it there, and how was it discovered?

Well, Tanimoto became one of the most famous survivors of Hiroshima because he was one of six subjects in John Hersey’s breakthrough story, which appeared in The New Yorker a year after the blast. We now know what happened at Hiroshima, but in the year afterward, the US military downplayed the effects of radiation poisoning, and a lot of the media, because there wasn’t wide access to Hiroshima for reporters and journalists, it was being controlled by US military occupation. So, a lot of what people saw was just piles of rubble and crushed buildings, and they saw devastation. They didn’t see what happened to the people, to the residents of Hiroshima. And when John Hersey went over there a few months after the bombing and then, a year later, wrote this piece for The New Yorker, which consumed the entire issue, it became a phenomenon. Albert Einstein wanted 1,000 copies. It sold out on newsstands. It was serialized in newspapers and magazines and on radio shows around the world. And finally, people understood what an atomic blast did to the residents of a city.

Right, and Tanimoto was one of the people profiled in Hersey’s article. He was one of the six profiled.

And he went on to become a famous, world-renowned anti-nuclear activist and campaigner. It turns out he wrote his own account of what happened that day and in the weeks and months that followed, and it was written in English, so he obviously meant it for an English-reading, speaking audience. And at some point, he sent it to John Hersey, and it sat in Hersey’s boxes for God knows how long. He died, I think, in 1993; John Hersey did. Tanimoto died in 1986, and Hersey left his papers to the library at Yale University. A few scholars and researchers would come across this manuscript from Tanimoto, but it didn’t get any attention until a couple of years ago, when Cannon Hersey, John Hersey’s grandson, who is working on developing a film about his father — a feature-length movie about his father John Hersey — found this in a box at Yale. He gave it to a producer working on the film, who decided this had to be published and brought to light, and he came to me.

Yeah, it’s extraordinary. David, you spoke about the US government’s visits to Japan and not seeing or wanting to see the radiation sickness. By the end of 1945, nearly 40% of Hiroshima’s population had died, so obviously, counting for people who died from radiation sickness, that alone makes Tanimoto’s account remarkable. For you, what makes it stand out?

It is just harrowing what he saw and went through. And you’re right, as horrific as that day was, the weeks and the months ahead as people dealt with radiation poisoning — they called it the atomic sickness, and it was denied by the US military that this was even happening — he also talks about, very personally, how he tried to rebuild his church and how to come to terms with this act of violence, this unprecedented act in human history, and who was to blame for it.

Yeah, can you talk more about that? Because he really expresses his emotions on that, kind of an internal dialogue about the atomic bomb. How did his feelings evolve as the weeks and months passed after the bombing?

How widespread was that feeling in Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? 

Well, there was tremendous anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan. And the interesting thing about Hiroshima, the city itself, was that rather than play a role as a victim or a martyr, it dedicated itself to preventing any other nuclear attacks. If you go there today, it’s rather moving. There’s a peace museum, a peace memorial. They rebuilt the city. They rebuilt a city that people at the time thought could not be rebuilt, that there would not be a tree that could grow there for 75 years. Now it’s full of beautiful parks and trees. And there’s a whole message that Hiroshima still seems to be unified around, which is ending the threat of nuclear warfare and working for the abolition of nuclear weapons. And when I went to Hiroshima a few years ago, I was quite moved because it represents both the worst of humanity and now the best of humanity. And I think Tanimoto tried to capture that in the work that he did. But like everything, the anti-nuclear movement in Japan became political. It was dominated by people on the left and labor unions. He was not political in that sense, and he was certainly not of the left. So, he was always a bit of an odd man out in Japan.

And what about more widely? What do we know about the impact of Tanimoto’s anti-nuclear work outside of Japan?

Well, he came to the United States soon after the attacks and did a speaking tour across the United States all about the effects of the bomb. He did not blame the United States, but he wanted people to know what really happened. He tried to raise money for the orphans and victims, and he became — I don’t want to say a celebrity, but he became well known and even appeared on American TV. 

One thing that’s striking in his book is his enduring patriotism to Japan, even though he is quietly critical of the Japanese Empire. He’s worried about speaking too publicly about the government in front of soldiers. Why do you think, in the utter destruction of Hiroshima and Japan’s military being brought to its knees, Tanimoto was still kind of supplicating to the leaders? I mean, what does that tell us about the Japanese civilian mindset after years of war?

It’s very interesting to read his book because you see within the Japanese population, I go back to the sense of conflicting sentiments and feelings of who to blame. I mean, some still loved the emperor and didn’t want him to surrender or abdicate. Others blamed the military class for getting them in this fix. And he reflects all of that in this book.

You spoke earlier about John Hersey’s groundbreaking story in  The New Yorker, which took up the entire issue in August of 1946, a year later. What does Tanimoto add to our understanding of what happened, do you think?

One thing that’s quite interesting to me, as I edited his manuscript, is that he opens it with the idea that when this thing happened, when that flash went off, no one knew what it was. They knew there were massive air raids, and they were looking for fleets of airplanes in the sky, bombers that would drop destruction upon them, but this was like cataclysmic. It was the apocalypse. And it took a day or two for some people to figure out that it was a bomb and that it was this new form of atomic warfare. And so, these people under the worst of circumstances are not even able to understand what happened to them and their loved ones. As you know, the city is flattened. Every building has basically collapsed. People are dying beneath burning wreckage. People are vaporized immediately. People have the worst burns imaginable, and they don’t understand why.

Yeah. And everybody was wondering, what was that thing? Because that wasn’t a normal bomb. Well, partly because of Hersey’s article, Tanimoto gained that celebrity you were talking about: public speaking engagements all over the world, but especially in the US. In 1955, Tanimoto was in Los Angeles and was asked to do a TV interview at the NBC Studios. Turns out it wasn’t a news interview. He was basically ambushed as a guest on the reality game show at the time, “This Is Your Life.” This part alone is pretty stunning. Then what happened, David?

He was kind of ambushed, as you said, and they brought up people from his past, including someone who’d converted him to Christianity. And ultimately they brought out the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb. And he was not prepared for that. And I think the co-captain himself, a guy named Colonel Lewis, was not really emotionally fortified to do this. You can go to YouTube and watch this clip. It is incredibly awkward, painful and poignant.

I mean, it’s really awkward and, frankly, hard to believe a TV producer ever thought that was a good idea, but it turns out that appearance was intended to assist Tanimoto in getting attention and donations for his work with the Hiroshima Maidens. Who were they?

The Hiroshima Maidens were young women who had been disfigured during the Hiroshima attack. He brought a bunch of them to America, where they could get plastic surgery from doctors who were donating their services, and he raised money to do this. And this TV show asked people to donate money to that, and they did.

Right. As to this weird appearance meeting the copilot of the Enola Gay on NBC, wheeling out all these important people in Tanimoto’s life, helping with these Hiroshima burn victims, what do you think this exercise was really all about?

That’s a good question. I mean, we can talk for hours about how America has and has not come to terms with the use of atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We still debate to this day whether those actions were justified or necessary, and whether there were other ways to end the war. And we saw with the movie “Oppenheimer” just a couple of years ago that debate reignited, right? So, I mean, it was probably not a pleasant moment for Tanimoto, but I think it was, at least for the American public, yet again, another reminder of what had happened. It was just a very bizarre event: It happened between advertisements for fingernail polish, and they showed the maidens in silhouette — they didn’t bring them out, but they had them there, too. So, it was certainly a reminder to the American public of what had happened and some of the consequences.

You know, at the end of the book, Kiyoshi Tanimoto is almost grateful to the US for using the bomb because it prompted so many Japanese, he says, to desire a world without war and to work toward that. As for what America learned from using the bomb on a civilian population, what do you think it would take for the US to really come to terms with that some four generations after Hiroshima?

It’s hard to see because we still have a tremendous nuclear arsenal. We have a president who now has no interest in working towards nuclear nonproliferation. And I think this is just one of those issues that may be too big to fully absorb. I mean, what Tanimoto has talked about when he was alive, what John Hersey wanted to do, was just remind people that every day we live in this peril, we’re just a couple of bad decisions away from the use of nuclear weapons, and it could end everything. So, what do you do about that? I think for a lot of people, the answer is, I don’t want to think about it because it’s too horrific a notion, and it seems too big a problem to solve. And so, 80 years after we were the first country to use nuclear weapons, we still haven’t really dealt with the full implications of that or taken all the necessary steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.