Hiroshima: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

As the chapter begins, Hersey alludes to the onset of radiation poisoning—a consequence of the atomic explosion that nobody seems to have anticipated (most of the scientists who designed the atomic bomb didn’t think that anybody exposed to nuclear radiation would survive the initial blast).

Gradually, the world realized that radiation sickness could be as deadly as the explosion itself. For reasons that are still unclear, not everyone within range of the explosion contracted radiation sickness—some avoided it entirely, while others experienced intense symptoms within a few days.

Like many other doctors in Hiroshima at the time, Dr. Sasaki faced the challenge of treating the victims of radiation sickness without understanding what was wrong with them.

By a strange coincidence, two of Dr. Fujii’s homes collapsed—the first because of the atomic explosion, the second because of a flood. Perhaps this event could be said to symbolize the random, meaningless destruction inherent to life itself.

Scientists quickly determined that Hiroshima was habitable. However, Hersey doesn’t discuss whether people were apprehensive about visiting the city due to the threat of radiation poisoning—perhaps the public was so dimly aware of the issue that they didn’t even consider this danger.

Radiation poisoning continued to eat away at the bodies of many Hiroshima survivors—moreover, the medical community had very little experience treating radiation victims, meaning that doctors could provide only simple, relatively ineffective remedies.

It’s gruesome but undeniable that the bombing greatly advanced the medical community’s knowledge of radiation poisoning: scientists began to understand the different ways that radiation interfered with homeostasis. While doctors had studied radiation victims in the past, these victims had mostly been exposed to small amounts of radiation over a very long period, whereas the Hiroshima survivors had been exposed to massive amounts of radiation in the span of a few minutes.

The characters slowly began to adjust to their new lives, but with great difficulty: they couldn’t forget what had happened on the day of the bombing, and most of them bore literal, physical wounds that acted as a constant, painful reminder of the catastrophe. Kleinsorge and Fujii, who’d known each other long before the explosion, tried to come to terms with their new lives—Fujii even managed to laugh about his misfortune, suggesting that he was beginning to cope with his trauma.

In the aftermath of World War Two, the United States established its own government in Japan, with the intention of eventually ceding control to Japanese leaders (albeit leaders of whom the U.S. government approved). Notice that Hersey characterizes Hiroshima as a “military center”—a claim that President Truman made in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Historians have since disputed this characterization—one writer argued that Hiroshima in the 1940s was a military center to the same degree that Seattle was (not very much).

While the U.S. government tried to hide specific information about the uranium bomb, the U.S. certainly wanted the rest of the world to know about its weaponry. Put another way, the U.S. wanted to broadcast its new military power without giving away scientific data that might allow other countries to build nuclear missiles.

Throughout the book, religion is a source of comfort for the characters; in this scene, for instance, Kleinsorge suggests that Christianity and the Christian definition of God can explain why disasters like Hiroshima occur. However, it’s unclear if Hersey himself buys into such an idea—notice that ends the section before Kleinsorge can articulate any of his “reasons.”

The characters in the book slowly begin to rebuild their lives, often relying upon religious leaders such as Father Kleinsorge for advice about how to do so. Even though they want to resume regular lives, their everyday circumstances have been irrevocably altered.

Kleinsorge worked tirelessly to help the victims of Hiroshima, and he did so to the point where he intensified the effects of radiation poisoning on his body and had to go back to the hospital.

One could argue that both Sasakis—Toshiko and the doctor—were motivated by a desire to forget about, or escape, the horror of the Hiroshima bombing. Toshiko turned to religion as a means of burying the trauma of Hiroshima, while Dr. Sasaki tried to use his medical practice to do the same thing.

It’s important to consider that, by definition, the Hiroshimans Hersey interviewed for his book were six of the luckiest, least traumatized people living in Hiroshima on the day of bombing—they survived the explosion with the power to think and speak. By structuring his story around these six survivors, one could argue that Hersey crafts an inherently optimistic story, in which tragic things happen, but the characters escape death. The passage also discusses the way that Japanese citizens used love for their Emperor to rationalize the Hiroshima bombing. The bombing was a horrific and, some might argue, incomprehensible tragedy, but may of the characters in the book find ways of convincing themselves that the tragedy happened for a reason—whether that reason was God or “the Emperor’s sake.”

This is one of the only times in the entire book when Hersey raises the possibility that the Hiroshima bombing was a war crime. In 1946, when the book was published, the vast majority of Americans believed that the Hiroshima victims were acceptable casualties of war (or even that the bombing was “payback” for the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941). Some have faulted Hersey for presenting a lopsided view of the Japanese response to Hiroshima, making it seem that the Japanese were somewhat more accepting of America’s attack than they really were. Others have praised Hersey for raising the possibility that the bombing wasn’t justified—a point of view that was scandalous in American society at the time.

In a chapter that offers many different interpretations of the Hiroshima bombing—that it was an act of God, that it was a war crime, that it was a justifiable preemptive strike, that it was all for the Emperor’s sake—Hersey ends with Toshio’s simple, childish perspective on the disaster. Toshio, who’s just a kid, doesn’t have any elaborate way of understanding the bombing—all he knows is that people are dead. But in a way, Toshio’s unbiased perspective on the bombing is the one that the book itself ultimately offers: there are many different ways of understanding the attack, but all revolve around the inescapable fact that a hundred thousand people died.