Survival and Cooperation Theme Analysis

In Hiroshima, John Hersey writes about six main characters who were living in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, but were far enough from the city center that they survived the bombing. In the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing—when the city was engulfed in flames, food was scarce, and many must have thought that the world was coming to an end—these characters faced impossible decisions about how to survive and whom to help. Unlike in many other books about life-or-death situations, Hiroshima doesn’t suggest that its characters must sacrifice their moral principles to survive. Indeed, many of the characters go out of their way to help other people—some devote the rest of their lives to helping their fellow hibakusha (survivors of the nuclear explosion).

Both immediately after the nuclear explosion, and for many years to come, the characters in Hiroshima behave selflessly, risking their own health and safety to tend to the wounded and the children who’ve lost their families in the disaster. Immediately after the explosion, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge and Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto risk their own safety to help the wounded. Kleinsorge runs into a burning building to save people buried under rubble, and Tanimoto deliberately runs toward the nuclear blast to protect his wife and his church congregants. Hatsuyo Nakamura instinctively protects her three children, and Dr. Terfumi Sasaki works tirelessly to help the wounded in Hiroshima’s Red Cross Hospital. For many years to come, Tanimoto campaigns for nuclear disarmament and the establishment of a peace center in Hiroshima. There are remarkably few examples of characters in Hiroshima stealing food, fighting over supplies, or even disagreeing—in other words, the selfishness and pettiness that can emerge from a crisis seem not to exist in Hiroshima. It’s telling that the most selfish thing Hersey describes Dr. Sasaki doing is grabbing a pair of glasses from a nurse—which he does so that he can see clearly and help his patients. Even when the characters in Hiroshima sacrifice their morals, they do so for a greater good. In this way, the book suggests that during the aftermath of Hiroshima survival was a “team effort”—all the Hiroshimans pitched in and helped one another out.

In part, Hiroshima depicts the aftermath of the bombing as a relatively organized, civil, cooperative recovery effort because Hersey wanted to portray the Japanese people in the most favorable light, emphasizing their dignity and morality. During his time as a war correspondent, Hersey was known to despise the racist manner in which many other American journalists depicted the Japanese. In Hiroshima, he chose to write about doctors, priests, and mothers—in other words, the Hiroshimans who arguably would have been most likely to feel a strong instinct to help other people (and whom U.S. readers might have been most likely to respect). By focusing on these characters, Hersey challenged some of the lingering biases against the Japanese in America media. But the characters in Hiroshima aren’t especially cooperative simply because Hersey cherry-picked them—there’s strong reason to believe that, in the aftermath of the bombing, many Hiroshimans really were cooperative and selflessly devoted to helping one another survive. As the book suggests, the survivors of the explosion were united by a powerful sense of their own mortality. They felt that they’d been blessed with the gift of survival, and they wanted to help others survive, too. It’s entirely to Hersey’s credit that, at a time when many depictions of Japanese citizens in American newspapers and magazines were offensive and dehumanizing, Hersey emphasized his subjects’ selflessness, kindness, and nobility of spirit.