Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir by Kiyoshi Tanimoto — a newly discovered firsthand account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, written by one of its survivors in the immediate aftermath.
At approximately 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, Methodist minister Kiyoshi Tanimoto was on the outskirts of Hiroshima when a blinding flash lit the sky. In an instant, tens of thousands were killed. As Tanimoto raced back toward the city center in search of his wife and infant daughter, he encountered a landscape of unimaginable devastation: buildings leveled, fires raging, and countless injured people moving in silence “like a procession of ghosts.”
Written in English in 1947 and long believed lost, this manuscript was recently rediscovered among the papers of John Hersey, whose own book Hiroshima made Tanimoto one of the most widely known survivors of the bombing. Now published for the first time, Hiroshima, 8:15 offers Tanimoto’s own unfiltered testimony — an urgent, intimate, and harrowing record of the hours, days, and weeks that followed the blast.
With a powerful foreword by his daughter, peace activist Koko Tanimoto Kondo, this singular memoir stands as both an invaluable historical document and a deeply human witness to one of the defining catastrophes of the modern age.
A stunning rediscovery and an essential addition to the literature of Hiroshima.
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