Hatsuyo Nakamura Character Analysis

In the first paragraphs of his book on Hiroshima, Hersey sketches out the format of his work: by examining the lives of six ordinary people living in Hiroshima on the day of the explosion, Hersey will paint a vivid picture of what it must have been like in the city on August 6, 1945. At the time, Hersey’s method of reporting on Hiroshima was almost unprecedented: journalists tended to report on major events like the bombing using a more removed, objective style of writing.

It’s worth thinking a little more closely about how Hersey came to interview these six survivors of Hiroshima, and what forms of bias his reporting might reflect. To begin with, any book on Hiroshima that’s structured around the accounts of survivors is, almost by definition, going to be a more optimistic account of the disaster than what truly happened. The Hiroshima bombing was the story of one hundred thousand people who died; Hiroshima is, at its most literal level, the story of six people who survived. Second, there’s an important selection bias in Hersey’s journalistic project. For fairly obvious reasons, the six people whom Hersey was able to contact and write about were significantly more 1) cooperative, 2) morally minded, 3) sympathetic to the United States, and 4) familiar with Western culture than the average Hiroshima resident. (For example, it’s no coincidence that two of the six main characters are Christian priests—a Christian priest is exactly the kind of person who would have been likely to agree to talk to an American reporter less than a year after the bombing.) Hersey does a brilliant job of connecting the disparate experiences of his six main characters to the overall event of the Hiroshima bombing; however, it’s crucial to understand the forms of bias that might paint a misleading picture of what the Hiroshima bombing was really like.