Still free to subscribe to this newsletter! Greg Mitchell is author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.
Just a quick report here on a new book, an old friend, and a recent NY Times piece.
In my decades of writing about the atomic bombings of Japan, in articles, books and more recently in two PBS film, I have often related the creation of John Hersey’s 1946 classic “Hiroshima” and its aftermath. Hersey, of course, concentrated on just a handful of Hiroshima survivors. One of them, easily the most famous in history, was Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a 36-year-old Methodist minister. One reason that he remained in the public eye was his work with and publicity for the “Hiroshima Maidens” project in the early 1950s which brought disfigured young Japanese victims of the bomb go the USA for plastic surgery.
At some point he wrote a memoir about his Hiroshima experience. He sent it to Hersey but it disappeared until a few years back when it was discovered in his papers at Yale. Perhaps Hersey had felt it was poorly accomplished and was also perhaps too brief (maybe 100 pages or so). In any event it has now been newly edited and published as “Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir,” with an introduction by author and Mother Jones honcho David Corn, who also edited the manuscript. He described this process last week.
As it happens, David and I worked together at Nuclear Times magazine way back in 1982-1984. He was invited to contribute that intro after he wrote about his first visit to Hiroshima a few years back, a piece I reprinted here. Back in 1984, David had put out an issue of Nuclear Times during my lengthy trip to Hiroshima on a journalism grant.
I haven’t read the book as yet but I wonder if the following is mentioned (or maybe Corn briefly covers) a famous moment in television history.
The popular live TV show “This Is Your Life” hosted Tanimoto one night, which in part advertised the Hiroshima Maidens project, and brought along, among others, a co-pilot on the Hiroshima bombing, Robert A. Lewis, who was known to harbor regrets for the tragedy. He even wrote in his log of the mission after seeing the atomic blast from the air, “My God, what have we done?” He went on to make sculptures of mushroom clouds and the like. On the show he clasped Tanimoto’s hands and spoke a bit, a little tearfully as he repeated his “what have we done.” It was later reported that to steel his very difficult live appearance that night he had gotten fairly drunk in a bar near the studio.
Anyway, the tape or kinescope of the episode was now viewable for decades but then emerged, and here is the 2nd half of it with Lewis and Tanimoto:
This is all ties in with a NY Times piece last week by one of its longtime (now retired) reporters Ralph Blumenthal. It relates his finding of Lewis’s log at a trade show where its availability for sale—at $950,000—was publicized by a rare books dealer (whose shop we have visited in Pasadena). There’s no mention of Lewis’s Tanimoto meeting.
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