The 230-page memoir of Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a survivor of Hiroshima atomic bomb, is set to be published for the first time this summer after being discovered in a US archive. Written in 1947, the account provides an in-depth look at the destruction of the city following the world’s first nuclear attack in 1945.
The late Tanimoto, a Hiroshima Methodist priest who died in 1986 at the age of 77, witnessed the horrors of the blast after his life was spared because he was away from the city transporting furniture on the day of the attack.
His daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo, now 81, stated that her father eventually decided to write the memoir to “help ensure that no one experienced it ever again”, reports Guardian.
The book is scheduled for release on 6 August – the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing – by Random House in the US and Penguin worldwide. It features a 9,000-word foreword by Kondo, who was only eight months old when the bomb dropped. In her writing, she emphasises that “memory is our hope for survival as human beings”.
In addition to the publication, the memoir is being adapted into a major feature film produced by Donald Rosenfeld, the former president of Merchant Ivory Productions.
Acclaimed actor Takehiro Hira has been cast to portray Tanimoto. Pre-production is slated to begin this November, with filming expected to commence in February 2027.
Rosenfeld described the project as timely given contemporary nuclear threats involving North Korea and Iran. He noted that while the 1945 attack decimated Hiroshima, modern weapons are “supposedly 10,000 times stronger”.
The historical context of the memoir remains harrowing; the US attack on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 killed an estimated 120,000 people within four days.
A second plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later killed approximately 73,000 people, leading to Japan’s surrender on 15 August and the end of the second world war.
