{"id":754963,"date":"2026-06-23T03:37:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T03:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/754963\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T03:37:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T03:37:09","slug":"lost-memoir-of-hiroshima-survivor-found-after-decades-in-us-archive-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/754963\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost memoir of Hiroshima survivor found after decades in US archive | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

The memoir of a man who survived the horrors of Hiroshima<\/a> is to be published for the first time this summer after its discovery in a US archive.<\/p>\n

The 230-page memoir was written almost 80 years ago by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who witnessed the city\u2019s destruction after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. He will now be portrayed in a major feature film by Takehiro Hira, whose acclaimed roles include the detective in the Netflix Japanese-British drama Giri\/Haji. Pre-production begins in November, ahead of the shoot in February 2027.<\/p>\n

It is being made by Donald Rosenfeld, a former president of Merchant Ivory Productions, whose period classics include Howards End, starring Emma Thompson.<\/p>\n

Rosenfeld told the Guardian that, with today\u2019s impending nuclear threats, a film about Hiroshima and the publication of a survivor\u2019s account could not be more timely.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an in-depth look at what this terrible bomb did,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is so topical now with the Iran situation and North Korea. You can\u2019t imagine anything worse than Hiroshima, but it could be worse \u2013 supposedly 10,000 times stronger today. We really have to make sure it doesn\u2019t happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AKiyoshi Tanimoto, whose memoir has inspired a new film about the horrors of Hiroshima, due to go into production later this year. Photograph: supplied<\/p>\n

On 6 August 1945, the US attacked Hiroshima with an atomic bomb in an attempt to end the second world war. The world\u2019s first nuclear attack decimated the city, reducing it to rubble. An estimated 120,000 people were killed within the first four days after the blast. Bodies were burned and disfigured through acute exposure to radiation. Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki<\/a>, killing about 73,000 people. On 15 August, Japan surrendered, bringing an end to the war.<\/p>\n

Tanimoto, who died in 1986 aged 77, was a Hiroshima Methodist priest, whose life was spared because he happened to be away that day, transporting a wardrobe to another town.<\/p>\n

He returned to find unimaginable horrors. Having thought they could never be put into words, he eventually decided that a memoir \u201cwould help ensure that no one experienced it ever again\u201d, his daughter Koko Tanimoto Kondo said.<\/p>\n

In the memoir\u2019s foreword, Kondo writes of the need for future generations to remember it as \u201cmemory is our hope for survival as human beings\u201d.<\/p>\n

Having lain unpublished and forgotten in a US archive, the memoir will be published on 6 August, Hiroshima\u2019s anniversary, by Random House in the US and Penguin worldwide. The book has already been sold in most major territories.<\/p>\n

Tanimoto\u2019s newly published memoir features a foreword by his daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo. Photograph: Supplied<\/p>\n

Rosenfeld described it as \u201cbeautifully written\u201d.<\/p>\n

The memoir will be released by publishers worldwide this summer, with a 9,000-word foreword by Kondo, now 81. She writes: \u201cFor many years I could not live in Hiroshima, the city of my birth. On the day the atomic bomb dropped I was eight months old, a baby in the arms of my mother. It was 40 years before she could bring herself to tell me, in her own words, how I had survived. Few people would talk about that time. Their memories kept them quiet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The memoir of a man who survived the horrors of Hiroshima is to be published for the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":754964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-754963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/754964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}