What Divides Us

A newly discovered firsthand account of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath from one of the survivors—a lost classic that brings unprecedented immediacy to our understanding of this world-changing event. “A stunning historical discovery and a heartrending testimony.” —Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American PrometheusThe whole city was covered with dark clouds, and conflagrations were breaking out in various directions. Could all of this have happened at once? It was then that black drops of rain, as big as blackberries, began to fall – rain caused by the atomic bomb. I wondered what had happened to my home and church. With a pale face, I ran down the Koi highway…When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima at 8.15am on 6 August 1945, Methodist minister Kiyoshi Tanimoto was just beginning his day with the usual bowl of soybean and rice bran porridge. Unbeknownst to him at that moment, the aftermath that will unfold before him over days and weeks is full of horror, but through his courageous determination to save his family, church and city from total devastation, Tanimoto would become internationally recognised as a hero of Hiroshima. In 1946, he featured in American journalist John Hersey’s seminal book Hiroshima which catapulted Tanimoto into global fame – but it is only now that we have discovered the manuscript that he wrote in his own words. With a powerful introduction from Tanimoto's daughter, Koko Kondo, a renowned peace activist in her own right, What Divides Us is a remarkable eyewitness account of this devastating moment of history. Although written only a couple of years after the bomb, the manuscript had been lost for many decades and was only recently discovered in a university archive. Today, over eighty years later in a world fraught with conflict, Tanimoto’s story is a moving and powerful reminder of how the strength, love and resilience of the human spirit will always triumph over the things that divide us.