Hiroshima Memory Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #4

They could not move a bit under such a heavy fence and then smoke entered into even a crack and choked their breath. One of the girls begun to sing Kimi ga yo, national anthem, and others followed in chorus and died. Meanwhile one of them found a crack and struggled hard to get out. When she was taken in the Red Cross Hospital she told how her friends died, tracing back in her memory to singing in chorus our national anthem. They were just thirteen years old. (4.36)

In a letter to an unnamed person offering his thoughts about the bombing a year out from it, Mr. Tanimoto included some stories that he had heard from the day of the attack that stuck out in his mind. Unlike the people who sought to move on by burying memories of that day, Mr. Tanimoto seemed to find such memories mobilizing and powerful, because they highlighted the stakes/tragedy of letting something like that happen again.

Quote #5

It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface, their recollections, months after the disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure. (4.41)

Here, Hersey is reflecting on how the children of Hiroshima have been haunted (or maybe not haunted?) by memories of what happened a year after the blast. He then goes on to use Mrs. Nakamura's son's essay as evidence that children's memories of the event were somehow a lot more pleasant and even "exhilarating" than one might expect from a total catastrophe.

Quote #6

Dr. Sasaki, who had himself suffered nothing but this last, paid little or no attention to any of these revelations. He did not follow them closely in the medical journals. In his town in the hills, he treated few hibakusha. He lived enclosed in the present tense. (5.39)

When Hersey caught up with the six subjects forty years later, he mentions that Dr. Sasaki wasn't really one for getting lost in the past or wallowing in the plight of the hibakusha. In other words, he didn't really let memories get him down, by living in the "present tense."