Chapter one introduces the six main characters whose stories and point of view are recounted throughout the rest of the book. Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto is first introduced helping a friend when the bomb goes off two miles away. Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the widow of a tailor, is introduced as the mother of three children, who lets her children sleep in at her house the day that the bomb goes off three-quarters of a mile away from her house. Dr. Masakazu Fujii runs a successful private hospital near a river. On the day of the explosion, he woke up much earlier so that he could take a friend to the train station, but when he gets back and sits on his porch reading the newspaper, the bomb goes off and Dr. Fujii is launched into the water. Dr. Terufumi Sasaki is a twenty-five-year-old surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital. He took an early train that certain morning, which allowed him to escape the death zone of the bomb and he is the only character who is unscathed when the bomb goes off. Miss Toshiko Sasaki is a twenty-year-old clerk who works at the East Asia Tin Works. When the blast …show more content…
As written in Hiroshima, “The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant. Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky” (Hersey 5). This quote shows the momentous change and shock that the people of Japan felt at the time the bomb was dropped and how the bomb would come to overturn the entire way of life in Hiroshima. Also, the level of destruction that the bomb caused and the stories that are known because of this destruction caused some of the most horrifying experiences of the war. As written in the book, “There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books” (Hersey 16). This deathly terrifying experience was an example of how the entire world and everything in it turned against the people of Japan when the bombs were