In the spring of 1946, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Japanese Methodist minister who had been educated in the United States, and Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist John Hersey came together for a project of dire importance — to preserve the stories of those who had survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
“If you can’t tell this story to the world, we are going to die twice,” Tanimoto told Hersey, whose accounting was published in The New Yorker magazine on Aug. 31, 1946 — almost a year after the bombs destroyed both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The piece was titled, “Hiroshima.”
More than seven decades later, Hersey’s grandson, Cannon, made a remarkable discovery while digging through the Yale University archives: a 230-page memoir by Tanimoto and written in English, covering the two years following the Hiroshima bombing.
The New Yorker article and Tanimoto’s memoir became the inspiration for “What Divides Us,” a film being produced by Cannon Hersey that will center on the relationship between his grandfather and Tanimoto in their efforts to document the horrors of war. With a release date planned for 2026, “What Divides Us” has already garnered public support from Izumi Nakamitsu, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs.
“We are really on the cusp of production at this point,” Hersey tells The Japan Times. “Next year, we’ll make the movie.”
Producer Taku Nishimae says audiences can expect some rough scenes depicting the effects of an atomic bomb on a populace, “but we are not aiming for shock and awe.”
The film is a response of sorts to “Oppenheimer,” last year’s Academy Award-winning biopic of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is known as the “father” of the atomic bomb. The Japanese-American production team behind “What Divides Us” hopes the film will give people a new understanding of Hiroshima, as a place defined not only by nuclear destruction but also hope and resilience.
“I think how we bring that to life will be in the visual splendor of the first green sprouting after an atomic bomb,” Hersey says, adding that hibakujumoku (survivor trees) are “the core resonating symbol of Hiroshima” as opposed to the preserved ruins of one of the few structures that remained standing following the bombing, the “Genbaku Dome.”
Casting is currently underway for roles that include Tanimoto’s eldest daughter, Koko Kondo (the real-life Kondo, 80, serves as the film’s executive producer), and Capt. Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
Kondo was 8 months old when her city was destroyed. She was raised in her father’s Nagarekawa Church with the so-called Hiroshima Maidens — a group of 25 schoolgirls whom Tanimoto helped to obtain treatment in the U.S. for keloid scars — and other gravely injured survivors.
“One day, one of the girls found a comb somewhere, so she started combing my hair,” Kondo says, recounting a childhood memory. “When I turned my head, I saw her fingers holding the comb. All the fingers were melted. I was so shocked.”
Upon seeing the girl’s disfigured hands, young Kondo told herself, “When I grow up, I have to find the people who were on the B-29 Enola Gay. I wanted to give them a punch or kick.”
Kondo resented Lewis and others involved in the bombing until she met the U.S. captain in 1955 on the American television show “This Is Your Life.” The program featured an interview with her father, who then shook hands with Lewis after he was brought on stage.
“(Lewis) said, ‘I wrote it on my log: My God, what have we done?’” Kondo recounts. “Right after he said that, I was staring into his eyes. His tears came down. I was shocked. I thought he was a monster but, oh, monsters don’t have tears! That means he’s a human being, same as me.
“As I stood next to him, I just touched his hand. That’s the only way I could say ‘sorry.’ And, of course, he felt my fingers touching his hand. He held my hand very tightly. That’s the moment I changed. If I hate those people, I should hate the war itself. ... Whenever I think about (Lewis), tears come out.”
Another real-life figure set to be portrayed in the film is Hersey’s grandmother, Frances Ann Cannon, who helped facilitate her husband’s entry into Hiroshima despite strict rules on media.
After Japan’s surrender, Gen. Robert Lawrence Eichelberger visited the Cannon family, owners of a successful textile business, in order to present them with a samurai sword in return for supplying towels and sheets to U.S. troops. Frances Ann met Eichelberger and told him that her husband, who was in China at the time, wanted to visit Hiroshima and write about the survivors.
“It was really through that relationship that the door was opened,” says Hersey, adding, “Frances Ann is sort of the unknown story.”
She was not the only unknown in the film producer’s family history.
“My grandfather never ever spoke to my father about Hiroshima,” Hersey says. “It was something he never spoke of with any of his children. What he saw was so horrible, he really struggled to talk about it. I think he always felt like words on the page speak for themselves.”
Hersey was also able to obtain records that showed his grandfather was put on a government watchlist after leaving Hiroshima. Upon returning to the U.S., the family was routinely visited by the CIA.
The “Hiroshima” piece, which had been produced in complete secrecy with the help of New Yorker editors Harold Ross and William Shawn, was later republished as a book. Hersey can still remember his grandmother giving the book to him at the age of 13.
“I went to (my grandfather) having read it and he (still) didn’t talk about it,” Hersey recalls, “but it was a transformative moment.”
John Hersey died in Key West, Florida, in 1993. Cannon Hersey says, “Very close to his death, one of the things I remember him saying was, ‘There are so many more stories left to tell,’” likely referring to the hibakusha. Hersey later found a note written by his grandfather in 1985 that read: “It’s largely thanks to the hibakusha’s willingness to revisit that dark moment in their personal history that another nuclear weapon hasn’t been used. But what will happen when there are no more hibakusha left to tell the stories of what happened in Hiroshima?”
Producer Robyn Rosenfeld says that “by virtue of (John) Hersey’s integrity and defying of ... information suppression" the film will hopefully reinspire and reinvigorate the tenets of journalism that have been lost to a wave of increasing disinformation in our lives.
Producer Donald Rosenfeld agrees, saying, “Now we are going to be able to tell Tanimoto’s story from a different angle — his own writing. It’ll be a voice from Japan we haven’t exactly heard.”
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