The Doctor of Hiroshima

Author: Dr Michihiko Hachiya

Publisher: Octopus Publishing

Available: 14^th March 2024 available in Paperback & eBook

Thank you to Anne Cater, Random Things Tours & Octopus Publishing for my gifted copy and for having me on the blog tour for this book. My review is based on my experience of the book and any thoughts expressed here are solely mine alone.

 Book Details:

 With what this poor woman had been through the sight of her crying tore at my heartstrings. What if something should happen to her; who would care for her little baby? To conceal the fear and terror in my heart I left her, trying to put up a cheerful front. But no one could conceal from her the ominous import of the dark spots that had appeared on her chest.

The Doctor of Hiroshima is the extraordinary true story of Dr Michihiko Hachiya, whose hospital was less than a mile from the centre of the atomic bomb that hit on that warm August day. Somehow, in immense shock and pain and extremely weak, the doctor and his wife manage to drag themselves to the hospital, where their horrific wounds are treated, and they slowly begin to recover. Tentatively, the doctor starts to reckon with the utter devastation of the bomb, and to investigate the strange symptoms afflicting his patients.

Told simply and poignantly through Dr Hachiya’s daily diary entries, The Doctor of Hiroshima is the inspiring story of how a doctor and his patients fought to survive and rebuild their lives in the face of unimaginable loss.

My Thoughts:

I was born 30 years after the end of WWII, I had grandfathers who served as Merchant Navel Seamen on wolf pack infested seas, neither of them spoke much about their wartime experiences but what they saw, what they lived through as young men was etched upon their hearts and minds and even though time passed, the spector of war, never left them.

My grandad Walker was a great reader and always had his nose in a book, I remember pestering him regularly by repeatedly asking, what was he reading, because the covers of his book choices, never seemed particularly appealing to me. Especially not in comparison to the sherbet pastel colours of my grandmother’s Mills & Boon stack, with their kissing couples on every cover. When I was 11 years old, he gifted me, a copy of Anne Frank’s Diary. I confess at the time, I wasn’t overly impressed by this choice, as to be honest I was hoping for a couple of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books! But I remember, he said at the time, other people’s perspectives provide us with real insight into the happenings in our world. His words have never left me and set me on a reading path starting with Anne Frank, that I could have easily missed out on, if his influence and wisdom hadn’t directed me to their pages. So, I have to credit him today as one of my reasons for choosing to read The Doctor of Hiroshima by Dr Michihiko Hachiya.

Another reason for my choosing to read this book and to my share my thoughts with you on what I’ve read, is because and this maybe a generational observation, when I studied the history of WWII at school or subsequently as an adult have chosen to read books of others accounts/experiences of the war. They tend to come from the Allies perspective, nurses from Australia, survivors of the Holocaust, Land girls ploughing fields. Rarely have I found or read books, whose authors came from the Axis perspective, with the exception of Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s last Secretary – Traudl Junge.

Certainly, until now that is, I have never read anything from a Japanese point of view, so I saw reading this book as a step to re-dressing the balance of my knowledge and because and I am going to make a large assumption here, most of us, when the we hear the names Hiroshima or Nagasaki; we believe, we know about it; how in order to end the war and to punish Japan for their attack on Pearl Harbour, the US unleashed a weapon of such devastating magnitude, that it changed the face of our world…forever! But in reality…we mostly have no idea, what happened next…the aftermath of such actions, have left indelible footprints on these cities and their populations, and the generations that followed.

There are plenty of books and films, that convince us of our understanding of the history, including the most recent Oscar winning film Oppenheimer, which depicts the trajectory and invention of the atomic bomb, the minds behind it and how it came into being but it doesn’t examine the situation any further…unlike this book, which depicts how on an ordinary summer’s day, ordinary people’s lives were obliterated and how one Doctor, put one foot in front of the other and tried to help pick up the pieces of what was left!

The Doctor of Hiroshima is a book, that provides another side to this story, a different perspective but a very human one. This book is not for the faint-hearted, it is both beautiful and breathtakingly brutal. It offers a very personal account of the circumstances Dr Hachiya found himself living through, it provides in unequivocal terms the incomprehensible horror and tragedy of the event and aftermath. Nothing can truly prepare you for reading about it, this book once read, is unforgettable emotionally, historically, and societally!

For me this detailed, harrowing account, in terms of written history, does help re-dresses the balance of our perspectives of ‘the other side’, it has been very easy to dismiss the Japanese as not having suffered in any way during the war, because of our emotional viewpoints regarding their well-documented negative behaviour towards their allied prisoners. This book brings front and centre the all consuming cost of WWII on every aspect of humanity involved.

For me reading this book was a truly unique experience and a profound one. As time marches on, those who lived through this time of war, are diminishing and there will come a point, in the not to distant future, when accounts like Dr Hachiya’s will be lost forever, taking personal truth and a variety of valid but different perspectives with them, in terms of the history of WWII.

I cannot recommend more highly that you read this book, it won’t be an easy journey for any reader, but it is an important one, be brave and read it.

Happy Reading Bookophiles…

About the Author:

Dr Michihiko Hachiya was Director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. After the bomb, he continued as Director there for several years before taking on a teaching role at Okayama University Medical School.

He retired in Okayama and passed away in the 1980s.

Please do read some of the other reviews available on this blog tour.