He reported an entire city of 300,000 vanished. It was censored.
August 31, 1945: A version of Leslie Nakashima’s eyewitness report from Hiroshima ran in The New York Times, one of the first accounts of the atomic bomb’s devastation to reach American readers, and one of the first to be publicly contradicted by the same paper that printed it.
Nakashima was born on the island of Kaua’i, Hawaii, and had spent the war years in Tokyo working as a correspondent for United Press. When Japan surrendered, he had one thing on his mind: his mother, who lived on the outskirts of Hiroshima. On August 22, sixteen days after the bomb fell, he boarded a train to find her.
What Nakashima found when he stepped off the train defied description, so he tried anyway. The station, once one of the largest in western Japan, was gone, nothing left but concrete platforms and fragments of brick wall. Looking out over what should have been a dense, thriving city center, he could see clear to the mountains beyond it. Three concrete buildings were the only structures still standing.
Nakashima’s mother had survived. The city she lived near had not. In a dispatch filed with United Press on August 27, he wrote plainly that what had been a city of 300,000 population had vanished. He estimated the death toll would reach 100,000, with people still dying daily from their burns.
Censored at Home
Nakashima’s full dispatch, syndicated under headlines like “Not a Building Undamaged; After-Fumes Affect People,” went far beyond what most American readers ever saw. He described warnings that people would sicken from the effects of uranium that had seeped into the ground, kept them away from the city, and reported that Japanese authorities feared the bombed area might be uninhabitable for 75 years.
Many newspapers cut that material out. The New York Times ran its version on August 31 under the headline “Hiroshima Gone, Newsman Finds.” What survived was a single line: people continued to die daily from burns suffered from the bomb’s ultra-violet rays. Directly beneath it, editors inserted a rebuttal of their own: “United States scientists say the atomic bomb will not have lingering after-effects in a devastated area.” Those scientists were tied to the Manhattan Project, the same government program that built the bomb Nakashima had just watched erase a city.
First, But Forgotten
Nakashima wasn’t alone. In the weeks and months following the bombings, American press coverage was shaped less by journalists on the ground than by government press releases, some prewritten before the bombs even fell, and by strict controls on what reporters in Japan were allowed to file. The first draft of the atomic age wasn’t journalism. It was public relations.
For decades, the historical record credited Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett as the first Western reporter to expose the truth of Hiroshima, particularly the horror of radiation sickness, when his account ran in the British press in early September 1945.
But Nakashima’s dispatch came first, more than a week earlier, and included his own observation of radiation’s effects. The distinction is that Burchett’s account was published without a rebuttal attached to it. Nakashima’s was published alongside one, an official assurance, printed in the same breath as his eyewitness account, telling readers the very thing he’d just described wasn’t really happening.
Why Was His Article Forgotten?
Nakashima’s report came from a Japanese American reporter, at a moment when American wartime propaganda had spent years training the public to distrust anything filed under a Japanese name, and when General Leslie Groves himself was publicly dismissing Japanese-sourced casualty reports as propaganda. Burchett was white, Australian, and writing for a British paper with no occupation-era ties to bind his account to. It’s difficult to separate how thoroughly Nakashima’s reporting was undercut, and how completely credit for it slipped away from him, from the same prejudice that had shaped so much of the previous four years.
Nakashima went on to have a long career in journalism, but his Hiroshima dispatch remains his most consequential. The truth about Hiroshima did eventually reach the American public, through Burchett, through John Hersey’s Hiroshima a year later, through photographs suppressed for years and finally published. But it didn’t happen because officials changed their minds. It happened because enough journalists refused to stop trying to tell it.