Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses

The stories of hibakusha - Japanese for atomic bomb survivors - lie at the heart of this compelling minute-by-minute account of 6 August 1945 - the day the world changed forever as the Enola Gay dropped its payload over Hiroshima, ushering in the nuclear age. These survivors and witnesses, now with an average age of over 90, are the last people alive who can still provide us with reliable and detailed testimony about life in Hiroshima before the bombings. In this heart-stopping account they relay what they experienced on the day the city was obliterated, and what it has been like to live with those memories and scars over the rest of their lives.

M. G. Sheftall has spent years personally interviewing survivors who were just adolescents at the time but have lived well into their nineties, allowing him to construct portraits of what Hiroshima was like before the bomb, and how catastrophically its citizens' lives changed in the seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months and years afterwards. Fluent in spoken and written Japanese, his deep immersion in Japanese society has given him unprecedented access to the hibakusha in their waning years. Their trust in him is evident in the personal and traumatic depths they open up for him as he records their stories.

The result is a deeply human history of an unfathomable tragedy, which continues to haunt the world today.

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About the author

M.G. (Mordecai George) Sheftall is an American author and scholar living in Japan since 1987.

He is a professor of modern Japanese cultural history and communication in the Faculty of Informatics at Shizuoka University, a branch campus of the Japanese national university system. Sheftall's writing and research activities focus on the modern evolution of Japanese national identity, with particular emphasis on the Japanese experience in World War II and the lingering effects of that conflict on both collective and individual Japanese consciousness.

Fluent and literate in Japanese, he is a frequent commentator on modern Japanese history, culture and identity issues in public symposia and Japanese broadcast and print news media. He has also been a featured commentator and technical adviser on the History Channel series "Dogfights." He has contributed chapters to scholarly volumes on the legacy of the Second World War in modern Japanese society and on the historical, cultural and sociological analysis of the effect of military defeat on modern societies. His most important work to date has been the critically acclaimed Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (2005), based on interviews with survivors of Japan's wartime kamikaze program.

Sheftall graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, attended the United States Military Academy at West Point for two years as a member of the Class of 1984, and received a B.A. in Political Science/International Relations from Fordham College in 1985. He holds Master's degrees from California State University and the University of Birmingham, and received his Ph.D in International Studies from Waseda University in Tokyo in 2009. Sheftall's Waseda dissertation employs a methodological framework based on Terror Management Theory to analyze the roots and evolution of kamikaze ideology during Japan's Imperial Era (1895-1945) and the historical interpretive discourse of this legacy in postwar Japan.

From 2012-2013, he was a visiting research fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, researching discourses of war memory in postwar Japan.