About Michihiko Hachiya

Michihiko Hachiya was a Japanese physician who survived the Hiroshima bombing in 1945 and kept a diary of his experience. He was Director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital and lived near the hospital, about a mile from the explosion's center. A 1984 editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, indicates "At the urging of friends, Dr. Hachiya first published his diary in a small Japanese-language medical journal (Teishin Igaku) that circulated among medical members of the Japanese communications services. There it came to the attention of Warner Wells, MD, an American physician who was working in Japan in 1950 as a surgical consultant to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission." It was Dr. Wells, who in consultation with Dr. Hachiya, made the diary to be published in 1955, under the name of Hiroshima Diary.