Toyofumi Ogura

(1899 - 1996)

A professor of history at Hiroshima University, Toyofumi Ogura published Letters from the End of the World, an account of the Hiroshima bombing, in 1948. The book was written as letters to his wife, who died of radiation poisoning two weeks after the attack. “I felt at the time,” he wrote later, “that firsthand accounts should be published as soon as possible, before people’s memories could become clouded with the passage of time.”