He quickly put himself to work aiding others by bringing water, carrying them to safety, and if there was nothing else he could do, reading them verses from the Bible in Japanese.

During his time he met prominent figures such as Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck and political journalist Norman Cousins.

These meetings led to the establishment of the Moral Adoption Program, which facilitated Americans to offer financial support and send presents to orphans whose parents died during the bombings.

[1][3] On May 11, 1955,[4] believing he was there for a news interview, Tanimoto unwittingly appeared on a television program popular in the United States at that time, This Is Your Life, where his experience was highly dramatized with sound effects, dramatic music, and actual footage of the city being destroyed in the bombing, as he was asked to walk the studio audience and viewers through the events.

He, his wife, and his four children, including his daughter and eventual peace activist, Koko Kondo,[5][6] were placed in the uncomfortable position of meeting with Captain Robert A. Lewis, the copilot of the Enola Gay, which dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima.

The first of these ways is Disneyfication, the tendency to view Hiroshima as a dramatic spectacle, an exercise in special effects: the ticking clock, the rolling kettledrums, and the image of the mushroom cloud produce an emotional frisson, and little more than that.