HIROSHIMA – Atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reenergized to fight for a world without nuclear weapons Wednesday, a day after Japan’s leading organization representing them, Nihon Hidankyo, received the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
“I want to keep telling my stories” as a contribution to the effort to abolish nuclear weapons, 92-year-old Sadae Kasaoka said in Hiroshima, where she has long been giving her account of the 1945 U.S. bombing of the western Japan city.
Many foreign tourists and students on field trips enter the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and its famous museum to learn about the scope of the devastation caused by the atomic bomb, with those visiting on Wednesday particularly affected.
Foreign tourists visit the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on Dec. 11, 2024, a day after the ceremony for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo.
“I have been teaching songs of peace in my class. After watching yesterday’s ceremony on TV, I felt there are more things we must teach,” one of the visitors, Yoko Odesaki, 61, a junior high school teacher from Chiba Prefecture, near Tokyo, said.
In awarding the prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognized that testimonies by hibakusha, as the atomic bomb survivors are known, have made the use of nuclear weapons unconscionable internationally, a feeling that it said is unfortunately fading amid international conflicts.
Nagasaki survivor Mitoe Matsumoto, 82, who was 3 years old at the time of the bombing, expressed the joy she felt about the Nobel win.
“The voices of the survivors were acknowledged fairly, even though there are people in the world with different beliefs,” she said.
Matsumoto was encouraged by the fact that the younger generation had traveled to Norway for the ceremony, making efforts to carry on the experience of survivors.
Photo taken on Dec. 11, 2024, shows the Peace Statue at Peace Park in Nagasaki.
“Our efforts to abolish nuclear weapons have been acknowledged, and I was able to get confirmation that what we have been doing was right,” Tadayoshi Ogawa, an 80-year-old survivor in Nagasaki who has held photo exhibitions related to the bombing, said.
“I will continue to pass down the reality of the bombing and hopes for a world without nuclear weapons,” said 82-year-old Yasujiro Tanaka, a member of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council, which is a part of Nihon Hidankyo, after watching the ceremony at a public viewing.
BY: The Times Union
