As arms race in Asia intensifies, a-bomb survivors make final plea for peace : NPR
Toshiyuki Mimaki, 83, co -president of Nihon Hidankyo, a group of survivors of the Nobel Peace Prize in Japan, is outside his farm, about 10 miles from the city of Hiroshima.
Anthony Kuhn / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Anthony Kuhn / NPR
Hiroshima, Japan – shortly before 80th Anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima at the beginning of the month, several dozen primary school students met the survivor of the atomic bomb and the farmer Toshiyuki Mimaki to hear his experiences.
Mimaki, 83, is the vice-president of Nihon Hidankyo, an organization of “hibakusha” or bomb survivors, who work to abolish nuclear weapons. The group received the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
They met at the Nakajima Community Center, about three tenths from Mile de Ground Zero. Almost everyone and everything in the neighborhood was erased on August 6th[1945Thebombingkilledaround140000peopleintotalattheendof1945
“Did you know that a nuclear bomb was abandoned on Hiroshima?” Mimaki asked students.
“Yes,” they replied.
“Children like you were all burned to death, because the houses caught fire and collapsed, trapping people below. Many are dead. Poor children. They never had the chance to watch television, because there was no television at the time, and they never knew the bubble trains,” he said.
After Mimaki’s speech, Yuri Iwata, 11, who listened, shared his reaction. “As a child of Hiroshima, learning this past tragedy makes me want to talk to other people about it,” he said. “It could lead to a better future, so listening to Mr. Mimaki was good.”
Mimaki survived the bombing of his family’s farm, about 10 miles outside Hiroshima, where he now pushes buckwheat. He remembers hearing the nuclear explosion and thinking that it was a thunderclap.
Mimaki grew up in poverty. His parents taught him not to waste even a grain of rice. He says it makes him think of children today in Ukraine and Gaza. “Food is the most important thing for human beings,” he said.
Bomb survivor at 3 years old
Mimaki was 3 years old in 1945. Many of his memories of the event come from what his parents told him, as the day after the attack, when he went to the city to seek his disappeared father and was irradiated by nuclear benefits.
Toshiyuki Mimaki holds a painting based on his memory to enter the city of Hiroshima to seek his father the day after the atomic bomb on the city. The painting shows Mimaki, 3, walking while holding his mother’s hand.
Anthony Kuhn / NPR
hide
tilting legend
Anthony Kuhn / NPR
“When the bomb was abandoned, my father was in the basement, changing his work clothes,” said Mimaki. “It saved his life. When he got out, he saw the city of Hiroshima.”
Mimaki is part of a young generation of Hibakusha. He compared his experience to that of his compatriot Hibakusha and the former co -president of Hidankyo Sunao Tsuboi, who was 20 years old in 1945, and died in 2021 at the age of 96.
“It’s simply incomparable in many ways,” said Mimaki. “He was struck directly by the nuclear explosion. Parties of his face were burned. He had cheloid scars. He remembers all the details. My memories are just pieces.”
Now in the 80s, Mimaki tried to pass the stick from Hibakusha’s older generations to a young generation. But he says it’s not going so well.
“I give a conference at the Peace Park, and the children say that the bomb was placed on such a beautiful park,” he said. I must say to them: “No, that’s not! This area was all houses and grocery stores and stores! ‘”
Starting the world of nuclear weapons is not doing well either.
A new arms race in East Asia
The Norwegian Nobel Committee attributes to Nihon Hidankyo to have helped build a “nuclear taboo”. This is the idea that nuclear weapons are so cruel and morally repugnant that no one has used them for 80 years.
(LR) Laureates of the Nobel Prize Nobel Terumi Tanaka, Toshiyuki Mimaki and Shigemitsu Tanaka attend the Save The Children Peace Prix at the Nobel Peace Center on December 10, 2024 in Oslo, Norway.
Per ole hagen / getty images
hide
tilting legend
Per ole hagen / getty images
But, on the other hand, the leaders of nuclear weapons and self-written “realists” believe that it is the dissuasive power of nuclear weapons that prevented their use.
“There will be a hardening of these two camps, these two views of the world and their understanding and their value different from nuclear deterrence”, predicts Toby Dalton, co -director of the Nuclear Policy Program of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He notes that the countries of East Asia are locked in a arms race, the nuclear powers increasing their arsenals. And under the “America First” policies of the Trump administration, the American allies, including Japan, are increasingly looking for Washington insurance that Washington will not remove the “nuclear umbrella” on them.
In January, Toshiyuki Mimaki met Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and asked the government to attend a meeting of signatories to the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), if not as a signatory, then as an observer. But Japan has not attended.
The international treaty, which would make illegal to develop, own or use nuclear weapons, has been signed and ratified by 73 states parties, none of which are nuclear weapons. Ishiba said Japan will not sign because it essentially rejects the American nuclear umbrella.
This puts Japan in the contradictory position of calling the abolition of nuclear weapons, because the only country to have been attacked with them, even if it relies on the American nuclear arsenal for its security.
Toby Dalton says that at the end, non -nuclear states have no way of forcing nuclear weapons to abandon their nuclear weapons.
“So, in the end, while the moral authority of the Hibakusha is really important,” he says, “the change must come from the interior and between states with nuclear weapons”.
Hidankyo’s latest stand
Meanwhile, the average age of the Hibakusha is now more than 86. There are less than 100,000 of them, and they lose around 10,000 per year. Mimaki says he plans to set up a last big Hidankyo campaign.
“We age and we are no longer so active,” he said. “I proposed that we gathered all the surviving members in Japan and, with all our remaining forces, surrounds the parliament building to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons.”
Mimaki says he plans to make his movement this fall, if he can bring together enough people.
Chie Kobayashi contributed to this report.
