Hiroshima Survivors Win the Nobel Peace Prize
Juliana Mori
Staff Writer
On October 11, the winners of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize were announced. In a broadcast room in Hiroshima, Japan, Nihon Hidankyo, also known as “hibakusha,” was declared the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. According to The Nobel Prize, Nihon Hidankyo is a“grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” with the mission“to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.” This is a group of eyewitnesses of the only two events of nuclear weaponry being used in a war. They used their own experiences with losing family members, being riddled with radiation sickness, and other injuries to rid the world of nuclear weaponry.
Toshiyuki Mimaki, the leader of the Nihon Hidankyo, spoke about what this award means to him as a survivor, the organization, and the world. As The New York Times reports, with tears in his eyes he pleaded, “Please abolish nuclear weapons while we are alive…that is the wish of 114,000 hibakusha.” This mission to ban nuclear weapons has been a lifelong mission for him, and the thousands of others who have been affected by the atomic bombs during World War II. He wants to see the change within his lifetime to see the humanity of others.
Reuters reports that the average age of Nihon Hidankyo members is 85.6 which causes “concern that younger Japanese and people outside the country are becoming less familiar with the terrible lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The world should see through the testimony of the survivors that there are consequences to the actions of nuclear weapons that have affected generations of those who have been impacted. Many of these survivors hold the sentiment that the United States should issue some form of apology for using atomic weaponry during World War II. They see that their lived experience should be a lesson for leaders around the world about the aftermath which would follow using such weapons in war.BBC News has interviewed some of these survivors about their lives.
There are still states within the world that continue to attempt to modernize their nuclear weaponry. According to CNN, the 2024 annual assessment on the state of armaments made by the SIPRI has found that “the nine nuclear-armed states – the US, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel – “continued to modernize their nuclear arsenals and several deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapon systems in 2023.”
Toshiyuki Mimaki and other survivors have addressed this continued mission to expand and update nuclear arsenals will lead to international nuclear war, especially with the conflict in the Gaza Strip and in Ukraine. After hearing the announcement, The Japan Times states that Mimaki proclaimed, “The people are wishing for peace. But politicians insist on waging war, saying, ‘We won’t stop until we win.’ I think this is true for Russia and Israel, and I always wonder whether the power of the United Nations couldn’t put a stop to it.” He reflected on his experience as a 3-year-old when the bombs had dropped and wished to see a change. The Associated Press News reports the importance of this award being given to Nihon Hidankyo during a time of international conflicts stating that “the taboo of using nuclear weapons” is threatened in places like Ukraine, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Sudan.
Image courtesy of Getty Images
