Kunihiko Iida was three years old when he was seriously injured in the explosion. He feels the urgency to speak not only to the Japanese, but also to the many foreign tourists: “It will be difficult to abolish nuclear weapons without spreading the truth of what happened.” Today there are about 107,000 “hibakusha” whose lives were marked by the two American bombs.
Tokyo () – An 82-year-old survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb has begun taking private lessons to improve his English, convinced that the increase in global conflicts makes his mission to communicate the horrors of nuclear weapons more urgent than ever. The Japanese news agency Kyodo News reports that Kunihiko Iida was just a child when the atomic bomb dropped by the United States devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, leaving him with long-lasting health problems.
Iida has long spoken to Japanese visitors to Hiroshima and is often asked to speak to students about his experiences, but he was inspired to reach out to a wider audience following the G7 summit in Hiroshima last year. “It will be difficult to abolish nuclear weapons without making the reality of what happened known,” he says, “many people don’t know about it. With more foreign tourists coming to Japan, I want to have more opportunities to tell my story in English. Relying only on Japanese is limiting.”
In Japan, the number of survivors of the two atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as hibakusha, is dwindling, and with them the first-hand memories of the attacks and the horrors they brought. According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the number of survivors in March was about 107,000, with an average age of 85.6 years. At the Hiroshima Peace Museum only 32 survivors, including Iida, are actively offering their testimonies.
At the time of the bomb blast, Iida was three years old and had been playing in his grandparents’ garden, 900 metres from the hypocentre of the explosion, moments before. “My field of vision went completely white and I was thrown into the air,” he recalls. Buried under rubble, with wounds caused by broken glass and “everything was silent” around him, he was rescued by a relative. “I don’t remember a single healthy day as a child: I had constant headaches and dizziness,” he explains, recalling that at one point he was told he wouldn’t be able to go to school.
Iida studied English from high school and continued as an adult to better communicate with his international colleagues at a machinery company. “I lost a lot of my English skills because I couldn’t use them during the coronavirus outbreak,” he says, explaining his decision to return to school.
Despite the sense of hope raised by the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Iida believes there is an urgent need for global awareness and political action against nuclear weapons, citing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons and calls by an Israeli minister for the Gaza Strip to be hit with a nuclear bomb during the current conflict. “Nuclear weapons are often used as a threat, but there are no victors with their use.”
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