Nagasaki Hopes to Be the Last Place of Atomic Bombing

The City of Nagasaki held a Peace Memorial Ceremony on August 9th, commemorating victims of an atomic bomb and praying for lasting peace. The mayor, Shiro Suzuki, urged the world leaders to immediately stop disputes based on a principle that “force is met with force.” Nagasaki swore its utmost effort towards abolition of nuclear weapons to make itself the last atomic bombing site now and forever.

At the beginning of his peace declaration, Suzuki asked the audience. ”On August 9th, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on this city. Now, 80 years since that day, who could have possibly imagined that our world would become like this?” Arguing that conflicts around the world were intensifying in a vicious cycle of confrontation and fragmentation, Suzuki warned the world that the human being might end up with a nuclear war.

 

Suzuki quoted the words of late Senji Yamaguchi who suffered from atomic bomb in Nagasaki and his body was seriously burnt with heat wave of the bomb. Yamaguchi made a speech in a Special Session on Disarmament of United Nations General Assembly in 1982, with a photo on his hands that depicted his red naked body burnt down. Suzuki reiterated Yamaguchi’s cry at the U.N., “No more Hiroshimas. No more Nagasakis. No more war. No more Hibakusha.”

 

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba addressed as a guest of the ceremony that Japan, as an only country that suffered from nuclear bombs in a war, would lead the world without nuclear weapons. Ishiba quoted the words of a medical doctor, Takashi Nagai, who hoped Urakami to be the last place of nuclear devastation. As a Christian prime minister, Ishiba touched on two Bells of Angelus, one of which was recently restored, hanging on a tower of Urakami Cathedral where the atomic bomb was dropped eighty years ago.

 

Nevertheless, Ishiba’s speech was accepted by hibakushas in a half way. Although Suzuki demanded Japanese government to participate in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, Ishiba only reiterated Japan’s standpoint to seek nuclear disarmament through a traditional regime of Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). There are a number of people in Nagasaki who have been excluded from support for nuclear sufferers, because they had been out of the place designated as suffered area.

 

One of the hibakushas, Hiroshi Nishioka, who witnessed the atomic bomb in Nagasaki told his experience in the peace ceremony. “I was wrapped by extraordinarily bright light, and felt like sunk in a sea of orange and yellow light. Then, I was blown to the corner of classroom. I was not injured because my classmates were also blown away and covered me,” said Nishioka.

 

The city of Nagasaki invited Russia and Israel to the peace ceremony this year, while they had been dropped from the list last year. It is unsure whether the hope of Nishioka never to use a nuclear weapon was accepted by the attendees of ceremony from overseas.

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