In the lead up to this Friday’s 65^th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Dr. Tadatoshi Akiba, Mayor of Hiroshima and President of Mayors for Peace has been awarded the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award.

The award is considered Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize and is named after a popular Philippine president who died in a plane crash in 1957.

Tadatoshi Akiba was just 3 years old when a single American atomic bomb reduced the Japanese city of Hiroshima to ashes.

Amongst his many achievements, Akiba started a travel grants program through which American and other journalists visited and listened to the bomb survivors, called "hibakusha."

As a Japanese lawmaker and later Hiroshima mayor, Akiba recognized that Hiroshima had a moral obligation to warn the world of nuclear danger, the Magsaysay Award organizers said.

He established "Mayors for Peace" in 1992 and in 2003 Mayors for Peace launched their "2020 Vision" campaign to escalate pressure on governments to abolish all nuclear weapons by 2020, the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings.

There are now more than 4000 Mayors for Peace in 144 countries around the world.

"I feel it shows a positive assessment of our efforts to realize a world free of nuclear weapons. ... It's a great honor" Akiba said of the award.

He said it encourages him to do even more to realize a world free of nuclear weapons by 2020 and that he would like to accept the award representing atomic bomb victims.

Read more about Dr Akiba at http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Citation/CitationTadatoshiAki.htm