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Ahead of the 80th anniversaries of the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear (ICAN) has launched an online memorial honouring the estimated 38,000 children killed in the attacks.
It features more than 400 profiles with details of the children’s lives, their agonising deaths and the grief of surviving family members. The children range in age from infants to teenagers.
“We want the public to better understand the staggering human toll of the nuclear bombings. Among the victims were tens of thousands of children, who suffered in horrific ways,” said Tim Wright, the initiator of the project.
“By sharing their heart-wrenching stories, we hope to honour their memories and spur action for the total abolition of nuclear weapons – an increasingly urgent task given rising global tensions.”
The Children’s Peace Memorial was established with the support of numerous organisations, including newspapers and museums, as well as individuals, many of them based in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
ICAN thanks those who spoke with us directly about family and friends they lost, as well as all those who, over the decades, have carefully preserved the memories of the children killed by the nuclear bombings. In many cases, the information in the profiles is being made available online and in English for the first time.
The initiative was inspired by the lifelong advocacy of Setsuko Thurlow, who survived the Hiroshima bombing as a 13-year-old girl. In many of her public lectures, she holds up a large yellow banner bearing the names of her 351 schoolmates and teachers killed in the attack. She asks audience members to consider the victims as individuals, not a statistic.
In 2017, Thurlow jointly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to ICAN at a ceremony in Norway, where she said:
“Whenever I remember Hiroshima, the first image that comes to mind is of my four-year-old nephew, Eiji – his little body transformed into an unrecognisable melted chunk of flesh. He kept begging for water in a faint voice until his death released him from agony. To me, he came to represent all the innocent children of the world, threatened as they are at this very moment by nuclear weapons.”
Kishida Eiji is one of the children profiled in the memorial. Others include Tetsutani Shinichi, a boy whose burnt tricycle has become synonymous with the suffering of Hiroshima’s children, and Sasaki Sadako, who developed leukaemia from the Hiroshima bomb’s radiation and folded more than a thousand paper cranes in the hope of recovering.
Visitors to the memorial are encouraged to fold cranes and send them to decision makers to build support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – a landmark UN accord adopted in 2017. To date, 94 countries have signed it, representing around half of all countries in the world.
Acknowledgements
ICAN thanks the many organisations and individuals who have supported this initiative in various ways, including: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, Hiroshima Peace Media Center (Chugoku Shimbun), Nagasaki Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, Peace Boat, ANT-Hiroshima, Archives of Pre A-Bomb Days and Nagasaki Junshin Educational Corporation.
The image above is of Suzuki Hideaki and Kimiko. (Photo taken by Suzuki Rokuro, Hideaki’s father, and provided by Suzuki Tsuneaki)