More people in Nagasaki recognize August 9th as
the last day that human being used atomic bomb for a war, and keep it as the
latest. As the only city in Japan that had been open to the world in the time
of national isolation in Edo era, Nagasaki has brought many people with
international point of view up. With the help of their efforts to appeal
broadly, the world is getting closer to understanding what had happened there
sixty-eight years ago.
In the memorial ceremony of praying for peace, the Mayor of
Nagasaki, Tomihisa Taue, criticized the government of Japan. Last April, the
government of Japan avoided signing on a joint statement that emphasized the
inhumanity of nuclear weapons in a committee meeting of Non-Proliferation
Treaty, with the reason that it was unlikely to support it under the nuclear
umbrella of the United States. “Japan showed its stand point that it would conditionally
allow use of nuclear weapons,” he said. Tagami raised that issue as an evidence
of the reluctance of the government of Japan to nuclear disarmament.
A civil organization in Nagasaki has been sending high
school students to Europe as “peace ambassadors” for years. They had appealed to
the U.N. European Headquarters in Geneva the necessity of eliminating nuclear
weapons and submit list of subscriptions by students in Japan. This year, four
out of twenty “ambassadors” are from the area suffered from the severe accident
of nuclear power generation plant in Fukushima two years ago. They will report
how nuclear power affects people’s life, even if it had been addressed for
peaceful purposes.
While news organizations in Japan tend to stress the “duty”
of the only country suffered from atomic bomb, in terms of making effort in
nuclear disarmament, the sufferers of nuclear weapons know well about how that
discussion will not appeal to the world so much. It actually is inhumane for a
bomb to kill such a huge number of innocent people. But inhumanity cannot be
proved only by the speed of killing. For example, Soviet Union lost 20 millions
of people in the war, while Japan did 3 millions. “Is it ok for the Japanese to
kill great number of people, if it is not an immediate commitment?” the
Russians may ask. That’s why serious peace-seekers emphasize the importance of
eliminating wars, not only the weapons of mass destruction.
There are a few who survived two atomic bombs in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. One of them, late Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who had a job to cooperate
with U.S. occupation force as a translator post-war era in Nagasaki, left
words: “Human beings cannot coexist with nuclear power. But I can imagine the
world without nuclear weapons. People in Nagasaki are international.”
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