Hibakusha Alerts Japan

Leaving Japanese government negative on eliminating nuclear weapons behind, Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee awarded an international NGO, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, to 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. In the ceremony of the winner, one Hiroshima survivor, Setsuko Thurlow, gave a speech to warn the world of devastation of nuclear weapon. Thurlow, now living in Canada, included her home country as one of the accomplices of absolute evil.

As a representative of Japanese nuclear sufferers of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Thurlow revealed her incredible agony she experienced in August 15^th, 1945, at her age of 13. After she saw “a blinding bluish-white flash,” she found herself pinned by the collapsed building filled with the cries of her classmates needing help. As she crawled out the building guided by a man saying “Don’t give up! Keep pushing!” most of her classmates inside were burned to death alive.

The world has to realize that she has been living her life with consistent fear of death with influence of radiation caused by the atomic bomb. “In the weeks, months, and years that followed, many thousands more would die, often in random and mysterious ways, from the delayed effects of radiation. Still to this day, radiation is killing survivors,” Thurlow appealed. Many survivors have actually been suffering from discriminations on hibakusha, which sometimes appeared as refusal of marriage. Japanese government has been reluctant to include all the sufferers in the recipients of governmental compensation.

Introducing a scene of her four-year-old nephew whose body “transformed into an unrecognizable melted chunk of flesh,” Thurlow defined current situation in which nuclear weapons endanger everyone as insanity. “But still some refused to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as atrocities – as war crimes,” Thurlow accused nuclear possessing countries. “They accepted the propaganda that these were ‘good bombs’ that had ended a ‘just war.’ It was this myth that led to the disastrous nuclear arms race.”

Thurlow warned nine nations threatening the world with nuclear weapons, saying “These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.” But she refused excluding other nations that had not supported Treaty of the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons this summer from axis of evil. “To the officials of nuclear-armed nations – and to their accomplices under the so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ – I say this: Listen to our testimony. Heed our warning. And know that your actions are consequential. You are each an integral part of a system of violence that is endangering humankind. Let us all be alert to the banality of evil,” she said. Her words were real J-alert for Japan.