Looking out over the skyline of Hiroshima, 96-year-old Junji Sarashina points out places from his childhood.
“That was my grade school. Not too far from here,” he tells his granddaughter, showing her around the area.
Sarashina was 16 years old and working in an antiaircraft munitions factory when the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
“When the bomb dropped, I wasn’t able to see anything,” Sarashina says.
A concrete wall saved Sarashina, but when he emerged from the rubble after the blast, an apocalyptic scene awaited him.
“That’s when I saw 1,000, 2,000 people quietly moving. All wounded, burned, no clothes, no hair — just moving trying to escape the fire,” he recalls.
He made his way to a Red Cross station and began to help.
“I tried to give a sip of water to the first kid, but he was gone,” Sarashina says.
About 140,000 people died in Hiroshima. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb over Nagasaki, killing another 70,000 people. Japan surrendered soon after, bringing an end to World War II.
Now, in the hills outside Hiroshima, where rice and buckwheat grow, lives a man who has spent decades of his life campaigning against nuclear weapons.
Toshiyuki Mimaki was 3 years old when the bomb exploded, and he still remembers the stench of death. He has spent his life campaigning against nuclear weapons.
Last year, his organization, Nihon Hidank-yo, which means survivors of the atomic bombings, won the Nobel Peace Prize. But Mimaki fears that with more than 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, the group’s activism is more critical than ever.
“I want people all over the world to know that nuclear weapons and humanity cannot co-exist,” Mimaki says.
That message was repeated at Hiroshima’s Peace Park to commemorate the 80-year mark, which both Sarashina and Mimaki attended.
In his address, Japan’s prime minister said that as the only country to have experienced the horror of nuclear devastation in war, it is Japan’s mission to bring about a world without nuclear weapons.
There was a deep concern that the stories of the fewer than 100,000 remaining elderly survivors of the bombings, known as hibakusha, will fade away with their passing. But there’s hope that the younger generation will ensure the world never forgets.
“From now on, I want to do my part to share their stories with others who don’t know,” 15-year-old student Minami Sato says.
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