Hiroshima and me

by Kati Juva

When I was a child I saw an advertisement of a movie called Hiroshima, mon amour and asked my parents “who is Hiroshima?” They said they were actually glad I did not know, but then explained what had happened there in 1945.

In the 1970s the fear of a nuclear war was very real, and we children and young people thought we may not live long enough to become adults. We knew what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and feared it could happen in our home town. Later in medical school there were courses about radiation and it causing cancer and malformations. Most of the knowledge of the impacts of ionizing radiation to humans are derived from the experiences of the atomic bombing, so Hiroshima and Nagasaki were always in the background of these lectures. Humankind and medical science could easily have lived without this experiment.

But the bombs were dropped, and the knowledge accumulated. Over the decades physicians followed up the Hibakusha and learned more and more about the devastating long-term effects of radiation. Our IPPNW activist and friend Masao Tomonaga—a Hibakusha himself—is still doing haematological research in Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Hospital.

I visited Hiroshima for the first time in 1989, at IPPNW’s 9^th world conference. The Peace Memorial Museum, Peace Park, testimonies of several Hibakusha, and an interesting scientific programme made a great impact on me. The horrors of using atomic bombs became very concrete, and preventing nuclear war became my lifetime dedication.

Since then, I have visited Hiroshima three times. IPPNW’s 20^th world conference was again in Hiroshima in 2012. I had an honour to moderate one plenary and take part in many interesting scientific and social events. I remember noticing that the whole growing stock in the Peace Park had grown much taller. Usually parks have trees of different ages and look the same over the decades, but these trees had all been planted at the same time after the total destruction of the city, and got bigger at the same pace.

My daughter has been interested in Japan and Japanese culture for a long time, and she has learned to speak some Japanese. We visited Japan and Hiroshima seven years ago and I showed her around the memorial places. This summer we visited Hiroshima for a second time. I had contacted beforehand many of our Japanese IPPNW doctors and students, many of whom I had met at an IPPNW conference in Mombasa a few months earlier. They organised a wonderful program for us. Students showed us all the important memorial places at the Peace Park with very good English, and my daughter was able to chat with them in Japanese. We met the director of the Peace Memorial Museum and had good discussions with many colleagues from JPPNW and Hiroshima Prefectural Medical Association about nuclear abolition, NATO and umbrella states and peace movement in Japan and in Finland.  Also, the food was wonderful and Okonomyaki in Hiroshima was even better than in Osaka. 

It has been and it still is very important that people and doctors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki keep up the memory of the atomic bombings. The catastrophic humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons are the strongest possible argument to abolish them all.  Especially the leaders of the world would need this reminding, but they seem to be quite deaf to the message. Even when the G7 countries visited Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial Museum, their statement did not include the urgent need to abolish nuclear weapons. And Biden had his “nuclear football,” the briefcase containing the codes to launch a nuclear attack, all the time in his vicinity.

I do honour the work Japanese peace activists and especially JPPNW are doing in trying to get the world to understand that nuclear weapons are not usable in any circumstances and we have to abolish them as soon as possible. Personally, I want to thank all the JPPNW people in Hiroshima for providing me and my daughter an unforgettable two days visit in Hiroshima. Arigato.

IPPNW Co-President Dr. Kati Juva is from Finland. This article is one of a series from IPPNW co-presidents that will appear periodically on the Peace and Health blog.