AFP :
Just like the dwindling group of survivors now recognised with a Nobel prize, the residents of Hiroshima hope that the world never forgets the atomic bombing of 1945 — now more than ever.
Susumu Ogawa, 84, was five when the bomb dropped by the United States all but obliterated the Japanese city 79 years ago, and many of his family were among the 140,000 people killed.
“My mother, my aunt, my grandfather,and my grandfather all died in the atomic bombing,” Ogawa told AFP a day after the survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ogawa himself recalls very little but the snippets he garnered later from his surviving relatives and others painted a hellish picture.
“All they could do was to evacuate and save their own lives, while they saw other people (perish) inside the inferno,” he said.
“All nuclear weapons in the world have to be abandoned,” he said. “We know the horror of nuclear weapons, because we know what happened in Hiroshima.”
What is happening now in the Middle East saddens him greatly.
“Why do people fight each other? …hurting each other won’t bring anything good,” he said.
On a sunny Saturday, many tourists and some residents were strolling around the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park to the bomb’s 140,000 victims.
A preserved skeleton of a building close to ground zero of the “Little Boy”
bomb and a statue of a girl with outstretched arms are poignant reminders of the devastation.
Jung Jaesuk, 43, a South Korean primary school teacher visiting the site, said the Nobel was a “a victory for (grassroots) people.”