The speech by 83-year-old Japanese survivor Soichi Kido comes as he is expected to discuss nuclear disarmament at the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan, this week.
A Japanese survivor of the atomic bomb disaster in Nagasaki has spoken of his memories of the tragic accident near the end of World War II.
The speech by 83-year-old Japanese survivor Soichi Kido comes as he is expected to discuss nuclear disarmament at the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan, this week.
Kido was five years old when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
On the day of the disaster, he said, “It was very black. It wasn’t as if the city had burned. I just remember it was pitch black. Not like the traces of a fire. The whole town was gone.”
He says he went out to the streets the day after the disaster to find dead bodies everywhere among the survivors, some of whom begged for water and pieces of burnt flesh hanging from their bodies.
Kido survived after sustaining burns to his face and was later reunited with his family at a survivors’ shelter.
Kido leads the Nihon Hidankyo movement, a movement of survivors of the nuclear disaster that has been seeking for decades to raise awareness of the dangers of nuclear weapons and to call for their complete disarmament.
Kido feels grateful to participate in that movement, without which he would have been made “more vulnerable” by the effects of the disaster he experienced.
nuclear disarmament efforts
It is expected that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will raise the nuclear issue during the G7 summit, but Kido said that Kishida’s commitments to nuclear disarmament are not based on real foundations.
“I have great doubts about whether someone like Kishida can talk about denuclearization when he’s trying to expand the military and revise the constitution,” Kido said. towards the elimination of nuclear weapons and not just words.”
Kishida faces criticism within Japan over his plans to double Japan’s military budget over the next five years.
Japan also refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty despite the claims of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki disasters.
“Human history progresses and changes, so if you ask me whether denuclearization will be achieved in my lifetime, I can hardly answer,” Kido said.
