- Leading up to the 58th anniversary

At the end of a long rainy season, Hiroshima-esque heat has just arrived, and it's already August. Beginning August 1, a white-lettered banner on the Peace Memorial Museum announcing "Hiroshima City A-bomb Victims Consolation and Peace Prayer Ceremony" ("Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony") reminds us that the 58th "A-bomb Day" is approaching.

The first time I saw that banner was on the 23rd anniversary of the bombing in 1968, when I was 20 years old. With the Vietnam War intensifying, fearing that the US would use another nuclear weapon, I traveled from Kobe where I lived to attend the Peace Memorial Ceremony.

The museum's display of the ruins of Hiroshima after the bombing. The experience of the elderly hibakusha I heard sitting in a corner of Peace Memorial Park. The smell of incense as I stood before the Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims and first read the inscription. The countless paper cranes offered to the Children's Peace Monument. Looking up at the A-bomb Dome from the foot of the Motoyasu Bridge. The A-bomb researcher I happened to meet..

Everything I saw and heard had something to say to me. "I need to think about life and the world via Hiroshima." Driven by this thought, I wandered for six months, then moved to Hiroshima the following spring. Thirty-five years have gone by. First as a resident, then as a journalist since '81, aside from a few short breaks, I have been almost continuously involved with the atomic bombing, peace, and nuclear issues.

Recently, I am frequently been reminded of my first visit to Hiroshima because I meet so many young people coming to the A-bombed city as I did, hoping to learn something. One such experience was my interaction with seven reporters working for local papers elsewhere who came to attend the Hiroshima Course, a city-sponsored training session for domestic journalists. Except for one female journalist who is from Hiroshima, all were visiting for the first time.

"Terrorism and the Iraq War ongoing, Japan enacting the Emergency Measures Law and the Special Measures Law to send the Self-Defense Force to Iraq. Is this OK?" "We are struggling with a nuclear power plant that frequently causes trouble locally. Can the human race coexist indefinitely with nuclear power?" "What's the link between the Great Hanshin Earthquake that took thousands of lives and the A-bomb catastrophe?"

The motivations they brought to this course varied, but they all communicated their passionate desire to find something in the experience of Hiroshima to use as reporters.

In trying to assist Western or Asian journalists coming to Hiroshima for the first time, I have often had the opportunity to speak with foreign students and teachers. Reading their letters and the reports they wrote for their papers or magazines when they got home, I am convinced of the progressive globalization of "Hiroshima." However, these words from the reporter raised in Hiroshima also express reality. "When I left Hiroshima, I noticed that 'Hiroshima' is really a local issue." Once out of Hiroshima, elsewhere in Japan, much less the world, the nuclear issue gets little notice. It rarely enters public awareness.

One reporter said frankly that, "The mood in my company and community is against even writing about the experiences of hibakusha who live in the area." Fifty-eight years have passed since the war, and the atomic bombing (and war) experiences are fading. For all this time we have lived under the military and economic influence of the nation that dropped the bomb. The Japanese government, still unable to adopt a position of true equality, has been quite passive about digging up the facts of the atomic bombings and teaching them in school.

Most Japanese have become quite affluent and have pushed to the backs of their minds the importance of conveying their "historical experiences." As the experiences fade, some Japanese look at the possibility that North Korea has nuclear weapons and say, "We should develop our own nuclear weapons," or "Send the Self-Defense Force to Iraq." Such voices have growing influence.

With its trampling on the Peace Constitution, never before has there been such a large political gap between Hiroshima and the national government.

As a reporter who has, between my first visit to Hiroshima 35 years ago and today, written continuously about the nuclear age as manifest in the A-bombed cities and other locations around the world, I wonder what sort of information we need now to carve a path to a peaceful 21st century. To be honest, I have no ingenious idea. However, along with my young colleagues at the Chugoku Shimbun, the "A-bombed newspaper company" that lost about a third of its staff (113 employees) to the bomb, I intend to continue seeking ever more effective ways to deliver the unvarnished "voice of Hiroshima" to people at home and abroad through these pages and over the Internet.

That is our way of living up to our pledge to the victims: "Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil." And I firmly believe that this is the only way we can respond to the good-hearted people around the world seeking to eliminate war and nuclear weapons from this planet.