Fumikazu Nishitani, Part 3

Finding answers at the scene

Fumikazu Nishitani, with his aunt and sister, in front of the housing complex in Kyoto where he spent his youth.

Fumikazu Nishitani

Born in 1960. He started working as a civil servant at Suita City Hall in Osaka in 1985. He enjoyed traveling, and his visit to Iraq brought him into contact with children who had come down with cancer apparently as a consequence of depleted uranium weapons. He founded 窶彝escue the Iraqi Children窶・in December 2003. At the end of 2004 he left his job at Suita City Hall and became a journalist covering conflict areas. He continues performing NGO work to deliver humanitarian aid while working as a journalist exposing war crimes. In 2006, he received the 窶弃eace & Cooperative Journalist Fund of Japan Award.窶・He lives in the city of Suita.

I was born in the city of Kyoto in 1960. Back then there were rice fields and vegetable fields in the city center, there weren't so many cars on the streets, and the streetcars ran slowly down the roads. The streetcar service in Kyoto ended in 1978 so we can't take the tram anymore. Whenever I visit Hiroshima, I try to take the streetcar as much as I can when I'm moving about the city. I enjoy seeing the landscape from the streetcar window.

When I was in the second grade in elementary school, my family moved to a place called Katsura, on the outskirts of Kyoto. Katsura is famous for the Katsura Imperial Villa. The Katsura train station is big now, and it's part of a big city where a bullet train now stops, but in those days you could walk five minutes from the station and see a lot of rice fields. Walking past those rice fields, and another 30 minutes west, would bring you to 13 five-story buildings which made up a new housing complex that was developed on a hillside. That was where I grew up, at the Katagihara housing complex.

Our unit had a dining-kitchen area and two other rooms. We were surrounded by bamboo trees and persimmon trees. It was exciting to have a flush toilet and a simple system for throwing out our garbage: we would just drop it through a hole on a landing of the stairs. (However, this method proved dangerous for the people who collected the garbage so we had to stop dropping our garbage through that hole.)

The mountains around the housing complex were gradually developed, too. The thick bamboo grove was cut down and a reservoir was reclaimed. In the spring, bamboo shoots would grow one after another on the ground of the bare hill where the bamboo trees once stood. I enjoyed digging out the bamboo shoots with a shovel and eating them with my friends from school.

When I became a student in the upper grades of elementary school, I was wild about fishing at the river near my house. The water was clear and a big rock made a kind of pool where I could catch a lot of fish. I would eat a popular snack which had just come on the market and then fill up the empty bag with fish. My mother then cooked them for us.

Back then, I went everywhere by bicycle. Kyoto lies in a basin surrounded by the Atago and Hiei mountains. I was curious to see what was on the other side of the mountain range so I biked up as far as I could and then carried my bike along a very narrow path that crossed over.

When I was in my second year of junior high school, that December I crossed over the mountain pass at Kitayama. When I reached the other side of the mountain, I found that everything was covered with snow. I have a fond memory of walking in the snow up to my knees to get to an icehouse which once made ice for the emperor in the summer in the old days.

Now, looking back on my youth, that sort of curiosity I had about "wanting to see what was on the other side of the mountain" has been extremely important to my life.

I would like to see the square in Iraq where the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down. Where is the house in which Osama bin Laden was killed? What kinds of difficulties are being faced now by the people who were forced to evacuate due to the accident at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima?

Recently, from May 16~31, I went to Libya to cover the war crimes perpetrated by Muammar Gaddafi and the reality of damage caused by NATO air raids and the harm to children wrought by the war there.

To find answers to my questions, I need to go directly to the scene. Every August 6, if possible, I try to visit Hiroshima to see the A-bombed aogiri tree in Peace Memorial Park. I do this because I think it's important for me to go to the actual site so that I won't forget the horror of the atomic bomb.