Hidankyo Co-Head Vows to Keep Speaking about Cruelty of A-Bomb

Tokyo, Oct. 22 (Jiji Press)--Terumi Tanaka, co-chair of 2024 Nobel Peace Prize-winning Nihon Hidankyo, pledged on Tuesday to continue recounting the horrors of a nuclear attack for the rest of his days.

"I will let everybody know the reality of the damage caused by atomic bombs as long as I live," the 92-year-old survivor of the atomic bombing of the city of Nagasaki about 79 years ago told a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo.

A U.S. B-29 dropped a second atomic bomb over the southwestern Japan city on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the first-ever atomic-bombing against human was conducted at the western city of Hiroshima. It has been estimated that by the end of that year around 140,000 people died in Hiroshima and some 70,000 people in Nagasaki because of the just two bombings.

The 13-year-old Tanaka was at his home 3.2 kilometers from ground zero. Five of his relatives, including an aunt, were killed in the bombing.

He joined the activities of atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha, from around 1970 and became co-leader of Nihon Hidankyo, or the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, in 2017.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]