Youngest Hibakusha Determined to Demand Nuclear Abolition

Oslo, Dec. 9 (Jiji Press)--People who were exposed, while in the womb or during early childhood, to radiation from the atomic bombs dropped on two Japanese cities during World War II have expressed motivation to demand the abolition of nuclear weapons at the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony Tuesday.

Such people, known as the youngest hibakusha, are among delegates from the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, or Nihon Hidankyo, who arrived in Oslo on Sunday to collect the prize at the ceremony in the Norwegian capital.

The youngest hibakusha include Jiro Hamasumi, 78, an assistant secretary-general of Nihon Hidankyo. His mother was pregnant with him for three months when she experienced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in western Japan on Aug. 6, 1945.

She went to look for her husband, who had not returned, the day after the bombing and found his belt, wallet fittings and keys the following day. Her husband was working at a company located roughly 500 meters from the center of the explosion, and she was unable to take his remains home.

When Hamasumi, who now lives in Inagi, Tokyo, was 49, the same age as his father in the bombing, he wrote to his elder sister and brother asking them to tell him about what happened on Aug. 6. By learning about his father, Hamasumi came to feel that he himself was a hibakusha from before he was born.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]