Hiroshima, Japan – For more than half a century, the bells have spread through the Japanese city of Hiroshima every morning at 8:15.
The solemn ritual marks the precise moment of August 6, 1945, when the US bomber. Inola Gay dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, killing some 70,000 people instantly.
On Wednesday, people in Hiroshima commemorated the 80th anniversary of the devastating attack, as nuclear fears increase worldwide in the midst of military conflicts not resolved in Ukraine and the Middle East.
In a silent tribute of one minute, the city recalled the death and destruction of the panoramic scale caused by the 10,000 pound bomb, which created a huge cloud of fungi that increased to more than 60,000 feet.
“It is our duty to convey the reality of atomic bombings not only to the people of Japan but also to the people of the world,” Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru ishiba said in a speech.
Initially I intended to hit a T -shaped bridge, the pump deviated to an exhibition hall with a distinctive dome, which after the explosion was the only building that was still within a radius of 1 mile.
The explosion unleashed a whirlwind of fire and strength, incinerating thousands of people. Then came the radioactive black rain, which fell on the city, poisoning in silence innumerable more.
Teruko Yahata was 8 years old at that time.
Yahata, who is now 80 years old, says he still has a scar since he was thrown by the explosion. Fearing another bomb, he snuggled under a blanket with his family.
“I really didn’t understand what it meant to die,” said Yahata, “but the warmth I felt that he died together … I still remember to this day.”
Three days after bombing Hiroshima, the United States unleashed a second atomic bomb in the city of Nagasaki that killed another 40,000 people immediately.
The unprecedented bombings accelerated the surrender of Imperial Japan and the end of World War II, the majority of historians say, although at the price of almost a quarter of a million lives.
From the ashes, Hiroshima was rebuilt in an occupied city of more than one million people, attracting tourists around the world.
Near the hypocenter, where the pump detonated about 2,000 feet above, there is a museum and a Museum of Peace Memorial that includes the iconic atomic dome. Using virtual reality headphones, visitors can immerse themselves in the bombing and its brutal consequences while traveling the park.
However, the bombing still feels visceral for Hiroshima’s survivors, which are called Hibakusha, or “affected pumps”. Now on average more than 86 years, most of their lives have spent fighting with diseases, depression and discrimination.
Kunihiko Iida, whose father was killed in the war and whose mother and older sister died shortly after the bombing, now has 83, challenging the predictions that he would not live until he was 20 years old.
Those who say that attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, said: “They don’t know the reality of a nuclear bomb.”
Last year, the group of Japanese survivors Nihon Hidankyo received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Toshiyuki Mimaki, the group’s co -chair, is among those who advocate nuclear disarmament and ensure that Hiroshima is not forgotten or repeated.
“We are in a very dangerous situation with Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Iran,” he said. “Even a single nuclear bomb would mean a disaster.”
Janis Frayer / NBC News
According to the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons (ICAN), the nine nuclear weapons states of the world: Russia, United States, China, France, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) spent more than $ 100 billion on nuclear weapons last year, 11% more than 2023.
The increase in nuclear weapons spending contrasts with public attitudes over them. In a June June survey at the PEW Research Center, 69% of respondents said that the development of nuclear weapons had made the world less safe, compared to 10% that said it had made the world safer.
Almost 70% of Japan’s atomic bomb survivors believe that nuclear weapons could be used again, according to a survey this year by the Japanese news agency Kyodo News.
Hiroshima’s survivor, Setsuko Thurlow, 93, lost 10 family members in the bombing. She said she remembered having seen a procession of people who fled to the slope that “seemed ghosts.”
“Everyone’s hair was standing up, and the skin and meat came out of the bones,” he said.
Thurlow, who went to the United States to study in 1954, the same year in which the United States tested a hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, has spent his life campaigning for nuclear disarmament, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 in the name of Ican.
“I beg the world leaders to stop and come to the negotiating table. Diplomacy needs to be more attention,” he said in a video interview from Toronto. “They are not nuclear weapons, but diplomacy, exchange of words and ideas.”
The Hibakusha number is decreasing, which increases the fears that the living memory of the attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will soon have gone. At the end of March, there were 99,130 survivors throughout the country, according to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
The responsibility to remember is being assumed by young people like Shun Sasaki, 12, who has been giving foreign visitors free turns of guided tours of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park since he was 7 years old.
Sasaki said that although his great grandmother was among those killed in the bombing, for a long time his family barely recognized him.
“The most scary thing that could happen in the future is to forget what happened a long time ago,” said Sasaki.
“I don’t want anyone to have the same experience as my great -grandmother.”
Sasaki is not the only family that has avoided speaking that day. More than 70% of respondents in the Kyodo survey said they had never talked about their experiences.
Even so, some feel their duty to speak.
“While living, I want to say,” said Yahata. “I am a survivor.”
Janis Mackey Frayer and Mai Nishiyama reported from Hiroshima, Arata Yamamoto de Tokyo, Michael Fiorentino de London and Peter Guo by Hong Kong.
