When news broke that Nihon Hidankyo, a group representing survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings, had won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, its co-chair Toshiyuki Mimaki burst into tears. “It can’t be real,” he said after watching the award live from Oslo. “I felt so sure it would be the people of Gaza.”
The comments were revealing. The hibakusha, or A-bomb survivors, see their efforts to “achieve a world without nuclear weapons” as part of a wider struggle for peace. Mimaki’s weeping also caught something of their relief that after decades of campaigning they have finally won global recognition for what seems like a losing battle.
Founded 11 years after US bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, instantly killing 210,000 people, the Hidankyo initially aimed to support survivors. But as hibakusha continued to die from the impact of radiation (more than half a million are now officially recorded) and nuclear weapons proliferated, merely demanding their abolition became political.
Hibakusha are now the moral heart of Japan’s pacifism and the world anti-nuclear movement. Many are, at best, reluctant campaigners – trying to put the past behind them rather than repeatedly having to dredge it up for public consumption. Among their most famous faces was Sunao Tsuboi, who tried to hide after being badly burnt in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bomb.
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“Nobody wanted to marry someone who might die in a couple of years,” he once told me. “We were watched very closely to see if we would die.” Later he fell in love with a girl whose parents refused to give them permission to marry. “We decided to commit suicide together and took pills but we didn’t take enough. When we woke up and cried together, we were so happy to be alive.”
When Barack Obama became, in 2016, the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima, it was Tsuboi who opted to shake his hand, his very visible scars a reminder of the political failure to achieve disarmament. Tsuboi later said he told Obama that he would be remembered for having listened to the hibakusha.
Yet, despite his famous anti-nuclear pledge in 2009, which also won a Nobel Peace Prize, Obama left the world a more perilous place. By the time he vacated the Oval Office, the US “was well along in a modernisation programme that is making nearly all of its nuclear weapons more accurate and deadly”, pointed out Reuters at the time.
A proposal to end the US’s controversial nuclear “first use” policy has been dropped. While the global stockpile of 12,000 nuclear warheads is a substantial fall from the height of the cold war, the number of active warheads, meaning “operationally deployed or ready to be deployed”, is on the rise, noted Japan’s Asahi newspaper after the Nobel award. “In reality, the world is regressing into a fresh nuclear arms race.”
Japan’s official position, sheltering under the US nuclear umbrella while paying lip service to hibakusha, is often uncomfortable. Prime minister Eisaku Sato shared Japan’s only other peace prize with Irish peace campaigner Seán MacBride in 1974 for vowing “to never make, possess or allow on Japanese territory nuclear weapons”, despite secretly allowing US nuclear weapons to be brought into Japan.
When a global ban on nuclear weapons was approved at the UN headquarters in New York in 2017, 122 countries signed it. Japan, however, stayed away, along with the world’s nuclear powers – the US, Britain, Russia, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. Japan’s empty seat, said Toshiki Fujimori, then assistant secretary general of Hidankyo, left him “heartbroken”.
Some on the Japanese right resent that the “nuclear taboo”, as prime minister Shinzo Abe put it in 2022, inhibits the military policies of a country surrounded by nuclear-armed China, Russia and North Korea. Abe, who was assassinated a few months later, wanted the US to deploy nuclear weapons in Japan and jointly operate them with the Japanese military.
Current prime minister Shigeru Ishiba expressed this ambiguity after the Hidankyo win, insisting that nuclear abolition is the goal but pointing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which surrendered its nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union, as a salutary lesson. “We are not going to rely solely on deterrence, but, in reality, deterrence is functioning,” he said.
The Nobel Committee recognised that perhaps the only force capable of short-circuiting such logic is the global movement that Hidankyo leads, “which has stigmatised the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable”. As MG Sheftall, author of an acclaimed new book on the Hiroshima bombing told The Irish Times:
“For a world that has probably not been this close to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the awarding of this prize could not be more timely or necessary. We must never forget what happened to human beings under the fireballs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the survivors represented by Hidankyo can remind us of that.”