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In 2004, Hiromu Morishita participated in the Hiroshima World Peace Mission, a project organized by the Hiroshima International Cultural Foundation that sends A-bomb survivors and young people to nuclear weapons states and other countries.

After the World Peace Pilgrimage, I visited Europe, the United States, India, China, and other countries to share my experience in the atomic bombing and to attend peace conferences. Just when I reached my 70s and felt my overseas travels were coming to an end, the Hiroshima World Peace Mission plan was decided. The mission was a long trip lasting about five weeks during which we visited Russia and Ukraine, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina. I was intrigued by the changes taking place in Moscow, a place I had visited on the Peace Pilgrimage 40 years earlier, as well as areas where ethnic conflicts had broken out.

My impressions of Russia were that the country had become wealthy and Americanized. Department stores had more goods to sell, even a matryoshka Russian doll of President Putin. I still remember young people there listening attentively to what I had to say. They told me, among other things, that they had come to feel up close with severity the horror of nuclear weapons. I also visited regions still contaminated due to the explosion from the nuclear power plant accident and the radioactive waste leaking from the facility. In other words, it’s not that the country is unaware of the tragedy of nuclear destruction. Nevertheless, now, President Putin is hinting at the potential use of nuclear weapons. I want to believe that is not the consensus of the Russian people.

In Ukraine, I visited Kyiv and Kharkov. I wonder what the students who listened to my testimony are doing now. The vast wheat fields, beech forests, and the beautiful old capital city have been transformed into a battlefield—heartrending. I also visited the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It had been 18 years since the nuclear accident, but there were still concerns about leaking radiation. Former residents who had been forced to evacuate from the area continued to suffer from health problems and hardship in their daily lives. I had the real sense that the damage was ongoing.

Probably because of that experience, I just couldn’t sit still when the nuclear accident occurred at the Fukushima No. 1 (Daiichi) nuclear power plant, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company. The following year, I went to the accident site on my own. After taking a series of buses and finally reaching my destination, I could only get a glimpse of things from behind the cordon. In the recent conflict, nuclear power facilities have also become the target of attacks. I believe nuclear energy gradually has to be replaced by natural sources of energy.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the scars of the conflict were still vivid, with bullet holes remaining in buildings throughout the city. People continue to shed blood and destroy each other because of ethnic differences. I want to believe that human beings are not so foolish as to repeat the same mistakes again and again, but wars continue to be waged. To me, that is an unbearable situation.

(Originally published on May 7, 2022)