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Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for Atomic Bomb Victims registers portrait of Shogo Nagaoka, first director of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

by Michio Shimotaka, Staff Writer

On October 15, the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, located in Naka Ward, Hiroshima, announced it had registered the portrait of Shogo Nagaoka, who served as the first director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and died in 1973 at the age of 71.

According to the memorial hall and other organizations, Mr. Nagaoka, who belonged to the geology class at Hiroshima University of Literature and Science (now Hiroshima University), was in present-day Kaminoseki-cho in Yamaguchi Prefecture for a geological survey on August 6, 1945. He heard a loud boom and saw the mushroom cloud. He returned to the university on August 7.

After that, he traveled back and forth between his home in Kuba-cho (now part of Otake City), Hiroshima Prefecture, and Hiroshima City, collecting and studying stones and roof tiles that had been exposed to the thermal rays of the A-bombing. In 1949, he began working for a place that exhibited A-bomb artifacts, a predecessor of the Peace Memorial Museum, and became the museum’s director in 1955.

Toshiko Nakayama, 91, his sixth daughter, lives in Iizuka in Fukuoka Prefecture. She provided the portrait of Mr. Nagaoka after working with the memorial hall to produce a testimony video. She herself was also exposed to radiation while caring for the injured in the A-bombing at a school in Kuba. After the war, she served as a counselor for A-bomb survivors. She said, “War and A-bombings must never happen again,” and expressed her delight that the Nihon Hidankyo had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

For information on registering portraits of A-bomb survivors, please call the memorial hall at 082-543-6271.

(Originally published on October 16, 2024)

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