Features

by Michio Shimotaka, Staff Writer

“Midnight: There are 20 people at the sit-in. One is an elderly woman. No longer people around, most must have gone to sleep. There is a single star out. It looks like tomorrow will be another hot day.” Another passage reads, “11:15: Despite being hospitalized, a survivor joins the sit-in. He says he can’t sit still.” And another, “3:15: Only three hours left, but will our voices be heard in France?”

Twenty-four-hour hunger strike

Those are some of the notes left by Kazuyoshi Yukawa, 77, a resident of Hiroshima City’s Aki Ward who had lost his older sister in the atomic bombing. August 29–30, 1973, a total of 170 A-bomb survivors and citizens participated in a sit-in, including a hunger strike, in front of the Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims in Peace Memorial Park (in Hiroshima’s present-day Naka Ward) to protest a nuclear test conducted by France. Completing the 24-hour hunger strike were 13 people, and Mr. Yukawa was one of them.

On July 20 of that same year, members of 17 organizations sat with their backs to the cenotaph bearing the regrets of victims in protest against France’s nuclear test. The two Hiroshima Prefectural Confederation of A-bomb Sufferers Organizations (Hiroshima Hidankyo), originally a single organization that later split into two groups, one led by Ichiro Moritaki and the other by Masaru Tanabe, were acting in unison.

Since then, the two Hiroshima Hidankyo organizations and citizens have staged sit-ins together each time a nuclear test is conducted. An image of the 72-year-old Mr. Moritaki, sitting in the midsummer heat and leaving quietly on his own after the protest ended, was seared into Mr. Yukawa’s mind. “Seeing him up close, I sensed the belief of this man, who was that angry even after he had grown elderly.”

The sit-ins have a “back story.” When the United Kingdom conducted hydrogen bomb testing on Christmas Island in the Central Pacific, several people, including Kiyoshi Kikkawa, who died in 1986, staged a sit-in that began in late March 1957 and lasted until mid-April. When the United States announced its testing plan for 1962, Mr. Moritaki, a Hiroshima University professor at the time, submitted his resignation to the university and, despite collapsing from sunstroke, persisted in holding a 12-day protest beginning on April 20.

Carefully considered significance

One day, a young girl walking back and forth in front of him said, “Just sitting there won’t stop nuclear testing.” Mr. Moritaki later looked back at that time and said, “My actions, to which I had committed my entire existence, were sharply posed to me as a big question, whether sit-ins could halt nuclear testing and whether the peace movement could prevent war.”

In considering the issue and seeing the circle of sit-ins expanding day by day, he came to realize that “the chain reaction of spiritual atoms must prevail over the chain reaction of physical atoms.” He staged more than 470 sit-ins until just six months before his death in 1994 at the age of 92.

On August 6, 1945, Mr. Moritaki experienced the atomic bombing at a factory in the area of Eba-machi (in Hiroshima’s present-day Naka Ward), around four kilometers from the hypocenter, while leading a group of mobilized students. Shards of flying glass pierced his right eye, causing him to lose sight in that eye. Two days later, after recuperation on Miyajima (in present-day Hatsukaichi City), he returned to Hiroshima for medical treatment, where the devastation of the city became etched in his mind. Mr. Moritaki’s second daughter, Haruko, 85, a resident of Hiroshima’s Saeki Ward, believes that the driving force behind his sit-ins was “‘the origin’ that he witnessed with his left eye which, despite being terribly painful, he had forced open.”

While making persistent efforts to engage in protests in Hiroshima, Mr. Moritaki also traveled to Europe and Africa as part of international activities carried out by the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations (Nihon Hidankyo). Even before Nihon Hidankyo was founded in 1956, A-bomb survivors had begun to share their experiences in the bombings overseas. One such pioneer was Shinobu Hizume (dying at the age of 94), who experienced the atomic bombing in the area of Minami-machi (in Hiroshima’s present-day Minami Ward) and lost her husband and child at the time. When she was invited to the United Kingdom by the Medical Society of London in March 1955, she was apparently told at a church gathering that efforts would be made to not let the feelings of Hizume, who had traveled all the way across the ocean to share her experiences, go to waste.

(Originally published on December 4, 2024)