Koji Ueda: Collecting stories of A-bomb victims

November 15, 2015

A-bomb survivor works to get anti-nuke message to nuclear powers

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20151115p2a00m0na004000c.html

A survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing is trying to get the anti-nuclear message to nuclear-armed countries through translating and publishing the stories of those who lived through the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Koji Ueda, 73, was formerly the vice-head of the secretariat of Toyukai, a Tokyo organization of A-bomb survivors. He is collecting stories from a variety of sources, including Shuntaro Hida, 98, a doctor who treated A-bomb victims.

Ueda himself was exposed to the radiation of the Hiroshima bomb when he returned with his mother to check on their house near the blast hypocenter. Though he doesn't have memories from that time, he has spread the stories of the A-bomb survivors both within and outside of Japan. Last year, with the help from a Bangladeshi friend, Ueda self-published stories in Bengali, a language that is also spoken in India -- one of the nuclear powers.

At the Review Conference for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in May this year, a call for leaders around the world to visit the bombing sites in Japan was removed from an agreement document due to opposition from China. This led Ueda to believe that nuclear-armed countries need to hear the voices of A-bomb survivors.

Ueda now seeks to publish these stories in Chinese, and is raising funds through the website : https://www.makuake.com/project/hiroshima-nagasaki-peace/ (in Japanese).