Laureate of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, the Japanese association of atomic bomb survivors, Nihon Hidankyo, announced on Monday that it could send a delegation of 30 people to the award ceremony in Oslo, thanks to a crowdfunding campaign.
“I am pleased to announce that our delegation will be able to go” in Norway for the December 10 ceremony, one of its spokespersons, Jiro Hamasumi, announced to journalists.
Read also: The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Japanese anti-nuclear organization Nihon Hidankyo
The Nihon Hidankyo group, which brings together survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and which campaigns for a world purged of atomic weapons, won the prestigious award in mid-October.
€230,000 raised
But the amount of the prize was insufficient to cover the travel costs of the 30 collective recipients, leading the organization to launch a crowdfunding campaign. This generated more than 36 million yen, or nearly €230,000, Mr. Hamasumi said.
This survivor, now aged 78, was in his mother's womb during the explosion of the American atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. His father was one of the 140,000 dead.
In Oslo, “I hope to be able to share my experience so that there are no other victims and that atomic weapons are never used again,” he pointed out.
Among the other members of the delegation is Terumi Tanaka, 92, who as a child suffered the Nagasaki explosion on August 9, 1945. It left 74,000 dead.
Created in 1956, the Nihon Hidankyo group includes, among others, survivors of these two nuclear explosions, known in Japan as “hibakusha”, literally “people affected by the bomb”.
For a “world without nuclear weapons”
He was distinguished by the Nobel Committee for “ its efforts towards a world without nuclear weapons » and for “demonstrate through his testimonies that nuclear weapons must never be used again”.
The “hibakusha” have for decades forcefully carried out their call to ban nuclear weapons. There were still around 136,700 in 2020 but their number is declining rapidly.
The award of the Nobel to this organization took on a heightened symbolic dimension at a time of strong international tensions, punctuated by Russia's repeated threat to use nuclear weapons in the context of the war in Ukraine.
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