GENEVA – A group of Japanese high school students on Tuesday submitted to the United Nations more than 110,000 signatures calling for the abolishment of nuclear weapons 80 years after the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Four boys and 20 girls selected from across Japan as this year’s peace messengers conveyed the voices of aging survivors of the atomic bombings in a meeting with Carolyne-Melanie Regimbal, chief of service of the U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs’ Geneva Office.
“Eighty years ago, the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki left behind deep wounds and unfathomable sorrow — scars that have never healed,” Ami Nagato, a 16-year-old student from Hiroshima Prefecture, said during the meeting. “It goes without saying what the consequences would be if today’s 12,000 nuclear weapons were ever used.”
Sharing episodes from the lives of their great-grandparents, who experienced the nuclear attacks firsthand, some students made an urgent call for action as the average age of survivors has already exceeded 86.
Karen Mizuno, an 18-year-old from Shizuoka Prefecture, performed a song titled “Sembazuru” (A Thousand Paper Cranes), praying for the souls of those who died because of the bombings, as other young peace messengers held up paper cranes on their fingertips.
“You also mentioned how the scars of the past still impact the families and communities. Continue to say it to the world,” Regimbal told the students. “Be the memory that your grandparents need you to be. Please don’t give up.”
The students also attended a meeting of the Conference on Disarmament on Tuesday morning in Geneva.
This year marks the 28th cohort of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Messengers, an initiative that sends Japanese youths to the United Nations annually to submit signatures. The latest group delivered 111,071 signatures collected across Japan over the past year, bringing the total gathered through the program to more than 2.8 million.
The messenger initiative began shortly after India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998, when two high school students from Nagasaki brought signatures calling for the abolishment of nuclear weapons to the U.N. headquarters in New York.
In the final days of World War II in August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with respective death tolls of roughly 140,000 and 74,000 by the end of that year, according to the cities.
AloJapan.com