Online memorial for the child victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

On July 1, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) launched an online memorial commemorating the roughly 38,000 children killed by the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago.

The site, called the Children’s Peace Memorial, contains over 400 profiles of children who died due to the attacks, whether from burns, blast injuries, or radiation. By sharing the stories of individual victims and their grieving loved ones, ICAN hopes the public and decision-makers will gain new conviction that no country should possess such weapons of terror and mass destruction, let alone use them.

“We want the public to better understand the staggering human toll of the nuclear bombings. Among the victims were tens of thousands of children, who suffered in horrific ways,” said Tim Wright, treaty coordinator at ICAN and the initiator of the project.

As we approach the 80th anniversary of the nuclear bombings on August 6th and 9th amid rising global tensions, through the Children’s Peace Memorial, ICAN hopes to honor the memories of the children killed and spur action for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.

Child victims as individuals

The profiles included in the memorial represent just a fraction of the tens of thousands of child victims. ICAN hopes the number of profiles will continue to grow going forward and welcomes individuals to submit information via the memorial’s contact page.

I (a former Hiroshima resident) was a member of the team that gathered profiles and photos for the memorial, working with individuals and organizations in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and beyond who believe these children’s names should be known, and their stories heard, by people around the world.

We drew extensively from the testimonies and records of the bombings that have been painstakingly preserved since 1945. These include essays written by grieving parents, the collections of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, and reporting by the Japanese media. We also spoke personally with victims’ family and friends. In many cases, the stories in the memorial are being published online or in English for the first time.

The memorial’s homepage features a sphere of paper cranes, each representing a child; visitors can double-click on a crane to read a child’s profile at random. Although it’s impossible to list all the profiles I would like to introduce here, here are a few.

While many are familiar with Hiroshima’s stories of Sasaki Sadako and the paper cranes or Tetsutani Shinichi’s blackened tricycle, fewer know the children in Nagasaki who have similarly become symbols for the horror of nuclear weapons and the wish for peace: Fukutome Minako and Oshima Chikako, who were cremated together in kimono, and Hayashi Kayoko, whose mother donated 50 cherry tree saplings to the school where Kayoko died.

The nuclear bombings are commonly thought of — and, thereby, justified — in the West as attacks on “enemy” cities. However, such oversimplified descriptions obscure the reality that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cities of immigrants, just like the vast majority of cities today. Korean Ha Chandu was among the many students killed while working outdoors in Hiroshima. Kaneko Hiroaki was killed at home just after having breakfast with his extended family, all first- or second-generation Korean immigrants. Japanese American Tamura Mana, who had moved to her father’s hometown near Hiroshima city in 1938, was identified by her family after the bombing by her American-made nylon slip, even though her face had been burned beyond recognition.

Many of the profiles contain details about the children’s personalities, dreams for the future, and relationships with family and friends. After the war, Akita Kozo’s father helped organize bereaved parents from First Hiroshima Prefectural Junior High School to compile a collection of essays memorializing their lost sons heart-wrenching detail.

Although photographs were a luxury at the time, the the Suzukis lovingly compiled family photo albums, while the Wataokas took commemorative photos when they didn’t know what the war would bring next.

Akiguchi Akemi, killed in Nagasaki at age 17

Miyazaki Yuji, killed in Nagasaki at age 8

In Nagasaki, 17-year-old medical student Akiguchi Akemi was just starting his journey toward adulthood as an intellectual and professional when the nuclear bombing ended his life, while eight-year old Miyazaki Yuji was robbed of childhood days spent going to school and playing with his neighborhood friend.

A resource and call to action

The Children’s Peace Memorial is part of ICAN’s ongoing efforts to highlight the disproportionate impacts of nuclear weapons on children, who are statistically more likely to suffer life-threatening injuries from nuclear weapons’ extreme heat and blast, as well as to die from acute radiation sickness or develop radiation-related illnesses over the course of their lives.

We hope the memorial will be a resource for those hoping to learn more about this topic. You can explore the profiles using filters for city, gender, age, etc., as well as search for specific names or keywords.

The site also contains a page with general information on the nuclear bombings, including photos and drawings that show the destruction of the cities and harm to children. A separate version with less graphic images and simplified content geared toward school-age children is also available. (The profiles themselves do not contain graphic images.)

Visitors are also encouraged to take action to promote a nuclear-free world. You can fold paper cranes and send them to decision makers to build support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a landmark treaty which, to date, 94 countries have signed, representing around half of all countries in the world.

We hope visitors to the memorial find stories that resonate with them. And, whether held in one’s heart or mentioned in a letter to a decision-maker, we hope you will use them to build a world in which future generations of children may grow up in peace, free from the scourge of nuclear weapons.

COVER photo: Hirono Wataoka (right) with her younger sister, Kimino. It is believed that this photo was taken the day before the nuclear bombing. It was colorized using AI technology with the help of Ishikawa Hiroshi, professor at Waseda University’s Faculty of Science and Engineering. (Provided by Iwata Miho)