Japan In Focus

Hiroshima: Students Carry on Wish of Late Hibakusha Leader Sunao Tsuboi

By Hitomi Nakayasu / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

10:53 JST, November 30, 2024

HIROSHIMA — The longing for a world without nuclear weapons harbored by Sunao Tsuboi, who served as a leader of Nihon Hidankyo, is being carried on by the students at a junior high school in Minami Ward, Hiroshima, where he used to teach. Tsuboi died in 2021 at the age of 96.

Tsuboi, who talked about his experience as a hibakusha left with severe burns all over his body, earned the nickname “Pika-don sensei.” Pika-don is a Japanese word that describes the intense flash of light and sound of an atomic blast. Sensei means teacher.

Tsuboi started teaching at Midorimachi Junior High School in 1972. In 1977, when he was vice principal of the school, he found a register of children in a school office’s cabinet, which contained the names and addresses of students who died in the bombing.

The Yomiuri Shimbun
The old register of children that Sunao Tuboi found at Midorimachi Junior High School, left, and the booklet compiled by Tuboi’s students.

A total of 210 students at the school are said to have been killed in the bombing, but the number of students listed in the register was about half of that.

With Tsuboi’s guidance, students used their summer vacation and other occasions to interview the families of 52 students who died in the bombing and published a booklet based on the interviews in 1980.

The booklet is still used as part of the school’s peace education curriculum, and it is now customary for drama club members to read out the stories during school announcements every summer. One of the stories says: “My younger brother, who cried out for water on his sickbed at home, died two weeks after the atomic bombing. He was a brilliant boy who was class leader.”

“The booklet put together by the students is a valuable learning resource containing information that cannot be gained simply by visiting the Atomic Bomb Dome [in Hiroshima],” said Toshiyuki Namikawa, 55, principal of the school. “I think Nihon Hidankyo’s Nobel Peace Prize win is confirmation that Tsuboi’s peace education was correct.”