Fumiaki Kajiya was six years old when he suddenly found himself in hell. He had just arrived at school with his sister in bright sunshine. A flash of lightning, a crashing thunder, "Pika-Don", and his whole city was in flames. Everywhere there were people whose skin was torn open and burned, corpses floated in the river, screams for water rang through the soot-blackened air.
Tim Kanning
Editor in business.
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His sister was no longer there. Little Fumiaki had witnessed the dropping of the atomic bomb on his hometown of Hiroshima – and survived. Today, the delicate man with the small black eyes is 84 years old and one of the last survivors, the Hibakusha, as they are called in Japan.
Images of burning people
He sits quietly on a chair in a sober seminar room in the memorial hall for the atomic bomb victims in a gray checkered jacket and tells the guest from Germany about hell. On his laptop, he clicks through a presentation that is projected onto the wall.
It shows pictures that he himself has painted over the years, of burning people, of himself under the rubble of the school building that had collapsed above him, of his mother, whose body was shot into the body by the blast wave of the detonation. One eye could not be saved, but she also survived.
Kajiya has told his story thousands of times, in front of school classes, museum visitors, and even state guests. Like so many survivors, he often reproached himself, tormented himself with the question: Why did he survive and so many others did not? "To tell how it was," was finally the answer that gave him comfort. "I want to tell as many people in the world as possible about the suffering that the atomic bomb has brought to the world," he says, and then raises his voice once: "Never again must an atomic bomb be dropped on a city."
No other city in the world can tell more stories of the devastating destructive power of nuclear weapons than Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945, the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb in history there. Within a few seconds, it destroyed almost everything within a two-kilometer radius and killed 70,000 people; almost twice as many died from their injuries by the end of the year, and many more from secondary diseases.
Hiroshima is the constituency of Kishida
The heads of state and government of the world's seven largest democratic economies will meet here on Friday for the G7 summit. The decision in favor of the metropolis in western Japan as the venue has less to do with its history; First and foremost, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is inviting his powerful counterparts to his hometown, his constituency.
But US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the other representatives of the Group of Seven will also discuss how to deal with dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, who are more offensive than they have been in a long time threatening to use nuclear weapons.