Toshiyuki Mimaki is a survivor Atomic bomb Which she delivered United States of America [1945inthecityHiroshima Japanese, and is co-chair of the Japan Federation of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Victims’ Organizations, known as (Nihon Hidankyo) which was established in 1956.
Toshiyuki was three and a half years old when the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb, which exploded 600 meters above the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. He was residing with his family in a village on the outskirts of the city.
Although he was far from the bomb site where the greatest damage occurred, he was infected with radiation when he accompanied his mother to the city in search of his father, who worked on the railway.
He devoted his life to combating nuclear weapons and defending the rights of survivors of nuclear bombing, and since 2005 he has been presenting his testimony and experience in international forums.
The Swedish Academy announced its donorNobel Prize On October 11, 2024, the Nihon Hidankyo organization won the Nobel Peace Prize, and said that it chose to honor the organization “for its efforts for a world free of nuclear weapons and for proving, through testimonies, that nuclear weapons should never be used again.”
Following the announcement of the award, Toshiyuki Mimaki, one of the three co-chairs of the organization, likened the situation of children to… Gaza Strip who is exposed For genocide Since October 2023, what happened in Hiroshima 8 decades ago, which angered IsraelIts ambassador to Japan criticized him and considered this comparison “baseless.”
Birth and upbringing
Toshiyuki Mimaki was born in March 1942 in the Japanese capital TokyoHis parents had been married since January 1941.
Three months before his birth, the Japanese fleet attacked American destroyers in Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
His father worked in a chemical factory in Tokyo’s Shimura district, while his mother was a nanny.
Related Post
On March 10, 1945, his father decided to leave Tokyo after it was bombed, believing that staying in the capital was no longer safe and that his family’s life would become difficult. The destination was his birthplace in Hiroshima.
In April, the family left the devastated city of Tokyo and settled on the outskirts of Hiroshima in a house they rented in the village of Imura.
His father worked in an engine warehouse belonging to the Hiroshima branch of the National Railway, while the mother devoted herself to household affairs and raising her two children.
Toshiyuki said in his testimony about that period that their life was quiet, as their house directly overlooked the Ota River, and his mother would take him and his brother to the other side of the river on a boat in order to buy vegetables from farmers.
Hiroshima bomb
Toshiyuki Mimaki was playing in front of the house on August 6, 1945, when he saw a sudden flash in the sky. In the afternoon, he saw crowds of people walking near his house, but he did not realize that they were injured.
He was 3 years and 4 months old at the time, and yet he clearly remembers a woman who was alone in the crowd, wearing worn-out clothes and looking like a beggar. She approached their house and called his mother and asked her to open a can of canned food for her. The mother opened the can and put the contents in a bowl and gave it to the woman, then continued. The latter made her way. Later, his mother commented, “The woman must have died.”
He also remembers that that evening he saw something that looked like burning paper flying in the sky over the Ota River.
The mother knew that something scary had happened and was worried about her husband, who works at the train station in central Hiroshima, so she took her two children and tried to go to the city on foot because transportation services had stopped.
On the way, she saw huge fires and many people collapsed and dead. She felt tired and exhausted, so she returned home.
She returned the ball two days later, and took her two children to the city, where they were exposed to radiation without realizing it. They were tired of searching again without results, so they returned home to be surprised by the father waiting for them after he had taken a mountain road.
The father told them that he was changing his work clothes in an underground changing room at the Hiroshima station when he heard a loud noise at a quarter past eight in the morning. He went up to the roof and found the station square engulfed in flames. Many people burned to death, while the buildings caught fire, and everyone was… In a state of panic and shock.
The family left their rural home in Hiroshima and moved to the maternal grandparents’ home in Kumagaya, Saitama Prefecture, part of the greater Tokyo area, in the hope of starting a new life there.
At that time, the Mimaki family was not aware that what happened in Hiroshima was caused by an atomic bomb or that they had been exposed to radiation. All they knew was that a flash spread over Hiroshima and caused massive destruction.
In the fall, the family moved to their paternal grandfather’s house in the village of Kichisaka in Yamagata Prefecture, about 300 kilometers from Tokyo, where they stayed in a warehouse located near the family’s main house. His parents would go with the rest of the family to work in agricultural projects.
When Toshiyuki was in the fifth year of elementary school, he began to exhibit the characteristic symptoms of radiation sickness. He had a high fever for several days, and the usual treatments did not help, so the doctor prescribed an expensive injection to his mother.
Academic path
He studied primary school in a school far from his home. He had to walk an hour to get to school, so his father bought him a bicycle.
In secondary school, he joined a secondary school near his home, where he studied part-time except on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Thanks to his Japanese language teacher, he learned to read books and became addicted to them.
In parallel with his studies, he worked in various jobs to earn money in order to pay school fees and provide pocket money. He worked in harvesting rice in the fall, carrying wood from the mountains in the spring, and trimming the hooves of livestock in the winter.
Professional path
In March 1961, he graduated from high school after 4 years of study, and immediately got a job in a lathe factory. He lived in company housing, and on Saturday evenings he would return home to visit his parents, and on Sundays he would help his father work on the farm.
His youth coincided with the rapid growth of the Japanese economy, which enabled him to acquire modern electrical appliances such as a washing machine, refrigerator, and television, and his family lived an economically comfortable life.
The struggle against nuclear weapons
Toshiyuki Mimaki joined the anti-nuclear hibakusha (bomb survivors in Japanese) movement in Hiroshima Prefecture in 2005.
5 years later, he visited New York With other atomic bomb survivors to share their experience at a review conference Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Mimaki heads the Hiroshima Prefectural Federation of Atomic Bomb Victims’ Organizations (Hiroshima-ken Hidankyo), one of seven local groups that make up the Japan Federation of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Victims’ Organizations (Nihon Hidankyo), which includes survivors of the Hiroshima andNagasaki.
At a meeting of Nihon Hidankyo in June 2022, Toshiyuki Mimaki was chosen as co-chair of the organization as one of its three presidents, succeeding anti-nuclear activist and atomic bomb survivor Sunao Tsuboi, who died in October 2021 at the age of ( 96 years old).
“Tsuboi was a prominent figure among the hibakusha in Japan,” Mimaki said after being selected for this mission. “I will do my best as someone who worked with him.”
There are about 107,000 atomic bomb survivors in Japan, and their average age is 85, according to official data released in March 2024.
The nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Japan, with an atomic bomb, killed 70,000 people immediately, and by the end of 1945, 140,000 people had died from radiation poisoning and other effects of the bomb, representing 55% of the city’s total population.
Four days later, a second atomic bomb dropped by the United States exploded over the city of Nagasaki, killing 40,000 people immediately and 70,000 by the end of the year and destroying 40% of Nagasaki’s buildings.
In 1956, the survivors founded the Nihon Hidankyo organization to demand government compensation for victims and survivors, and to press for a ban on nuclear weapons. It participated in a number of activities in United Nations Asian and European countries.
Nobel Prize
The organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024, and the Swedish Academy, which awarded the prize, announced that it had chosen to honor the organization “for its efforts for a world free of nuclear weapons and for proving, through testimonies, that nuclear weapons should never be used again.”
After the award was announced, Toshiyuki Mimaki said while trying to hold back his tears, “When I saw children being carried and covered in blood in Gaza, I remembered the scenes that took place in Japan 80 years ago.”
He added, “The pictures overlap with each other,” referring to the pictures being circulated about the Israeli aggression on Gaza, and those that spread about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Israeli ambassador to Japan criticized Mimaki’s statements, saying they were “a scandalous and baseless comparison.”
