Native name 田中 煕巳 | Nationality Japanese | |
Organization Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations | ||
Terumi tanaka toshiki fujimori message to president obama from hibakusha
Tanaka Terumi (田中 煕巳, Tanaka Terumi, born 1932) is a Japanese anti-nuclear and anti-war activist and former professor. He is a hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and is the secretary general of Nihon Hidankyo, a Japan-wide organisation of atomic and hydrogen bomb sufferers. He lives in Niiza, Saitama.
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Early life
He was born in 1932 in Manchuria in China, which was then under Japanese occupation as the puppet state of Manchukuo. He later moved to Nagasaki.
Atomic bombing of Hiroshima
Tanaka was 13 years old when Nagasaki was bombed, and his home was around 3.2 kilometres from the hypocenter. He was blown through several panes of glass but did not suffer major injuries. He lost his grandfather, two uncles, an aunt, and a cousin in the bombing. He personally cremated his aunt in a nearby field after she died several days after the bombing.
Postwar career
He was an associate professor in the school of engineering at Tohoku University.
Activism
Tanaka has been involved with hibakusha activism since 1974, and he became secretary-general of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations in 2000.
He has repeatedly called upon the US to apologise for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to get rid of its nuclear weapons, as well as stating that all nuclear weapons should be abolished, and that their use is never justified. He has also condemned North Korean nuclear tests.
He has also spoken out against discrimination against atomic bomb survivors and their descendants.
After the March 11 disaster and meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, Tanaka and Hidankyo called for the decommissioning of reactors that had already been shut down.
Along with other atomic bomb survivors Tanaka attended the May 2016 speech of US President Barack Obama in Hiroshima, responding positively and praising it as being "wonderful", although he regretted that Obama had not been able to make progress towards a nuclear free world. After reading a translation of the speech and fully understanding the contents, he regretted praising the speech, stating that Obama's abstract language such as "Death fell from the sky" was unacceptable, given the bombing was a deliberate act by the US.
In January 2017 he announced that he would retire in June at the Nikon Hidankyo General Meeting.