Hiroshima A-bomb survivor sharpens English skills to engage with foreign visitors

HIROSHIMA (Kyodo) — An 82-year-old atomic bomb survivor from Hiroshima has been diligently improving his English in the belief that a rise in global conflicts makes his mission to communicate the horrors of nuclear weapons to the world more pressing than ever.

Kunihiko Iida was just a toddler when a uranium bomb devastated Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, leaving him with long-running health problems.

But despite his advanced years, he recently began taking one-on-one English lessons, focusing on listening skills. His goal is to communicate with the growing number of foreign visitors to his hometown to share his belief in the necessity of nuclear disarmament.

Iida has long spoken to Japanese visitors to Hiroshima and is often asked to talk about his experiences to students, but was inspired to reach out to a wider audience after leaders at the Group of Seven summit in the city last year agreed to work toward a world without nuclear weapons and stand by Ukraine in its efforts to repel Russia’s invasion despite Moscow’s threats of nuclear strikes.

“It will be tough to abolish nuclear weapons without spreading awareness of the reality of what happened (in Hiroshima). So many people don’t know,” he said.

“If nuclear weapons are ever used again, the world will be destroyed, and everyone will be incinerated,” he said.

With the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum saw a record 670,000 foreign visitors in fiscal 2023, comprising over 30 percent of the total.

“With more overseas tourists coming to Japan, I want more opportunities to tell my story in English. Relying solely on Japanese is limiting,” Iida said.

Japan was hit twice by U.S. atomic bombs in the closing days of World War II, first in Hiroshima and then three days later in Nagasaki. But as the number of survivors, known as hibakusha, in the country dwindles, so do first-hand memories of the attacks and the horrors they brought.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the number of survivors stood at around 107,000 as of March, with an average age of 85.6.

In Hiroshima, only 32 survivors, including Iida, were actively providing testimonies as of April, according to the peace museum.

Iida recalls the moment the bomb exploded. Aged 3 at the time, he had been playing in his grandparent’s garden just moments earlier, 900 meters away from the blast’s hypocenter.

“My field of vision went completely white, and I was thrown into the air,” he recounted.

Buried under rubble, with wounds from broken glass and “everything going silent,” he was eventually rescued by a family member.

The aftermath was etched into his memory — survivors with peeling skin or barefoot seeking shelter. His mother and sister succumbed to atomic bomb disease a month later, while he continues to suffer from persistent physical and mental health issues.

“I don’t remember a single day when I was healthy as a child — I had constant headaches and dizziness,” he said, recalling he was told at one point he would not be able to go to high school.

“Until recently, I never even really had an appetite for food,” he said.

Iida pursued English from junior high school and continued as an adult to better communicate with international colleagues at a machine manufacturing company.

While he took periodic classes after retirement, his lessons were suspended in early 2020 due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, and Iida could not continue them for another three to four years.

“I lost a lot of my English ability from being unable to use it for so long,” he said.

Today, determined to convey the grim details of the bombing, Iida engages with tourists at the Rest House, which withstood the atomic bomb and now serves as a tourist information center within the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. He takes with him handmade pamphlets.

He also studies at the peace museum’s library to deepen his understanding of the bombing’s impact.

Despite a sense of hope kindled by the Hiroshima G-7 summit, Iida feels an urgent need for global awareness and political action against nuclear weapons, citing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons and calls made by an Israeli minister for striking the Gaza Strip with a nuclear bomb amid the ongoing conflict there.

“Nuclear weapons are often used as threats, but in reality, there are no winners in their use,” he said.

(By Toma Mochizuki)