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■サーロー節子さんスピーチ
Your Majesties,
Distinguished members of
the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
My fellow campaigners,
here and throughout the world,
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is a great privilege to
accept this award, together with Beatrice, on behalf of all the remarkable
human beings who form the ICAN movement. You each give me such tremendous hope
that we can - and will - bring the era of nuclear weapons to an end.
I speak as a member of the
family of hibakusha - those of us who, by some miraculous chance, survived the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For more than seven decades, we have
worked for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
We have stood in
solidarity with those harmed by the production and testing of these horrific
weapons around the world. People from places with long-forgotten names, like
Moruroa, Ekker, Semipalatinsk, Maralinga, Bikini. People whose lands and seas
were irradiated, whose bodies were experimented upon, whose cultures were
forever disrupted.
We were not content to be
victims. We refused to wait for an immediate fiery end or the slow poisoning of
our world. We refused to sit idly in terror as the so-called great powers took
us past nuclear dusk and brought us recklessly close to nuclear midnight. We
rose up. We shared our stories of survival. We said: humanity and nuclear
weapons cannot coexist.
Today, I want you to feel
in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million
souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure
that their deaths were not in vain.
I was just 13 years old
when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, on my city Hiroshima. I
still vividly remember that morning. At 8:15, I saw a blinding bluish-white
flash from the window. I remember having the sensation of floating in the air.
As I regained
consciousness in the silence and darkness, I found myself pinned by the
collapsed building. I began to hear my classmates' faint cries: "Mother,
help me. God, help me."
Then, suddenly, I felt
hands touching my left shoulder, and heard a man saying: "Don't give up!
Keep pushing! I am trying to free you. See the light coming through that
opening? Crawl towards it as quickly as you can." As I crawled out, the
ruins were on fire. Most of my classmates in that building were burned to death
alive. I saw all around me utter, unimaginable devastation.
Processions of ghostly
figures shuffled by. Grotesquely wounded people, they were bleeding, burnt,
blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing. Flesh and skin hung
from their bones. Some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands. Some with
their bellies burst open, their intestines hanging out. The foul stench of
burnt human flesh filled the air.
Thus, with one bomb my
beloved city was obliterated. Most of its residents were civilians who were
incinerated, vaporized, carbonized - among them, members of my own family and
351 of my schoolmates.
In the weeks, months and
years that followed, many thousands more would die, often in random and
mysterious ways, from the delayed effects of radiation. Still to this day,
radiation is killing survivors.
Whenever I remember
Hiroshima, the first image that comes to mind is of my four-year-old nephew,
Eiji - his little body transformed into an unrecognizable melted chunk of
flesh. He kept begging for water in a faint voice until his death released him
from agony.
To me, he came to
represent all the innocent children of the world, threatened as they are at
this very moment by nuclear weapons. Every second of every day, nuclear weapons
endanger everyone we love and everything we hold dear. We must not tolerate
this insanity any longer.
Through our agony and the
sheer struggle to survive - and to rebuild our lives from the ashes - we
hibakusha became convinced that we must warn the world about these apocalyptic
weapons. Time and again, we shared our testimonies.
But still some refused to
see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as atrocities - as war crimes. They accepted the
propaganda that these were "good bombs" that had ended a "just
war". It was this myth that led to the disastrous nuclear arms race - a
race that continues to this day.
Nine nations still
threaten to incinerate entire cities, to destroy life on earth, to make our
beautiful world uninhabitable for future generations. The development of
nuclear weapons signifies not a country's elevation to greatness, but its
descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary
evil; they are the ultimate evil.
On the seventh of July
this year, I was overwhelmed with joy when a great majority of the world's
nations voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Having
witnessed humanity at its worst, I witnessed, that day, humanity at its best.
We hibakusha had been waiting for the ban for seventy-two years. Let this be
the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.
All responsible leaders
will sign this treaty. And history will judge harshly those who reject it. No
longer shall their abstract theories mask the genocidal reality of their
practices. No longer shall "deterrence" be viewed as anything but a
deterrent to disarmament. No longer shall we live under a mushroom cloud of
fear.
To the officials of
nuclear-armed nations - and to their accomplices under the so-called
"nuclear umbrella" - I say this: Listen to our testimony. Heed our
warning. And know that your actions are consequential. You are each an integral
part of a system of violence that is endangering humankind. Let us all be alert
to the banality of evil.
To every president and
prime minister of every nation of the world, I beseech you: Join this treaty;
forever eradicate the threat of nuclear annihilation.
When I was a 13-year-old
girl, trapped in the smouldering rubble, I kept pushing. I kept moving toward
the light. And I survived. Our light now is the ban treaty. To all in this hall
and all listening around the world, I repeat those words that I heard called to
me in the ruins of Hiroshima: "Don't give up! Keep pushing! See the light?
Crawl towards it."
Tonight, as we march
through the streets of Oslo with torches aflame, let us follow each other out
of the dark night of nuclear terror. No matter what obstacles we face, we will
keep moving and keep pushing and keep sharing this light with others. This is
our passion and commitment for our one precious world to survive.
