ICAN leader visits Hiroshima peace park, lays wreath

January 16, 2018

Hiroshima- Beatrice Fihn, leader of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, on Monday visited Hiroshima, one of the two Japanese cities destroyed in the U.S. atomic bombing in 1945.

Fihn, executive director of the group, the winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and laid a wreath at the cenotaph for atomic bomb victims.

"ICAN will work with you to see the end of nuclear weapons," Fihn wrote in the visitors' book of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

The United States dropped an atomic bomb on the western Japan city on Aug. 6, 1945, in the closing days of World War II and another on the city of Nagasaki, southwestern Japan, three days later.

Fihn said she was "disappointed" that the Japanese government declined her request for a meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The ICAN leader said she wanted to talk with Abe to discuss "how to move forward, how we can together work to make sure that this (the tragedy of atomic bombing) never happens again." She visited Nagasaki on Saturday.

In a meeting with some 340 people, mainly young people including local high school students, later, Fihn discussed issues related to the nuclear ban treaty and peace activities.

At a press conference afterward, Fihn said she was moved to hear Keiko Ogura, an 80-year-old hibakusha atomic bomb survivor, tell her story about her experience. Ogura was hit by the blast some 2.4 kilometers away from the ground zero at the age of eight.

Fihn said she was now more determined to devote herself to abolishing nuclear weapons. She also called on political leaders who justify the threat of nuclear weapons to come to Hiroshima and listen. Jiji Press