JUNKO MORIMOTO was 13 when hell rained down.
At 8.15am on August 6, 1945, she was at home with her family when an atomic bomb, dropped by American aviators, exploded 580 metres above Hiroshima, killing up to 80,000 people, many of them women and children.
Miraculously, Ms Morimoto’s family survived, but climbing out of the rubble of their destroyed house the young teenager couldn’t comprehend the scale of destruction. The heatwave and earth-shattering roar had convinced her the bomb had landed directly on her house, but the entire city lay in ruins.
“Surrounded by screams, it sounded as if I was in hell,” she says through an interpreter. “I felt nothing but fear.”
She recalls walking through the remnants of a once-thriving city, shocked by the sight of so many people whose clothes had melted to their skin.
Her family was left with nothing but bit by bit she rebuilt her life and is now a celebrated children’s author. Her harrowing account of the attack, My Hiroshima, is compulsory reading in all primary and junior high schools in the rebuilt Japanese city.
Mr Morimoto immigrated to Australia in 1982 and was this week brought to Fremantle to address the Mayors for Peace conference at the town hall. She told the Herald she’s not specifically a campaigner against nuclear weapons, but is happy to share her experience to promote the cause.
• Hiroshima survivor Junko Morimoto with supporters at the Mayors for Peace conference. Photo by Steve Grant.
Fremantle was recently appointed a lead city for Mayors for Peace, an international movement pushing for the weapons’ abolition.
Mayor Brad Pettitt wants other WA mayors to sign up, noting even a limited nuclear war in the region would have devastating consequences for WA.
“Scientific research backs up the notion that we would have summer frosts in the Wheatbelt,” Dr Pettitt says.
“There is no local nuclear war—even a limited one—without it having global effects.”
As part of the conference a Fremantle Declaration was drafted, which recognises the effects of nuclear weapons on the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also Aboriginal people and servicemen and women closer to home, exposed to nuclear tests in the Australian outback.
The Declaration also calls on the Australian government to actively support international negotiations for a treaty permanently banning nuclear weapons.
Fremantle’s renewed anti-nuke push was sparked by Adrian Glamorgan who recently travelled to Fukushima to see the effects of Australian uranium in that city’s nuclear power disaster. He says the visit gave him renewed energy to fight nuclear weapons, noting that with chemical and biological weapons already outlawed internationally, nukes remain the odd one out.
by STEVE GRANT