The G7 leaders have come this Friday to the Museum and Peace Park of hiroshima in a historic visit aimed at sending a strong message in against nuclear weapons and where they met a survivor of the tragedy, Keiko Ogura. The leaders of Japan, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States participated in this visit before the formal start of the 49 summit of the Group of Seven which is held from this Friday until May 21 in the Japanese city, the first to be attacked with a nuclear weapon in 1945.

During the visit to the museum, the leaders met with a “hibakusha” -survivor- of Hiroshima, a meeting that the Japanese Foreign Ministry did not want to bring forward at first. Although the content of the conversations was not disclosed, the Japanese Foreign Ministry later confirmed that the survivor was Keiko Ogura, a woman who was eight years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and who was then about 2.4 kilometers from the hypocenter.

Ogura has spent most of his life dedicated to spreading the knowledge about the bombing and keep alive the stories of the survivors, of whom there are fewer and fewer. Now 85, Ogura continues to talk about his experience as a atomic bomb victim and in recent years, after the Russian invasion of Ukrainehas participated in various meetings to defend the importance of abolishing nuclear weapons and that what happened in his city is never repeated.

He has also established a Hiroshima Association of Interpreters for Peace, in order to spread the anti-nuclear message to more parts of the world, and published several books, including a guide to the Peace Park and “A Day in Hiroshima”, which deals with the tragic memory of that day. “I was engulfed in a dazzling flash of light and the tremendous explosion What followed knocked me to the ground. All the roofs of the neighboring houses burst into flames and when I returned home I found that everything was destroyed,” recalls the “hibakusha” in a written file from the city.

Hiroshima, “a sea of ​​fire”

In his memory, the city became “a sea of ​​fire” where figures that looked like ghosts moved trying to leave it. “After that, seriously injured people they died every day and were taken to the park, which was being used as a crematorium. It was in that park where my father cremated more than seven hundred corpses“, he adds. “My memory of that day stayed with me like a nightmare even decades later,” explains Ogura, who still remembers how, on August 7, a day after the bombing, he saw the city for the first time from a hill and it was totally destroyed. “The burnt-out ruins stretched as far as the eye could see,” he laments. ogura He continued to climb that hill every day to look at his destroyed city, but also to see how, over the years, it was recovering its vegetation and life.

Hiroshima was devastated on August 6, 1945 when the Enola Gay plane dropped on the city the first nuclear bomb used in actual combat and christened “Little Boy”, precipitating the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. This bomb immediately killed some 80,000 people, about 30% of the population at the time. At the end of 1945, the balance rose to about 140,000 and in subsequent years the victims due to the effects of radiation more than doubled.