The family of a famed Hiroshima atomic bomb victim is fundraising to take a flame burn-ing since the wartime attack to Pearl Harbor to light a peace monument, they said Friday.
The “flame of peace” is said to have been taken from the smoul-dering ruins of Hiroshima after the world’s first nuclear attack. It was kept alive first in a private home before being moved to a peace tower in Japan’s Fukuoka in 1968.
Now, the family of Sadako Sa-saki, who died at 12 of radiation-induced leukaemia a decade after the attack, wants the flame to be taken to the site of the deadly Japanese attack to promote peace.
“We want this plan to be a sym-bol of peace after Japan and the United States, once enemies, have overcome their hatred,” Sa-saki’s brother Masahiro Sasaki told AFP.
A majority of Americans “still support the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their reaction to our calls for ‘no more Hiroshima, no more Na-gasaki’ is ‘you attacked Pearl Harbor,’ but we have to over-come the hatred,” the 80-year-old said.
He is soliciting private donations in Japan and the US to transport the flame next summer, and are discussing a site for the monu-ment with authorities in Hawaii.
“We’re hoping that it will be at the memorial” built over the re-mains of the USS Arizona, which sank during the attack, he said.
The “flame of peace” has been taken abroad before including to the Vatican in 2019 when atomic bomb survivors were granted an audience with the Pope.
Sadako Sasaki is widely remem-bered for having folded one thou-sand paper cranes before dying on October 25, 1955, after a long battle with leukaemia.
She set out to fold the cranes while in hospital, after hearing a tradition that doing so would make a wish come true.—Agencies
