Photo/Illutration Nagasaki residents offer prayers at Urakami Cathedral on Aug. 9 for those who died in the atomic bombing 76 years ago. (Jun Kaneko)

NAGASAKI--This year’s Nagasaki Peace Declaration began with a long quote by a late Catholic monk who was orphaned after the atomic bomb was dropped on this city on Aug. 9, 1945.

Tomei Ozaki died in April at 93, but not before leaving behind a variety of writings about his experience on that day 76 years ago.

Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue quoted Ozaki’s words written in a personal account published in 1999.

“Nuclear weapons are not conventional bombs. Only those who experienced the atomic bombings can understand the terror inherent in radiation. Parents, children, loved ones and many others were killed by these bombs. To see that they are not used again I keep saying, ‘This is wrong! This is wrong!’”

On Aug. 9, 1945, Ozaki was working in a plant building torpedoes that had been set up in a tunnel to guard it from U.S. bombers. His mother was his only living relative, but not even her remains were found at their destroyed home in the city.

In his account, Ozaki recalled how other children began dying off one after another. He also wrote about the lack of knowledge at that time about the dangerous effects from radiation.

One young boy developed acute diarrhea, but his older brother thought it was due to some kind of infectious disease. The brother consulted with Ozaki and they quarantined the young boy in a bomb shelter where he died a few days later.

Ozaki himself was stricken with tuberculosis and reflected on his life while recuperating at a hospital. He began writing his personal account on the 50th anniversary of his mother’s death.

He joined the Knights of the Immaculata monastery, which was established in Nagasaki by the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe. Kolbe, who later returned to Poland, was imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp where he volunteered to take the place of another man whom the Nazis had ordered be executed.

After Ozaki learned about the connection he had to Kolbe, he began tracing the Polish priest’s steps in Nagasaki as he conducted missionary work.

Ozaki had said that he wanted to pass on Kolbe’s spirit of self-sacrificing love as one way of passing on hope for the future.

The final quote from Ozaki in the Nagasaki Peace Declaration was, “Those of us who survived the hell of the atomic bombings want to make sure that we have peace without nuclear weapons before we die.”

Touching upon the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which took effect in January, the peace declaration continued, “the ‘peace without nuclear weapons’ that Ozaki continued to call for has not as yet been realized. However, the wish he had has borne fruit in the form of a certain treaty.”

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