THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
May 23, 2023 at 17:25 JST
HIROSHIMA–-Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s surprise visit to the Group of Seven summit resonated with the visiting foreign leaders but the iconic atomic bomb museum here also left a lasting impression on the Ukrainian president as well.
Japan’s Foreign Ministry on May 22 released the signed message that Zelenskyy left when he visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum the previous day.
Handwritten in Ukrainian, the message in the guestbook reads: “My visit to the museum made a deep impression on me. No country in the world should experience pain and destruction like this. There is no place for nuclear threats in our world today.”
Atomic bomb survivor Keiko Ogura told her story to Zelenskyy at the museum on May 21.
“I believe he sympathized with the people of Hiroshima and understood the horrors of nuclear weapons,” she said on May 22, reflecting on the previous day’s event.
She asked the Ukrainian president to “find ways to save lives, especially those of children.”
Ogura was 8 years old and 2.4 kilometers from ground zero when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
She said Zelenskyy fell silent, with a stern expression on his face, when he looked at a display that showed the moment of the detonation re-created by computer graphics images projected on a map of the city.
“It must have reminded him of his own country,” she said.
Ogura said she was almost in tears when she shared the story of Sadako Sasaki, one of the most prominent Hiroshima hibakusha, who died of leukemia at 12 after being exposed to radiation from the bomb.
“The president, too, seemed to be holding back tears,” said Ogura.
Ogura, now 85, also shared her story with other global leaders attending the summit.
“To know (what happened) is the first step in the movement toward world peace, and I helped them achieve that,” she said. “I want each of them to play a role in bringing about an end to the war.”
(This article was written by Rikuri Kuroda and Yuhei Kyono.)
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A handwritten message left by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Photo was taken on May 22. (Jun Ueda)
