Michiko’s story: How a Japanese girl survived an atomic bomb

As the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to Nihon Hidankyo – the organisation of Japanese atomic bomb survivors – Michiko Kodama’s experiences are testimony to the horrors and long-term effects of nuclear weapons.

She was only seven years old at the time, but Michiko Kodama has a crystal-clear memory of the morning of August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, Japan.

“It was a sunny day,” she says. “At 8:15, I was at school, sitting at my desk at the front of the class, when there was a tremendous white flash and the ceiling collapsed. A piece of glass was lodged in my shoulder, and all around me people were trapped by pieces of debris, but somehow everybody was still alive.”

The next thing she remembers is being in the school clinic where one of the teachers removed the glass. “They tore up curtains to clean our wounds as best they could. Then my father arrived. He put me on his back and we walked home together.”

Michiko is a “hibakusha” or “bomb-affected person” – a survivor of the nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hibakusha, including the descendants of those who experienced the bombings, today number about 540,000.

Nearly nine decades since those horrific events, Nihon Hidankyo, the organisation representing hibakusha, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 11, 2024 “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”, in the words of the Nobel Foundation.