Since war is born in people's hearts, we must build strongholds of peace in people's hearts.
Ignorance of one another's customs and ways of life has been a common cause of suspicion and mistrust among the peoples of the world throughout human history, and because of this suspicion and distrust, disagreements between peoples have all too often been caused. A war broke out.
The terrible great war that has now come to an end repudiates the democratic principles of human dignity, equality, and mutual respect, and replaces these principles with the doctrine of human and racial inequality through ignorance and prejudice. It was a war made possible by the spread of
The wide dissemination of culture and the education of humanity for justice, freedom, and peace are essential to human dignity and must be fulfilled by all peoples in a spirit of mutual assistance and mutual concern. It is a sacred duty.
A peace based solely on the political and economic arrangements of governments is not a peace that can secure the united, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world.Therefore, peace, if it is not to be lost, must be built on the intellectual and spiritual solidarity of mankind.
(Cited from the "preface" of Constitution of UNESCO)
the Constitution of UNESCO : http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=15244&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Message from a bombed nation: for a world free of nuclear weapons
On that day in Hiroshima where I only barely escaped death, I attended, as an army doctor, to the medical needs of victims of the bomb. In a medical center specially established in the suburbs of the city, where lumps of bloody flesh were piled up, I treated mothers holding their dead babies.
What was shocking was that people who entered the city later to search for relatives or provide relief suddenly developed high fevers and died.
A woman who came to the city from Shimane Prefecture one week later to look for her newlywed husband ended her life by soaking her black hair with blood as her husband cried out his name in tears.
After the war, many patients who had narrowly escaped death at Hiroshima and Nagasaki came to see me in the clinics I had opened in Tokyo and Saitama. Fearing discriminations and marked forever by their experience, these people were assailed by a morbid weariness and suffered from the lack of understanding of their relatives. A victim of the bomb even died abandoned in a hen’s hut.
”Internal irradiation”. I came to know the word about thirty years after the bombing, through a meeting with an American researcher. The radioactive matters released in the air at the time of the explosion of the atomic bomb enter human bodies through dust or water. Once fixated inside, they keep on releasing a low level of radiation. People that had not been caught in the flash or in the blast of the bomb thus fell ill, their lives slowly taken away by that most cruel trait of nuclear weapons : radioactivity.
Extract from the morning edition of the Asahi Shinbun, 2009/6/25 Doctor Shuntaro Hida, specialized in victims of the atomic bomb)