The 2024 Nobel peace prize has been awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grassroots organisation created by survivors of the two US atomic bombs that were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The Norwegian Nobel committee recognised the organisation “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”.
Discussion of the bombings, which killed more than 100,000 Japanese people, was largely a taboo in the immediate post-war period. This was, in part, thanks to American press censorship in occupied Japan.
