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This year’s Nobel Peace Prize
Hello subscribers!
On Friday it was announced that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to “Nihon Hidankyo” in Japan. That’s a confederation of “Hibakusha”, i.e. survivors of the two atomic bombings of Japan by the USA at the end of World War II. The organization has long been campaigning for the abolition of all nuclear weapons in the world. While that noble wish may remain illusionary, the Nobel Committee’s choice should at least send a signal to those contemplating renewed use of such weapons of mass destruction (Putin in particular has made such threats repeatedly in recent years – see e.g. this older Blog Post).
The Nobel Committee’s choice inspired me to come up with a new Blog Post, namely about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their A-bomb-related dark-tourism sights, which I uploaded yesterday. Please do go and take a look.
The photo above is one of the 22 images featured in the new Blog Post and shows the iconic A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima at sunset.
Below is another photo that is not included in that new Blog Post. That’s because I snapped it illicitly (I wasn’t supposed to), so for copyright reasons alone I didn’t want it to feature in the publicly accessible Blog, whereas this Newsletter is only for a closed circle of subscribers. But please do not share this.
The photograph that the photo below is of is on display at the end of the permanent exhibition of the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki. It was taken by a news photographer for the US military in the aftermath of the bombing and shows a young boy standing in the rubble near a crematory. He was delivering the body of his dead baby brother and was so consumed with grief that he was biting his lower lip so hard that it started bleeding … before he turned round and silently walked away. Encountering this photo was one of the moments in my “career” as a dark tourist that I recall most vividly – after seeing this photo for the first time and reading the accompanying text I was so shaken that I actually had to sit down and compose myself before I could move on.
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