Unity service in Coventry
Over 100 people attended a commemoration event in Coventry Cathedral’s Chapel of Unity on 6 August that was organised by Coventry Quakers.

Hideko Okamoto and Midori Sumida from the Hiroshima Coventry Club (an informal Friendship Link with Coventry) travelled to UK to take part in this event. Midori played beautifully on a Japanese Bamboo flute (above, photo by Simon Watkins) – a piece called ‘The Prayer of the A Bomb Dome’ – and Hideko presented a peace message to Coventry from the mayor of Hiroshima. Everyone present was invited to renew their commitment to work for peace and an end to nuclear weapons. Peace cranes – a Japanese symbol of hope – were folded, and messages of friendship sent to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hideko has arranged for children at two primary schools in Hiroshima to fold a total of 1,000 paper cranes to hang in the Chapel of Unity.

Two powerful exhibitions – ‘The A Bomb and Humanity’, showing the effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ‘Sadako and the Paper Cranes’, telling the story of a young girl who suffered from leukaemia as a result of the bombing – will remain on display in the Chapel of Unity at Coventry Cathedral during August. There is also a display of drawings and paintings by survivors of the bombings.
Jo Hallett


Friends House exhibition
At the opening of the Friends House exhibition ‘After the Bomb Dropped: How Hiroshima and Nagasaki Suffered’, Shoso Kawamoto spoke movingly about his experience living as one of the cohort of 8 to 11-year-olds who were evacuated from Hiroshima before the dropping of the A-bomb. His words gave a new resonance to the concept of Hibakusha, ‘bomb-affected people’. The lucky ones found family to take them in, but many thousands found themselves orphaned and homeless, running errands for gangsters or forced into prostitution, and for all of them, there has been the shame and fear of contamination by association. ‘I want you to know of the existence of those orphans,’ said Shoso Kawamoto. ‘I want to convey to our children that all of us have a right to live in a peaceful world. That would make my life very fruitful.’
Rowena Loverance

Hiroshima Day in LondonClick here for photographs from Hiroshima Day in London by Jez Smith.